On Friday, August 1, 2008, the U.S. Senior Golf Open in Colorado Springs was a zoo, literally! There were deer, fox, and even a black bear wandering the course while the tournament was carrying on as usual.
Three days earlier, Tom and I returned from a land trip through Alaska. The Alaskans are proud of their animals.
The tour bus through Denali Park was the highlight of our trip. We saw animals but not up close and personal like we would have if we attended the golf tournament in the Springs. The Alaskan animals kept their distance. Gerilynn, the tour bus director for the day through Denali, was a Michigan transplant who lived with her husband and sled dogs in Alaska since the 1980s. Gerilynn was the queen of multi-tasking. She talked nonstop like a talking encyclopedia for eight hours with her lovely Irish lilt, while she drove the bus filled with hairpin turns on cliff-hugging roads, meanwhile spotting animals with her zoom lens and converting them to pictures on the pull-down mini-screens on the bus. This was high-tech Alaska! Without Gerilynn, I would have seen no animals. With her expert guidance, three brown pebbles turned into a mother bear with her two baby cubs.
Being proud of the number of large animals spotted, Gerilynn counted the following on our day at Denali: grizzly bears, caribou, dall sheep, moose and fox. One of the Aussie chaps on our trip swore that he saw a gray wolf, but later admitted that it was probably a fox.
Perhaps next year instead of traveling to Alaska, we’ll attend the U.S. Senior Golf Open in Colorado Springs to catch the wild life.