By this early afternoon the day was turning out to be a bummer, so I decided to go on a drive to get out of the house/listen to music. I took a grand tour of the valley, decided to go up cooper spur and loop back to the highway. I was driving past some clear cuts that looked bear-y and was thinking how cool it would be to see a bear to make this day kinda worth it. Well, I didn't see anything on that road. The highway was totally packed with high speed traffic, soon I had a motorcycle and two cars following me pretty close and I was going 55. About a mile from the favorite skunk relocation site,  less than 40 yards in front of me, a black bear cub burst out onto the road and dashed across! Didn't strike me as particularly fierce (I got the impression it was running for its life), but one day it will become a monstrous ferocious beast. Extremely cool..my first local bear sighting, and the 8th bear I've ever seen (the rest were in Glacier except one seen from a jet boat in hell's canyon). I turned around in a turn-around and drove back hoping for a glimpse of the cub, or the mother which must have been nearby, but it was a lost cause. Too much traffic and a little risky to hike into the forest where it headed. So afterwards I randomly drove to odull and then pine mont, which I had kinda been wanting to do just for the fun of it. Unfortunately I didn't see any marmots or other adorable whistling rodents in the rock piles. Just some people loading rocks into their truck. Narrowly avoided running over a chipmunk.
 
In the late afternoon I walked Bosun up to the canal and came back through the orchard. Walked the edges of the rows, heard a deer running through one. Got to see it at the top of the hill where it had to stopped to check out the source of approaching noise. A large doe. They're in their bronzy summer orange coats right now.
 
This evening I resumed work at the Markers', was hoping to finish that up. I did totally destroy the remaining few poppies, but then of course another task has come up..to pull out all the grass clumps from the wildflower bed. That sucks but I have nothing else to do, so perhaps another 4 or 5 hours. Arrggh.