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Closeup Bear
Katmai National Park, Alaska, USAMy passion, as I’m sure most of you already know, is photography. I started my own business a few years back and have had some success selling my pictures but, more than anything, I’m just a big photo-nerd. As a traveler, it works out pretty well for me. I get to see cool places and take pictures of them. For Kel, it works out pretty well too because, when I would have been bored by some activity, I now spend my time shooting photography. It’s a win-win situation for Team Turner.
The really cool thing about photography is that, once you’re really serious about it, you actually make decisions based on the passion. So, when it came to Alaska, I was certain that we just absolutely had to see some bears in the wild. Kel, travel planner extraordinaire (she’s my travel ninja), made sure we had a day of bear viewing planned.
But, as I have learned to expect, the activity I was most excited about led to a Murphy’s Law situation. Sure, we’d had great weather for days but the morning we woke up for our bear trip was cold and rainy.
Foxy Lady
Katmai National Park, Alaska, USA No, you can’t have sunny and 70s…no, that’s too easy…instead you get 35 degrees and rainy. “Perfect photography weather” I say facetiously!! My first thought was of the one rainy safari day we spent in Africa driving around all day in search of animals only to see nothing. The guides were specific on that trip, “The animals hate the rain as much as you do. They stay under cover while you drive around looking for them.” Thus, I had images of spending a cold miserable day in search of bears only to see nothing.
Despite my misgivings we set off to meet up with our pilots/guides for a mid morning flight to Katmai National Park. This rustic pair has been flying people to see bears for the last thirty years. Unlike what you may think, this seems to be a pretty lucrative endeavor because they have four planes, two of which can seat about twenty. During peak season they are fully booked and fly out almost every day of the week. Everyone wants to see bears, especially when the salmon are running.
Since it was early in the season and not peak bear viewing time, it was just
Kel's Crazy Red Fish
Cook Inlet, Alaska, USA Kel, me, our two pilots and another couple who were just as gung-ho about photography as I was. Thus, imagine two older rather grizzly looking pilots, one hot redhead (my wife) and three super geeky photo-nerds. I don’t think we had much of a chance of successful survival if there had been a plane crash. This was definitely not the future of the species (Kel being the exception).
A little background on Katmai National Park, this huge national park was set aside by the government in 1918 and officially made a National Park in 1980. It’s roughly the size of Wales in the United Kingdom and is completely uninhabited. The vast majority of the park is mountains which are not hospitable to brown bears but a 30 mile stretch of coastline directly across from Kodiak Mountain is the perfect climate for them. And since they are as smart as monkeys, they’ve learned that the park is the perfect place for them to live since they won’t be hunted there. Therefore, in just a thirty-mile stretch of land there are over 1,000 bears. If you can get there (which can only be achieved by a long boat ride or a
Lookin Away
Katmai National Park, Alaska, USA float plane ride) then you are almost guaranteed to see a bear during the peak season.
Our guides got us set up with hip boots (which at this point had become the de rigueur fashion for this trip), they talked us through safety procedures and then proceeded to give us the history of Katmai and some bear info. Unlike the commonly held beliefs, brown bears are not really dangerous. Sure, if you’re dumb enough to try to hug one or poke him in the eye then, yes, he will go all “angry bear” on you and, no, you won’t survive an attack like that. But usually, as a group approaches a bear, one of two reactions will occur. He will do one of two acting jobs A), which is most likely, we’ll call “Scaredy Bear” and B) “I’m Ignoring You Bear.” “Scaredy Bear” involved running away as soon and as fast as he or she can. This is the most likely approach a bear will take because, after millennium of co-existing with humans they have learned that humans are dangerous and often up to no good. Option B, “I’m Ignoring You Bear” will involve turning its back on the
group and generally pretending you aren’t there unless you do something stupid - then it will revert to “Scaredy Bear.”
Interestingly enough, after years of doing this, the guides had experimented with different ways of approaching the bear. The most successful way to go about it was to be very obvious and to be slow and steady about the approach. If you see a bear in the distance and want to get closer, this approach involves slowly and steadily getting closer, staying in a tight group, and sometimes just sitting down on the ground to watch the bear. If you try the sneaky spy methodology and try to crouch and sidle up to the bear all ninja-like, when the bear finally notices you they will immediately be spooked and use bear option A, and “Scaredy Bear” their way away from you as quickly as they can. Bears can be spooked. They don’t like human surprises because they’ve learned over generations that human surprises come in the form of spears and bullets.
Float Plane Antics Loyal readers of our blog will know that Kel loves new modes of transport. She will go out of her way
Rear-View
Katmai National Park, Alaska, USA to try new means of getting from point A to point B and will take extra effort to try new one if it’s risky. She loves planes and helicopters and roller coasters and bumpy boat trips. She loves anything that, in short, will cause me to wish I were dead because of motion sickness. Take a quick guess where in the grand scheme of “motion sickness causing modes of transportation” taking a 6 person float plane through a cold stormy day falls. I’ll be that you, my faithful reader, could make a pretty good guess.
To say that I was not a happy camper would be to make one of the grander understatements you could possibly make. As an understatement it’s probably up there with statements like, “We have a small problem, ladies and gentlemen, it appears all four of our engines have stopped.” As our plane dipped and shimmied its way to Katmai National Park, Kel was torn between throwing her hands in the air like a small kid on a rollercoaster screaming, ”WEEE!!!!,” and patting me on the shoulder as I attempt to keep myself from illness. To her credit she did a pretty good job of
Our Boat's Catch
Cook Inlet, Alaska, USA not looking too gleeful and I never did get sick. (Kel Note: It was a fun flight - zoom!!! Especially when we flew on our side in circles so the pilot could look out the side window for bears on the ground . . . Mike turned a new shade of green around then. )
Cold, Rainy, Glorious Bear Viewing Unfortunately for Kel, the moment we got off the plane it just wasn’t as fun for her. We spent the next four-ish hours fording streams, sitting in cold water, getting stuck in mud and being mostly uncomfortable while we tracked and watched bears. It was a blast for me and rather dull for her. But, we were both pleased with the close to ten bears we saw during our brief stint in Katmai.
