More bears and other things

 Thursday July 24

We dodged an incoming storm system yet again, and flew to Brooks Falls for another day watching bears and salmon. The float planes (de Haviland Beavers) seat 7 guests. The ones we flew in have been updated repeatedly but were originally built between 1954 and 1964.  Most of our pilots were born long after the planes were built!  We flew between 500 and 650 feet of altitude, depending on the “ceiling” of the cloud banks. At the end of the day we boarded a conventional Beechcraft King Air 100 for the 30 minute return flight to Homer and the final dinner of the trip. We amused ourselves totaling up the modes of transportation on this trip. Leaving aside getting to Fairbanks for the start of the trip and vans belonging to various lodges and short transfers, we rode in: 3 vans, 2 helicopters, 1 train, 7 boats, 3 float planes models  (4 rides) and 2 charter planes. 

Today we could be a bit more relaxed in our bear viewing and really study particular individuals and their fishing methods. There are three formal viewing areas— the lower river where it widens out and flows into Naknek Lake, the famous falls, and the “riffles” slightly below the falls. Today the lower river was quite active, as a safe space for mothers with cubs or young inexperienced adults that don’t want to compete with the big boys up at the falls. The inexperienced bears were fun to watch, as they missed as much as they caught. When we arrived, we saw 10 bears in this area.

At the riffles, we watched one of the “celebrity bears” named Walker (151). Every bear is assigned a number and there are webcams set up by the falls that people log in to watch. Walker is a large, dark male with facial scars and a dominating personality, so he is easy to identify. As for fishing style, Walker is a “snorkeler”. 

We did have to stop a few times to let bears pass by the trails, and on one occasion we got to hear bears vocalize as they chased each other. This is unusual, as bears normally use body language and facial expressions to avoid conflicts and preserve the hierarchy. We also saw a few bears sleeping off their food coma to be ready to fish some more.

A few other notes about bears. Alaska has three species of bears: black, brown and polar. Both “grizzlies” and “coastal brown bears” are the same species. Grizzlies are brown bears who live more than 500 miles from the coastline. While grizzlies are omnivores, their access to protein rich foods is limited, and the largest males weigh about 800 pounds. Coastal brown bears have the opportunity to gorge on salmon, allowing the largest males to weigh well over 1200 pounds, even up to 1400 pounds, which rivals the size of polar bears. Black bears are smaller than grizzlies and while also omnivores, the proteins in their diet are things like insects and frogs. 

As with a number of other national parks in Alaska, Katmai National Park was established in 1980— but not because of the bears.  In 1912 there was the Novarupta volcanic eruption which caused the collapse of Mt Katmai’s summit. It was the largest eruption of the 20th century and estimated to be 30 times larger than Mount Saint Helens. It coated the area in ash. It also created a valley (“the valley of ten thousand smokes”) full of fumaroles. It was hoped that this would be a second Yellowstone, and the area was created a National Monument in 1918 to protect these features. The fumaroles have gradually petered out, but of course the bears and salmon have become the new attraction. We saw pumice “stones” on the beach as well as places where bears have dug down to the ash layer. Apparently the ash helps them with digestive issues if they’ve really overdone the gorging. 

Pictured: snowshoe hare, today’s bear-on-the-trail, Walker in deep water, Walker with his tongue out, the abundance of salmon even in the lower river, sleeping bear (look at those claws!)

BEARS!!!

 Wednesday July 23

Today was a day for seeing coastal brown bears at Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park— and boy did we! We flew by floatplane for about 30 minutes and disembarked on the beach of the Naknek Lake within the park. 

Katmai National Park covers 4 million acres and is the 4th largest national park in the US. It sees 20,000 visitors in its short season, averaging over 500 per day. The park does a great job of managing the crowds to ensure everyone has a chance to be on the best viewing platforms next to the Brooks River and its falls. They also require all visitors to go to “bear school” to ensure you can behave safely and with minimal disruption to the bears. This includes emptying anything with scent (food, drinks, gum, bug spray, suntan lotion) from your packs. 

