Wilderness Wandering

We were up early.  We headed to the sea plane airport for our 2nd flight seeing adventure with Rust’s Flying Service. 

Our Katmai flight was to leave at 8 AM. We were delayed until 9:15 AM due to fog at Katmai.

Mike was our pilot. We were flying in a Cessna C206 today. 

We had a very nice flight out. The flight is about 2-1/2 hours.

Katmai NP has two major parts. The park was created to preserve the living laboratory of its cataclysmic 1912 volcanic eruption that created the Valley of 10,000 Smokes. Most of the geothermal activity is presently dormant, but protecting brown bears has become a huge focus.  You can only fly into the park. The bear viewing is extremely popular.  Staying in the park requires a reservation for one of a few cabins or a campsite in the gated campground that is protected from the bears.  

The reservations are available through a lottery that takes place a year in advance. We weren’t planning this trip a year in advance. When I inquired about reservations, I was told they already had 5000 people on the wait list and weren’t accepting more. Seeing both the Valley of 10,000 Smokes and the bears would have required an overnight stay.  We chose to see the salmon and bears at Brooks Falls.

We headed to the VC to attend Bear School, which is required before you can enter the park.  Basically, they teach you to respect the bears and not to run if you encounter one.  We got a cool Katmai pin to show we graduated from bear school.

Then Tim and I hightailed it out to the Brooks Falls platform to get on the list for the viewing platform. I don’t know if it was because it was a Monday, but when we got to the platform the wait was less than three minutes. Other people had warned us that wait times of a half hour or more are common.  They allow you to stay on the main platform for 30 minutes.  We spent our half hour on the platform at the falls but it felt a little anti climactic to me. There were only two bears at the falls and both were on the far side of the river, so photographs from an iPhone weren’t great. We went over to the other platform and there was only one bear, but it was pretty close to the to our viewing station.  There were a bunch of fishermen in the river with the bear, and everyone was doing their own thing. At this point in the season the bears are very wasteful. They are mainly eating the head, the skin, and the roe or eggs of the female as those are the highest protein parts. The rest of the fish they just abandon. In the half hour we were at the falls, Tim and I think we only saw 2 or 3 salmon make it up the falls.

We decided to go have lunch and possibly walk back out to the falls later. 

On the way back, we ran into one bear walking toward us on the trail. We stepped off the trail as we were taught. More people caught up to us and waited with us. Then a Ranger came along. Then we spotted two more bears sleeping in the woods on our left. Eventually about 6 or 7 bears passed through.  We were caught on a bear superhighway! We eventually had almost 100 people waiting for the bear jam to clear! At one point, a bear was headed straight for me! It was only about 20 feet away when it veered to the right and then laid down for a nap.  We were probably delayed there a good 30 minutes. 

We made it back to the VC and retrieved our box lunch. We went into the picnic area that is fortified against the bears with an electric fence and had lunch. Afterwards, we walked down to the beach and took our photo with the NP sign. We found our pilot Mike and the other couple that came out with us. We said we were OK with heading back to the plane.  As Mike was preparing the plane, a sow and a yearling came out of the woods to our left and sat for a bit and then decided to go for a swim. They swam from our right to our left and the waded back out into the woods right by our plane.  It was a great end to Katmai. 

On the way back we refueled in the gorgeous little village of Port Allsworth, which is in Lake Clark NP. We were not able to leave the plane,  but we did get to see a little bit of the other side of Lake Clark NP! It was nice to make the side trip because we saw different things on our way back.