One of my official goals in 2009 is to get in 100 days of riding on the mountain bike. The only "rules" are I have to be on an actual trail (no dirt roads or work commutes) and each ride has to last at least 20 minutes. I pushed my riding last year and hope to progress even further this year, thanks to my sweet ride, which is almost a year old! I have a few other goals: clearing Hall Ranch's rock garden in one shot, sub-20 minute laps at Betasso and so on -- but mostly I want to get out there and have some epic rides this biking season!
Also: last night I got to watch one of the many Discovery Channel specials on polar bears. I'd seen it a bunch of times before (and as many of you know, my company Natural Habitat Adventures runs trips to see polar bears in Canada). It made me wonder how my polar bear pals are doing that I encountered on my 2004 trip to the Arctic. Of the 6 or 7 bears we saw, the ones that stick with me are the mother bear and two adolescents we spotted on an ice floe int he Kennedy Channel. One of the 2 year old cubs had a limp and possible leg injury. Our biologist said that both cubs have a great chance to survive if the mother is a good hunter and since we witnessed a seal kill on an ice flow, she certainly had some seal-snatchin' skills.
My ride at Heil also reminded me of a similar black bear family I saw last autumn roaming through the woods just off the biking trail. I hope they had a fine winter and are all geared up for the spring to do the things that bears do. I'm a bit of a sentimentalist in some ways but I just think the world is a better place when we share it with our wild animal pals.
