Bears, Bears and a Glacier

As was mentioned in the Homer Spit blog posting we splurged and treated ourselves to a charter flight tour to go and watch grizzly bears catching and feeding on salmon. The guide outfit we chose is called Bold Mountain Air Service and is a family owned and operated business that flies patrons to the most awesome bear viewing locations in the world on Kodiak Island and in Katmai National Park.

Let me quote from their brochure.
“Our trips to see the bears after about the first week of August is to the southern coast of Katmai National Park down Shelikof Straight opposite Kodiak Island. The scenery is outrageous. We pass cape Douglas which is the start of the Aleutian Mountain range. There are seven and eight thousand foot high volcanoes all he way down. You’ll see beautiful blue green glacial lakes. We go to a bay called Geographic Harbor named after the National Geographic Society who did the first exploration of Katmai Volcano from there. We land next to a small boat and skiff to shore about 2 minutes, then walk about ½ mile (depending on the tide) and set up on the banks of the river where the bears are splashing up and down chasing salmon. The river is full of pink and chum salmon, and it’s not uncommon to see 10 or 15 bears in the river right in front of us. The beach is full of clams and bears are excellent clam diggers. I guess if I had to choose a place in all of Alaska to watch bears, this would be the place. I don’t think I can describe how beautiful it is.

We leave the coast around 4:30 p.m. for the trip back to Homer. Don’t forget to save some film for the ride home! Most of the time, we can see whales if the water is halfway calm.”

This is not just advertising talk…it is exactly what happened to us on our trip. And there is a big surprise on the trip back as you can see in the photos of the glacier I will put into a separate Blog post. The pilot flew us down and around to see and film the glacier from the air! The Bears and the glacier are awesome and we’ll let the photos speak for themselves. We took over a hundred photos plus a full tape of video of the bears and much of the time these grizzly bears were in the water just past the grass at our feet, within about 10 feet of our feet, as we sat watching and photographing them!!! We carried no guns or pepper spray and the bears could have chosen to attack or mingle with us at any time but they behaved beautifully! (And so did we!)


Enjoy these photos and we will have many more to share with our friends back home. We can, upon request, email more to other folks when we get back home to good internet access in October.