The Bears of Katmai

We wrapped up our nearly two-week Alaska trip with a visit this weekend to Katmai National Park—more specifically, to Brooks Camp. If you've ever seen those famous photos of a bear standing on a waterfall with the salmon jumping right into its mouth, those photos were most likely taken at Brooks Falls.

To get to Brooks, first we took a one-hour flight from Anchorage to the village of King Salmon on PenAir (the “Pen” is short for “Peninsula”). At King Salmon we got on float planes for a 20-minute flight over to Brooks Lodge.

For most of us, it was our first experience flying on a seaplane, and it was very cool. Some of us flew in a de Havilland Beaver or de Havilland Otter, built in the early 1960s, while others were in a Cessna of some sort. I think the biggest plane of the bunch seated 10 passengers.

As soon as we arrived at Brooks Lodge, we had to go to “bear school”—that is, stand on the shore while a National Park Service volunteer gave us a rundown on how to behave in the presence of bears.

There are something like 60 or 70 bears living within the vicinity of Brooks Camp. (The camp consists of a lodge/dining hall, a bunch of sleepover cabins, a campground for tent campers, a small visitors’ center, and a small gift shop.) I asked the Park Service guy what were the chances of our actually seeing a bear. He just laughed and said, “If you don’t see a bear, I don’t know what you’re doing.” Sure enough, we saw bears all over the place—in the woods near the lodge, walking along the beach, and in Brooks Lake.

We were told not to carry any food with us when wandering around the area: no candy, gum, or anything that might arouse the bears’ sense of smell. And we were told not to leave our daypacks or camera equipment unattended at any time. It's best to walk in small groups, but when walking alone, just talk or sing or something, so the bears are aware of your presence and aren't startled when they see you.

At Brooks Camp, the bears are in charge. The trails are their trails; we just use them when the bears don't. If one of them decides to lie down and take a nap on the trail, then no human traffic can go through until the bear gets up and ambles away. There’s a path that leads from the lodge to the edge of Brooks Lake, and then a wooden bridge that takes you across Brooks Lake to the viewing platform. There are National Park Service rangers and volunteers posted at various locations who talk to each other by walkie-talkie to monitor the bears' movements, and the aforementioned bridge is constantly getting closed by the rangers because one or more bears have ventured too close to it. In the 48 hours we were there, I bet there were at least a dozen such “bear jams,” ranging in length from five minutes to an hour. We heard stories of people being stuck on the wrong side of the bridge—separated from, say, dinner back at the lodge—for as long as four hours.

Anyway, for the first part of our visit to Brooks Lodge, we had cloudy skies and rain. The bears were around, munching on sockeye salmon in Brooks Lake, but the picture-taking conditions were pretty lousy. We even had two cubs playing and/or fighting right below the viewing platform—not 15 feet away from us—but it was dark and none of us got really crisp photos. Still, you get the idea:

We spent several hours watching the bears in the rain and got pretty soaked in the process. Each of us had some kind of homemade contraption—usually involving clear plastic bags or Ziplocs—to protect our camera equipment. I noticed that the professional photographers (who seemed omnipresent at Katmai) were better prepared, with fancier, commercially made, waterproof covers for their cameras.

But then yesterday afternoon the sun came out and we finally got some decent photo ops. Here are a couple of shots.

I have to say that none of the photos I took were all that fabulous. Shooting photos of bears is harder than I expected! It’s hard to get the exposure right—one photographer told me that that’s partly because the bears’ dark fur absorbs so much light—and I struggled to get really sharp focus as well, for reasons I haven’t figured out. Clearly I’ll need to go back to Katmai someday and practice some more. :-)

Here’s one out-of-focus but cute shot of a pair of cubs:

And here’s a shot to give you a sense of the backdrop against which we saw the bears:

We also spent some time at the famed Brooks Falls, about a mile-long hike away, but the better time to see bears there is in July. It has to do with the salmon being more numerous at the falls in July; by September, they have "spawned out" and are more prevalent along the river that flows into the lake. So the only bear I saw at the falls was back in the shadows and seemed not very adept at catching fish.

As our seaplane took off from Brooks Lodge this morning, Andrea, our NatHab trip leader, pointed out that you could see the falls from the plane. And, as luck would have it, there were at least two bears on the falls. Figures!

That’s all for now. I may try to write one more entry later to wrap up the trip.