Other Stuff

My Dad was heading up to Churchill and asked if I wanted to come along! All expenses paid; of course I said yes. We got to have an out of the ordinary experience because my dad's good friend owns/runs one of the two tour companies up there, Tundra Buggy Tours. So we often had our own buggy and he got a guy named Ernie to basically be our tour guide and he took us all over the place. They said it was the best year for bears that they had ever seen. I wish I had known more about photography at that time, and had some better equipment, but I did my best. Pictures with a lot of snow in them are tricky due to colour casts that they can get (a lot of cyan in my experience) and I've tried to fix them in photoshop. Not only did we see bears but also artic foxes, ptarmigans, and artic hares. I had a close encounter with a bear in terms of being really close to one through an open window. I was in the Polar Bear Cam buggy (late at night, I had gone out there with the owner's son and his wife to take some supplies to the lodge where the tourists stay) and the guy called a rather large bear and it got up on its hind legs and came to the window. It's head was huge! When we didn't give it anything it gave the buggy a little frustrated push (the buggy rocked quite a bit) and it went back to sleep. It's strange that it's so close to home, and everyone loves polar bears, but I don't know any other Manitobans that have been up there. I don't know the prices but I would guess that it can get expensive in tourist season so that would be a deterrent.