Public Project
Katmai Brown Bears
A mother bear and her cub amble toward us across the grassland. The cub—a shaggier, blonder miniature of the mother—is in its second summer here in Hallo Bay on the coast of Alaska’s Katmai National Park. It mirrors mom’s adult behavior but is still playful, affectionate. Now the cub snuggles against her, and they sit down facing away from us and curl up for a nap. They’re completely, almost radically, at peace with our presence.
And the feeling is mutual. Within half an hour, my fiancé—who, like many first-time visitors to Katmai, had been concerned about coming close to such large predators—is so at ease around the bears that he too falls asleep in the grass.
Around 2,200 brown bears live in Katmai National Park and Preserve’s four million acres, and its Pacific coast, separated from the rest of the park by the Aleutian Range, is home to some of the highest densities of brown bears ever recorded. Abundant coastal food sources like sedges, salmon, and razor clams mean that bears can gather in large numbers and still have plenty to share. That makes food-rich areas like Hallo Bay, accessible by bush plane or boat, some of the best brown bear viewing in the park.
Dave Bachrach has led brown bear trips in Katmai for over 20 years. Now 67, he is steady and relaxed, and speaks with calm authority, dressed in the same muddy gray as the glacial silt that forms this coast. Following his example allows tourists to fit, for a few hours, into the bears’ world.
“I want people to see bears in their natural environment,” he says, “not reacting to us.”
Brown bears have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. In their 20s, my parents spent their summers running one of Alaska’s first brown bear viewing camps on the rugged coast just north of the Katmai border. Brown bears were revered in our household, and we regarded them as individuals, with—as research now shows—their own personalities. “Living with bears demands respect,” my mother told me. “We were honored to be visitors in their world.” Bear photos are still tacked up among family pictures in my parents’ kitchen.
Their five years as bear guides, in the mid-1980s, took place during a pivotal shift in thought in Alaska, where brown bear tourism had previously been synonymous with trophy hunting. Biologists and field staff at the nearby McNeil River State Game Sanctuary were learning to read brown bear behavior, challenging longtime assumptions that bears were unpredictable. They discovered that if humans behaved equally predictably—by limiting visitors to small guided groups, respecting the bears’ behavior and space, and never exposing the animals to human food—the bears could grow tolerant of a human presence over time. I grew up regularly visiting McNeil River and assumed that gazing out at a landscape of 40 bears at a time was normal.
Nearly 50 years ago, McNeil River’s most influential manager, Larry Aumiller, started a successful program bringing visitors to watch brown bears from the same spot, every day of every summer. The program continues today. Field staff give each bear a name as an identifier, like Braveheart or Solstice or Ears, and add each day’s observations to decades of compiled research.
At McNeil, I learned to notice how bears honed unique fishing tactics: snatching airborne fish from waterfalls, “snorkeling” after fish in eddies, or waiting downstream for larger bears’ scraps. Mother bears can be hovering and attentive parents that discipline their cubs—or they can be comparatively lax, letting them run wild.
The memories that stand out most involved the bears’ incredible displays of vulnerability and trust: a female called T-Bear that chose to nurse her cubs in front of my camera lens; a blond bear with a radial halo of a face that approached my father and me so she could take a nap beside us in the shade. What I didn’t realize as a child was that these moments could take place only because of how the land was protected and managed.
To Aumiller, spending time with bears in the wild is, in its broadest sense, about learning to share space with wild animals. In Katmai, this act of sharing land with bears is not new. Traces of human habitation, dating back 9,000 years, have been found along salmon-laden rivers where bears still fish today.
“It’s always seemed to me that people who don’t learn to share don’t thrive,” Aumiller once told me. “And those who share, do. If you can learn to do that with an apex predator, I think you can do that with almost anything.”
One of the biggest threats to brown bears is irreversible habitat loss. Globally, brown bears occupy only 2 percent of their former range. Nearly all the brown bears left in the United States live here in Alaska. Katmai’s expansive, unbroken terrain is precious: A single bear in Katmai may roam more than 50 miles each summer to find enough food to survive the winter.
The urgent need for conservation of this land can feel abstract—until you see a mother bear and her cub in person.
Brown bears are Ursus arctos, the same species as grizzlies. Standing seven to nine feet tall and weighing up to 1,500 pounds, they grow famously plump on fish and vegetation each summer. Some of Katmai’s brown bears have even become internet famous, thanks to the phenomenon of Fat Bear Week. This annual online competition run by the park and Explore.org lets viewers of a webcam set up at Brooks Falls vote on their well-fed favorite.
