In June of 2019 I was privileged to spend a week in Katmai National Park on the Alaskan Peninsula. There, coastal brown bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) (also known as grizzly bears, coastal grizzleys, or peninsular grizzlys) graze on protein-rich coastal sedges while they wait for the salmon runs.
Hallo Bay and Kukak Bay -- where I spent the bulk of the trip -- are lousy with bears. Huge males looking for mates, females with cubs (that they anxiously guard from the males) and just-out-on-their own juveniles. At one point my party saw more than twenty bears from our vantage point on a coastal dune. Although these remote areas are accessible only by boat or plane, the bears have seen enough people that they mostly ignore them. Not food, not another bear, not a threat. Indeed, if the bears paid us any attention it was born out of curiosity (especially young bears) or out of a mother bear's desire to show her cubs that these strange creatures with their clacking cameras are not a threat and could safely be ignored.
This gallery consists of my early selects from Katmai, plus a few favorites from a marsh in Anchorage.
