Call me naïve.  I’ve seen moose before and they don’t look the slightest bit coordinated.  But I have verified with my own two eyes that they can swim underwater.  Here’s what happened.

This was a few years ago in late summer in the Frank Church Wilderness of Idaho.  We backpacked in a few miles and camped at a lake.  Sure enough, the lake was a home to young Bull Moose.  We didn’t figure this out immediately.  First, we heard a strange noise that was unmistakably from a large animal.  We had no idea for the next 12 hours what it could be coming from.  I’m not sure how best to describe this sound but image a cross between an elk and an alligator. 

The next day we saw the moose on a day hike and were quite relieved that the strange noise came from an animal that we recognized!  Later in the evening we saw it again feeding on the far side of the lake.  A couple of us walked down to the water’s edge to take pictures.  While we stood there the moose continued around the lake slowly narrowing the gap between us.  He didn’t seem to notice us; he was just feeding on something just below the water.  I wasn’t too concerned because a large tree was lying in the water between him and me. 

Here’s a picture of the moose as he approached the log between him and me.

There were three lessons for me in this story.  The first was recognizing the sound that a moose makes.  The second is that a moose is quite a bit more agile than it looks.  When this moose made it up to the log he paused for only a fraction of a second and leaped over it.  The third is that they can swim; underwater.

After the moose jumped the log I stood frozen.  He was only about 15 feet away.  I waited to see what he would do.  I guess he didn’t see me because he just leaned down and started eating.  So I snapped a picture.  This may have been a mistake because his ears were better than his eyes.  He immediately stopped eating and looked straight at me.  I briefly considered my escape routes.  Fortunately, I didn’t have to verify the viability of the escape.  The moose turned away and started walking into deeper water.

Here’s where it got strange.  The moose started swimming towards the opposite side of the lake.  When he got roughly half way, he submerged and he was gone.  My hiking buddies and I unfroze and looked at each other.  I’m pretty sure we were all thinking the same thing.  Where did he go? 

What felt like about five minutes later (probably only a minute), the moose reappeared in the middle of the lake.  He shook his antlers and we could see that he had some lake plants in his mouth.  Apparently, he had dove toward the bottom to get something to eat.  To this day I’m trying to imagine what a moose looks like swimming underwater.  It can’t be pretty but it has to be fascinating.

A short time after this trip I was traveling through Yellowstone and I had a chance to talk to a ranger about my experience.  She told me that she wasn’t surprised about the moose swimming but she was surprised at how stupid we were.  She said the rangers consider the moose to be the most dangerous animal in the woods.  Moose are very unpredictable and frequently aggressive.