About half of all visitors to Katmai arrive at inland Brooks Falls to watch bears fish for salmon. Floatplanes line the beach, arriving guests are briefed with a safety video in a small theater, and two gift shops and a restaurant do a brisk trade. The last time I visited the falls’ crowded viewing platform, I was given a 45-minute wait time and a restaurant pager with a picture of a bear on it. It’s a great place to reliably see bears—but it’s an entirely different experience from being out in the coastal wilds, in a small group, surrounded by bears in every direction.
The Katmai coast is accessible only by air or sea, and its remoteness, coupled with its plentiful natural food sources, helps make bear viewing here as safe as it is. Far from roads or settlements, Katmai’s brown bears have never learned to associate humans with food or harm. In areas like Hallo Bay, tourists have been coming to watch bears for decades, following the same protocols developed by Aumiller and other bear biologists.
Each time we spot a bear, Bachrach reads its behavior. If the bear appears relaxed, we can watch for a while to see what it does. If it shows any signs of anxiety—moving away from us, yawning, or, in extreme cases, huffing—we give it space and leave it alone. We must never provoke behavior, let bears get too close, and most important, never let even a crumb of our food fall to the ground. The bear guides who took over from my parents learned this the hard way when a door once blew open to a cabin where a bowl of fruit had been left out on a counter. After a bear got in, it sat on their porch for days, wanting more.
By mid-afternoon, Bachrach leads us up a ridge of driftwood separating the meadows and the ocean. In a wide field, a pair of fluffy blond cubs tumble in the grass while seven or eight more bears graze in the far distance. On the other side, below a gravel beach, an amber bear wanders the glacial mudflats. It’s searching for razor clams, which it will either crush or pry open with its jaws and dexterous claws.
When bears emerge from their dens in the spring in Katmai, they feast on sedges and dig for razor clams at low tide. As the salmon run from late June through September, the bears move to the mouths of salmon-filled rivers, but they’ll also continue eating grass and berries. By the time they return to hibernation, they can have increased their body weight by 50 percent.
To be in tune with what bears are doing is to be in tune with what foods are in season—and by extension, what’s happening in their environment. A healthy bear is a sign of a healthy ecosystem.
At the end of August, I join Bachrach and six guests on a liveaboard boat for a weeklong trip down the Katmai coast. It’s salmon season, the beginning of summer’s turn toward fall. When we return to Hallo Bay, the grass has yellowed and the bears have largely dispersed, but we spot a female with a rare group of four tiny first-year cubs. Farther south, we watch bears fish in small, remote coves where thousands of salmon hang suspended in ribbons of green water.
Each time a new brown bear arrives at the edge of a river, the bears shift positions to allow space according to a hierarchy of size. We too move carefully around the bears—and around other tour groups visiting by boat and floatplane. This time is vital to the bears’ winter survival. Ensuring that we don’t disturb their feeding is one of the most important parts of being a responsible visitor.
Finally, we sail toward Geographic Harbor (named in honor of National Geographic in 1919 by an explorer whose expedition was funded by the Society). It’s a maze of islands, where waterfalls rush from basaltic cliffs and alders blanket the land down to the waterline. When the weather clears, we’re driven ashore in Zodiacs to a tidal plain where a river fans out to the sea. Life here moves to the rhythm of Katmai’s 20-foot tides, and as the water rises, the rivers begin to jostle with salmon.
A dark chocolate-colored bear with two cubs appears out of the alders, then a lanky adolescent, then a big male with a shaggy copper coat. Gulls cry out overhead. Soon the bears are everywhere, fat and glossy, lunging into the rivers to catch the most calorie-rich food of the year. Five species of salmon migrate through Katmai’s rivers, each one at a different time, and the bears know exactly when the time is right.
In a few hours, the whole landscape will be underwater. Soon the bears will retreat to their dens to sleep through the winter. New mothers will bear their young in the dark.
“What do you think people get out of seeing bears?” I ask Bachrach. During our days together aboard the boat, I’ve watched his guests go from hesitant to awestruck, then comfortable, and then observant and thoughtful.
“Hopefully they’re experiencing something that is both inspirational and humbling, that creates a reconnection to something wild that lives within them,” Bachrach says. “But they’re also getting a wilderness experience that will help them better understand the value of having wildlife and wilderness in our lives.”
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