Spring comes to the Dempster

Today we took a drive up through Tombstone Park on the Dempster with our fishing poles, hoping the river wouldn’t still be frozen solid.

Just 100km up the Dempster Highway, the snow is melting and the rivers are starting to flow! While the trees in town have leaves now, Tombstone is a few weeks behind.

It was about 10-12°C. The road to one of our favourite fishing spots on the Dempster was still under water, but our truck and its driver weren’t afraid of a bit of water, so we drove through it.

These cute little birds were hanging out on the edge of the water puddles.

This Bronco lover was delighted to find the river flowing!

Unfortunately there wasn’t a fish to be found! You can see into the water easily, and usually there are several grayling resting beside the current, but not this afternoon.

I really need to get a set of waders. 

When we were heading back out to the main road, some ducks came in to the flooded road.

They were really skittish so even though I tiptoed out in the weeds, my best pictures are of them flying away.

We saw a few ptarmigans today. They are slowly losing all their winter white and are brown headed and patchy looking now.

We saw one fox.

And several caribou! We hadn’t seen caribou this far south all winter. These are of the Hart River herd and are calving right now in the Tombstone Park.

We stopped at sheep mountain to check to see if any sheep had lambs yet. This little mountain is known as a Dall sheep lambing area this time of year. There is still a lot of snow so it took a good pair of binoculars to spot them!

A couple of them had little lambs!

While were were sheep spotting, a couple from Smithers, British Columbia stopped to chat and we showed them where the sheep were. Soon enough it was snowing on us and I’m sure they were wondering why they took their vacation in the subarctic in May.

Here’s a swan (above) and a bunny (below). Cute, eh?

After we were chatting for awhile, a sheep took an iconic sheep post right on the edge of the slope. Beautiful!

I’ve been so sick, for 11 days now. I’ve been to a Dr twice, which I rarely do once, and have missed several days of work. I have a viral infection, of my chest, sinuses, ears, throat, and it even went into my eyes. Crazy terrible grossness. Last night I slept for 12 hours, finally, after so many sleepless nights on the couch. Today I decided fresh air would be my cure. I still hear a loud squeal in my ears and can’t stop coughing, so at least I’m not any worse 😷