Alaska 2008

Today was all about bears. We had originally tried to get a flight to Katmai National Park on one of our full days in Homer rather than on a travel day like today. We could not find a seat for two on the air services that we contacted. We settled for the today... it was a lucky choice because we had the best weather in a week. We took off from Beluga Lake in Homer, which is home to several of the float plane services in Homer. The flight path took us across Cook Inlet to the Katmai Peninsula, past three volcanoes that have been active in recent years and then wound our way through valleys, at times flying only a few hundred feet from the mountains, to a landing on Naknek Lake.

Katmai is at the northern end of the Alaskan Peninsula and marks the end of the Alaskan Mountain Range and the beginning of the Aleutian Range. It is on the Pacific Ring of Fire and is seismically active. The largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century to place within the border of the park on June 12, 1912. Mount Novarupta released over six cubic miles of ash and plunged the island of Kodiak into three days of darkness. It was an eruption ten times more powerful than Mount St. Helens. The eruption created the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, about 25 miles from where we landed, which was named after the thousands of active fumaroles, vents spewing gasses and steam.

While I would have liked to have seen the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, we really came for the bears of Katmai. Katmai National Park has one of the largest concentrations of brown bears in Alaska. When we were in Denali, we felt lucky to have seen three of the 300 bears estimated to populate its 6.5 million acres. Katmai has many more bears in its 4.5 million acres. In June, July and August they concentrate on where this salmon are. One of these places is the Brooks River which connects Books Lake and Naknek Lake. If you have watched any of the documentaries on the brown bears shown on National Geographic or Discovery Channels, you have seen images of the bears fishing at Brooks Falls and that is where we headed to see the bears. We were barely on the ground when we had our first bear encounter. A sow with two cubs was walking through the area of the Katmai Lodge and we were forced to stay inside of a building until the rangers "convinced" the sow to move on. Generally, the bears have the right of way and people are told to move out of the way. However, in the lodge area, they tend to make noise so that the bears will leave. On other parts of the trail, it is a different story. On our way back from the falls to the beach where the planes are parked, a bear was walking on the trail near the bridge crossing the Brooks River. We were forced to wait on a viewing platform until the bear gave us some room. The rule at Katmai is to keep 50 feet away from any bear and 100 feet away from a sow with cubs. Susie and I shot over 350 pictures of bears and tried to select the best of them to post on this page. We may, after we return to New York, create a free standing page of Katmai bear pictures.

The two planes in our flight at Beluga Lake Dock