Is This Odd?

You be the judge: after we packed up and left the Northern Rockies Lodge in Muncho Lake, B.C., we saw fifteen or so frosty buffalo, some on the road, some on the wayside, all of them sort of dopey and steaming and before long most of them running, stampeding, like a herd of wild, gigantic buffalo and a guy on a mountain bike riding with the pack. You heard me. He looked like one of those painted wooden woodpecker gizmos that moves violently up and down and I thought, "clearly, he's pedaling towards us for help and the buffalo are chasing him...wait, no -they're not chasing him anymore and he's unmistakeably shaken...no no wait: he's on a unicycle and..." None of the above. HE WAS RIDING WITH THE BUFFALO ON A BIKE. The wind was scalpel sharp, it was -8 degrees at 7 a.m. and this guy was givin' 'er down the Alaskan Highway full throttle, snowshoes lashed to his backpack and evidently not much else in it. What the heck? Keep in mind we were really in the middle of nowhere and this guy was way too frosty to have just left the Lodge we left; as a matter of fact, when we left Fort Nelson 250 kilometers back the night before, we were given an info sheet basically warning people to gas up and don't necessarily expect to find a place to sleep if you get tired in the next 700 miles. Buffalo whisperer or nut? You decide.

I also spotted what appeared to be a beef roast the size of an Isuzu Trooper rolling in the snow; turns out it was a moose.