We’re enjoying staying on the river in Fairbanks. Because we have such a nice site, we’re slow to get moving away from camp.
We wanted to go to the Univ of Fairbanks Large Animal Research Center (LARS) which closes on Labor Day. We arrived at LARS in time for the 4:00 pm tour. LARS is a large research site/former homestead that was donated to the University of Alsaka (Fairbanks). They do research on muskox, cariboo, and reindeer. Tomorrow, Labor Day, is the last day of tours for the year.
The male muskox were in a pasture separate from the female and baby muskox.
They’re rather aggressive animals. I read in the Anchorage newspaper yesterday that a wild muskox had attached and gored a team of mushing dogs in a remote village. The dogs were chained to their dog houses in the owner’s front yard. He was a mile away tending to his fishing nets. He heard the dogs barking like crazy and returned to find the muskox attacking the dogs. After three shots he was able to kill the muskoxen. The muskoxen we saw weren’t as large as we expected, but they are dense. Here’s the female.
We next visited with a cariboo. Look at the difference between the antlers on these two. One had antlers which had largely shed their velvet; on the other the velvet was still intact.
See the velvet peeling off.
And here's a big boy.
As we were watching the cariboo, a beautiful red fox crossed the field. He’s beautiful.
After our large animal experience we returned to camp. We feel so lucky to be situated on the banks of this very pretty river. We fixed crackers and cheese and spent the evening sitting at a picnic table overlooking the river. The neighborhood ducks came to visit. Check out the pretty purple color on the feathers.
Later I went out to photograph this pretty sunset.
We know autumn is coming and we have to get moving south but we’ve extended our stay here for two more days so we can plan our route.
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