The most notable situation occurred about three hours after getting off the plane. We approached a big male chasing a smaller female (it’s breeding season after all). The big male took bear approach A and went “Scaredy Bear” immediately while the female decided to firmly grasp hold of bear approach B, “I’m Ignoring You Bear.”
We stopped and sat about 100
Grazing With A View
Katmai National Park, Alaska, USA yards away from the little girl while she ate some grasses and drank water from a decent little creek that was directly between her and us. Since she was very obviously ignoring us and not running away, our intrepid guide decided we were staying put for a while. He promptly lay down, rested his head on his pack and went to sleep. (See the picture). We (The Photo-Nerds) contentedly shot hundreds of pictures while we sat there. At one point I lay down and got a little closer to her and she didn’t seem to care. But, after a while I needed to take a pee break so I returned to where Kel and the two pilots were resting. At this point the sleeping pilot opens his eyes, looks and me and says,
I’ll bet you could get within 30 feet of that bear and she wouldn’t even care. I say, “really?!?,” but by time I’ve said the words he’d promptly gone back to sleep. So I shrug, look at Kel and proceed to knee-walk my way closer to the little bear girl. Between her and us is marshland that is similar to rice paddy fields in
Mike and The Bear
Katmai National Park, Alaska, USA Southeast Asia. I carefully and slowly walk on my knees until I get about 40 feet from her. I proceeded to sit there, on my knees, and shoot pics of her for the next fifteen minutes. Periodically she’d look at me to make sure I wasn’t doing anything stupid but, otherwise, she stuck to bear approach B and continued to ignore me. I returned to the group because I was trying to be nice and give the others a chance to get closer. No one ever did…wimps! At my closest I was between 35 and 40 feet from her and she never even blinked! (Kel Note - that’s when I took my 1 picture of the day - Mike butt and bear butt.)
Just For The Halibut Our return trip from bear viewing was uneventful and we had a relatively calm evening that night but, we had filled the next day (our last free day), with a trip out into the Cook Inlet to catch Halibut. The Inlet off of the coast of Homer, Alaska is THE place to catch halibut in the while world. So, we’d be remiss if we didn’t take a shot at
it right?
Once again we were on the boat with another couple, the same couple we’d fished with on the Kasilof River. If you’ll remember, the husband had been the only one to catch a fish on the Kasilof after noon that day. Between this feat and his success on a couple of other days of fishing he had become quite cocky about his fishing prowess. You could tell that he expected to catch some big fish that day. He was, shall we say, a wee bit arrogant.
Our fishing licenses allowed each of us to keep two halibut but, since the fishing is so good in this region, we threw many smaller fish back until we caught some decent sized fish. During the four or five hours on the boat we each had a couple of catches…well, when I say we, I mean all of us except the husband. He repeatedly caught nothing!
To add insult to injury for this poor man, about two hours into the trip his wife began fighting with a halibut and seemed to be having some serious difficulty. She fought and fought and was really getting tired when she finally caught
Young Lady
Katmai National Park, Alaska, USA sight of the fish she was fighting with. We all cheered as we saw what we later found out to be a 65 pound, four feet long halibut. As our captain, Captain Billy, pulled this behemoth out of the water Kel and I could both see a gleam of triumph in her eyes. As I’m sure you can imagine, he husband looked defeated after all of his cockiness. ( As an aside, he settled for the two smallest fish that any of us caught that day. HA!)
Halibut are ugly bottom feeding fish; they swim side-ways across the bottom of the ocean and have both eyes on one side of their head. While super tasty, they are really, really unattractive. As if this isn’t enough, they also are really tough fish to kill. Unlike normal fish that die a rather dignified death, these guys (specially the big ones) put up a real fight. Over their ugly little heads they had a seriously thick piece of bone that protects them on the bottom of the ocean. In order to kill the fish as quickly as possibly fishermen carry these half-sized baseball bats that they use to beat the fish to
Whatchoo Lookin At?
Katmai National Park, Alaska, USA death. While I’m sure this makes you animal loving/tree hugging types weep, it was actually pretty funny watching this four-foot long, 65 pound fish flop all over the boat while Captain Billy tried his best to corral and club the fish to death. We all ran for cover as the fish wiggled all over the boat.
Overall the fishing expedition was highly successful. If you look at the pic of all of our fish hanging up waiting for the filet guy you can see the four-foot behemoth next to our much smaller fish. We ended up with 32 pounds of halibut meat which we had split two ways and shipped home, half to Kel’s parents and half to our house. As the end to our fishing adventures in Alaska it was definitely fun one. Halibut fishing is a blast! We’d highly recommend it for those of you who are interested in Alaska, Tons o’ fun!
More to come soon, so be prepared for a few more entries. If you’re interested in keeping in touch with us for the future, be sure to sign up for our blog by clicking on this link:
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Katmai National Park, Alaska, USA out the pictures on the second page!!
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Stephanie and Andras
Stephanie
Nice blog guys!
I've lived almost my whole life in the NW and have yet to travel up to Alaska - after seeing these photos, man I really need to go there! It's a shame bears have become so feared in the continental U.S - sure they wander into camps and approach hikers aggressively because they've associated humans with food (as in, the tasty food we humans carry, not humans AS food) - so how refreshing to hear the flip-side of their wildlife story.