Jump ahead to the fall of 2000. I was on a cross-country road trip to visit my sister and her family in Boston. After a stop in western Nebraska to see Grandma, I made my way through the Badlands of SD and eastward into MN, up the north shore of Lake Superior for a week of backpacking on the lake's largest island and the country's least visited NP, Isle Royale.
On the boat ride over I met Tom and Jack, long time friends from Mnpls who were on a photography outing. We ended up running into each other along the trails at several times during our stay on the island and it was on a backpacking trip with Jack several years later in Rocky Mnt. NP that I got my first glimpse of 2 moose calves in the wild.
In a typical year, about 2 dozen wolves and 1,000 moose co-exist on Isle Royale. I was arriving on the last weekend of the tourist season so park employees were getting ready to close up shop and the moose were just starting their mating season, the "rut". Ranger Bob advised us, should we encounter a bull moose, they were unpredictable and potentially aggressive so to get yourself behind a tree large enough to block a charge.
http://www.isleroyalewolf.org/wolfhome/home.html
After spending a night at Rainbow Cove on the south shore, I was hiking back inland when from behind a thick batch of bushes right along the trail I heard a snort. Or maybe it was a grunt. In any case it was a sound I had never heard before. At this point, the bushes started swaying back and forth from what I now realized was the moose, pushing its way towards me through the dense foliage. He was having a hard enough go of it that I had the time to get my pack off, find the camera and, following Ranger Bob's advise, scope out a sizable enough tree to position myself behind.
At first, I felt pretty good about my decisions; good solid trunk diameter, about 15 ft of safe distance between me and his entrance point, courage that I had even stuck around at all to get a glimpse of my first Isle Royale moose. When he finally emerged, dripping with vines from his multi-tipped crown, snorting, my choices quickly turned to the ridiculous. I was too close. The tree became a sapling before my eyes and it was time to get some distance. As I sprinted and leap-frogged my way over downed trees and brush, he proceeded to ignore my clumsy movements, shuffling his way down trail and quickly out of view.
That same night, while tucked inside the tent, I felt the ground start to vibrate (remember the scene of the glass of water in the movie, Jurassic Park?), growing in intensity with each approaching step, followed by those characteristic grunts I'd heard from my earlier encounter. Another bull, making his rounds, luckily took the left-fork of the trail instead of the right, where my tent was positioned in the campsite less than 2 yards away.
Over the next several days, I observed a good number of moose on the island, happy that the close encounters came at the beginning of my stay.
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