10. An overly protective mama moose

“So there’s this island in Lake Superior called Isle Royale. This island really cool because it is full of wolves and moose that supposedly walked to it when Lake Superior was frozen over a long time ago. But there are no bears. So when you go there your bear protection can be fairly lax. For our group, that meant we could hike in relative quiet without fear of surprising a bear.

So along the entire length of the island is this big ridge line, and it was awesome hiking! One day as we were walking along this ridge we hear some rustling to our right, at the base of the ridge, and when we look to see what it was we see two baby moose, but no mama moose.

Now this is true of just about every animal I have ever encountered, but moose are very protective of their young. So seeing these baby moose, but not their mom was pretty strange. But as we are watching the baby moose do their thing, we hear huffing from the other side of the ridge. Turning around we see the mama moose on the other side of the ridge.

So we are at the top of this ridge standing directly between the mama moose and her babies! And the mama moose is just staring at us. Now this part of the ridge was fairly rocky, so to keep walking we would have needed to start walking directly toward the baby moose. Clearly this wasn’t the option to take. Instead, all we could do was sit down on the top of the ridge and wait and hope the moose would leave soon. So we sit down, hoping to get low enough that the mama moose cant see us over the ridge line, and we wait, listening to the mama moose and her babies on either side of us.

Eventually we couldn’t hear them any more, so we assume they left, and we get up and keep walking, and we don’t see them again, but for the rest of the trip we were constantly looking around to stay out of the way of any more moose.”