Hello again!:)

Howdy my dear friends and family!:) Life here at Brooks is still going wonderful, not lots has changed as far as the job goes... just basically the same thing every day. We hit our busy time so between 4-5 of us girls we waitress for breakfast in the morning, then clean rooms and change between 25-40 beds in 2 hours, followed by serving lunch until 3pm, then we get a small 1 1/2 hour break and serve dinner after that. It keeps us pretty busy. No stress, just busy and tired. I LOVE that feeling!:) Lots of people are coming in and out daily including day trippers, campers and the lodge guests we usually serve around 80-90 people at lunch and dinner. I have walked up to so many tables and asked the guests if they would like something to drink only to realize that they are non-english speaking. If i had to guess i would say that at least half of our guests here do not speak english. They usually have 1 person with them that can understand us and translate, otherwise I am stuck trying to communicate with them with my crazy, pathetic, made up sign language! :) haha! The good thing about these non-english speakers is if you make a good impression they tip really well! One of the waitresses got handed a $100 bill this morning. Unfourtunatly we split up all the tips between ourselves and the rest of the staff or a couple of us would be super rich. :) haha!!! j/k!:)


Yes lots more bear encounters. They are becoming so regular that i dont know where to start telling you about them. Some of them have been pretty scary, others funny, and others just made me nervous. I have a couple of them on video. As some of you may know I am cursed with an amazing and annoying sense of smell. Some days i absolutely hate it, but other days i am thankful for it. I am very thankful for this sense of smell most every morning when i am walking to work, especially after it has been raining. Reason being is I can smell the bears that have been in the area for a while sleeping or just hanging out. Being able to smell them has saved me from a couple of close encounters. Bears STINK, especially when it is raining outside!:)

Tonight a bunch of friends and I went to The Falls and had a pretty intense bear encounter. There were 5 of us girls walking down the trail, 2 infront 1 in the middle and 2 behind. Cassie looked up and saw a bear running down the path. She said "bear" and not 2 seconds after that we saw a 2nd bear coming down the trail after the first one. The first one had a fish in its mouth and the bigger male was chasing it trying to steal its fish. The scary part is they were running straight for us. We turned around and started walking back the way we came and when that didnt work we ended up jumping off the trail to keep from getting trampled by the 2 bears. Right before they were going to pass us they ended up cutting off the trail just 5 ft infront of us. THAT was really scary!! Unfortunatly my sniffer didn't pick up on that one! haha!:) :)

I finally was able to see the "boil" as they call it. It's when all of the salmon are swimming up river, they are in such large groups that the water actually looks like it is boiling. It's so cool! I tried to get videos and pics of it but none of them turned out real well. I am not sure exactly what is going on but i heard from a couple of different people up here that there is not as many fish this year. Not sure why or how they tell but i dont think thats a very good thing. I am not sure if I mentioned this before or not but a couple of weeks ago we had an earthquake here. It wasn't huge but if you were awake you could definatly feel it. It was around 5:45 am and i was awake reading and getting ready for work. The big boss says that he actually heard the ground crack. When people mentioned there not being as many Salmon as normal I immediatly thought back to the earthquake and wondered if that may have had something to do with it. I doubt it though. Anyways... I am gonna end this blog here... I need to get to bed cuz i gotta be up super early in the morning. TTFN!!:)

Kristie:)