Why ‘animal evidence’ and not animal photos? Because we never saw a mammal in the parks until our last lunch and then we only saw one red squirrel. So basically we saw no mammals. My guess is that the park is so large (bigger than Belgium) and surrounded by even larger wilderness areas that the animals just detected us and went the other way. I expect that they just steered away from us because they could. We only saw a handful of birds like three crows, a ruffed grouse, and a grey jay. No, the two national parks were not animal excursions.

But, we did see plenty of evidence that there are animals here and that there were some here recently. We saw evidence of bears, caribou, moose, and Dall sheep.

April found what looks to me like a leg bone in the first photo. All of our sightings were in areas of the river and the least dense forest.

The second photo is a caribou track and we had the ability to check on them with our reference materials. That looks like a very large caribou.

A series of bear paw prints is in the third photo. The fourth photo is a single bear paw print. These look to be reasonably large bear prints but it’s hard to say for sure. It’s good that the bears might have been large because that would mean that they were not cubs which means that Mama bear might not be so aggressive with no cubs around.

The last photo is just a horn that was lying about. We saw a number of antlers on the ground on our hikes.