Outdoor Notes : Alaska Woman, Attempting to Reach North Pole, Abandons Expedition

Pam Flowers, the Alaska woman who left northern Canada early last month in an attempt to become the first woman to reach the North Pole alone by means of surface travel, recently decided to call it quits.

Her difficulties included her camp being destroyed by a polar bear, but breaking ice caused by unusually warm weather posed the greatest problem.

“Her expedition has ground to a halt,” said Terry Jesudason, Flowers’ representative at her base camp in the Northwest Territories.

After traveling just 10 miles, Flowers, 41, was sleeping when a polar bear ripped through her tent. “She played dead, terrified in her sleeping bag, while the bear knocked over the tent and ate her food,” Jesudason said.

The respiratory therapist from the small town of Willow decided, however, to continue on her not-so-merry way.

She radioed back to the base camp and made arrangements for a new tent and supplies to be flown to her. After finding a large ice field to be used as an airstrip, Flowers waited for the plane while things grew more unstable by the minute.

“The weather started getting bad, and the ice started breaking up underneath her,” Jesudason said. “The plane found her but it was forced to land off in the distance and (Flowers) had to abandon everything but her dogs to make it to the plane.

“We’ve had a very, very mild winter,” Jesudason said. “For her to go on would have been suicide.”

Flowers, who had hoped to make a statement about the role of women in future polar expeditions, was on the way home from her starting point at northern Canada’s Ward Hunt Island and was unavailable for comment.

Bear Creek in San Bernardino County has become a wild-trout stream, joining Ventura County’s Sespe Creek and Deep Creek in the San Bernardino Mountains as Southern California’s only streams so designated.

The decision to award that status to Bear Creek was made by the Fish and Game Commission on a recommendation by Director Pete Bontadelli at the Commission’s April 8 meeting in Long Beach.

According to Bontadelli, Bear Creek is one of the top Southland streams in quantity of wild native trout. A 1987 survey indicated the number of trout eight inches or larger to average about 742 per mile.

The 9-mile wild-trout section of the stream, primarily a brown trout fishery, extends from Bear Valley Dam at Big Bear Lake, downstream to the Santa Ana River, most of which is within the San Bernardino National Forest. The creek will now be managed by the Department of Fish and Game exclusively for the promotion and maintenance of a self-sustaining wild trout population.

This brings to 23 the number of designated wild-trout rivers in California.

During the Santa Monica Bay Halibut Derby last weekend, 1,988 fishermen caught 600 legal halibut, 22 inches or longer. The event was won by Michael Connery, who caught a 29.5 pound halibut. Connery’s fish edged out the 29.4-pound fish caught by Gary Silverman of Venice.

The Marina del Rey Halibut Derby is scheduled for this weekend.

On the lighter side: According to the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, a tagged Monarch butterfly recently flew 660 miles from Goleta in Santa Barbara County to an area in southwestern Arizona, breaking the previous record flight of 565 miles by a tagged Monarch migrating from the San Francisco Bay area to the Grand Canyon.

Briefly

The Long Beach Casting Club is offering free fly casting classes for at least four consecutive Tuesdays beginning April 26 at 7 p.m. at Recreation Park in Long Beach. For more information call (213) 598-7486. . . . The Santa Monica Bay Area Chapter of Ducks Unlimited is holding its ninth annual banquet Wednesday at the Bel Air Bay Club in Pacific Palisades. For more information call (213) 829-4336. . . . The Federation of Fly Fishers’ sixth regional exposition, Saturday and Sunday at the Amfac Hotel in Westchester. Admission charge is $12 per individual or $15 a family with proceeds going to the Southwest Council for local conservation work, fisheries scholarships and other grants.