The Brooks River is one of the major salmon run rivers for the Sockeye Salmon. Sockeyes hatch in tributaries to Brooks Lake, up above the Brooks River, and spend several seasons in the lake before heading out to the ocean for several more years. In the ocean, they are a silvery color, but as they prepare for spawning their bodies turn red, their heads turn green, and they develop interesting protruding mouth parts. Getting to the spawning grounds requires swimming against the river currents for miles, and climbing the falls (which are about 6 feet high). Once a sockeye reaches the full coloration, even if it doesn’t successfully spawn, it dies. 

On the other side of the equation, the bears need to pack on as much fat as possible in order to survive without eating throughout their hibernation. Hibernation is triggered by dwindling food supplies, not by light or temperature, so it can range from 5 months to 7 months. Bears lose 40% of their body fat (as well as some muscle) during hibernation. So going into hibernation they want to be as fat as possible, gaining as much as 400 pounds. They practice hyperphasia, which means they never feel full and can just keep eating.  In a year of plentiful salmon (as this year is), they can be quite selective and only eat the high fat parts of a salmon— skin, head and roe. The rest of the fish carcass floats downstream to feel eagles, gulls, foxes and even ducks. 

The bears have several different fishing styles. Some stand in the water below the falls and scoop up fish that are tired or disoriented from an unsuccessful leap. Others “pounce” to try to catch a fish. The stream is unbelievably full of fish to start with, but when the fish sense a bear moving they get agitated— the water looks like it is boiling with fish. Others lung with claws or teeth from the top of the falls to catch a leaping fish. And a few “snorkel” with only their ears above water to listen for danger, grabbing fish from below. 

Of course not every bear is in the water (although at one point we could see 12 bears at once). Bears also wander through the surrounding woods and meadows, so you have to be continually on the lookout. We had to move or stand still to evade terrestrial bears on three occasions. We also thoroughly enjoyed seeing a few bear mothers with cubs, particularly on the beach where our float plane landed. 

Pictures: brown bear atop brooks falls with leaping fish, “boiling” fish, bear stripping skin from a salmon, cubs playing, mother and cub 

To Katmai

 Tuesday July 22

Today was another transit day, moving from the Kenai peninsula and Homer to the Katmai peninsula. We spent the morning at Odyssey Lodge. The low tide this morning was 18 feet lower (with probably an extra 100 yards of beach) compared to yesterday’s high tide. We went out onto the mudflats and saw many types of kelp, mussels and scallops on the shore, and near shore we watched small jellyfish and beautiful ochre sea stars. One sea star had only three legs, courtesy of aggressive sea gulls. We also got to watch a sea otter wrap itself up in kelp to safely take a nap without drifting away as the tide changed. We saw several interesting birds, and a colony of harbor seals hauled up onto a small rock. An hour later, nearly that entire landscape had been covered by the incoming tide, and by the time we boarded our water taxi, the water was back up to the cliff edges. The sea otter, however, was in the same spot, safely anchored to his kelp. 

On our short trip back to the Homer Spit, we slowed near a rocky outcrop called “Gull Rock”— there were hundreds of Black-legged Kittiwakes, Glaucous-winged gulls and Common Murre on the rocks, and in the surrounding water there were literally thousands of the Murres in great rafts. 

We flew in 8-passenger Beechcraft airplanes to the airstrip at King Salmon on the Katmai part of the Alaska peninsula, our home for the next two nights. Watching snow capped volcanoes pass by on either side was interesting. The landscape at King Salmon is very flat, a bit of a shock after being in various mountain ranges for the past week. King Salmon Lodge is family operated and the oldest of the salmon fishing lodges in this area. It is rustic but comfortable and the location can’t be beat. Dinner was family style, with freshly caught sockeye salmon— it was incredible.

Pictured: Black Oystercatchers, sea otter with a kelp blanket, juvenile spruce grouse, three-legged ochre sea Star

Grewingk Glacier Lake

July 21

We spent much of today on a 7-mile hike to and from the Grewingk Glacier Lake. We took a 20-minute “water taxi” ride to a broad pebble beach. After 1/2 a mile along the beach, we headed inland through a mature temperate rain forest, complete with mosses, ferns, cottonwoods, alders, and Sitka spruce. Later in the hike, as we got closer to the glacier, we crossed through a much newer area, created by a combination of glacier recession and the big tsunami and landslide of 1967.  We ate lunch along the shores of the glacial lake. In 1967, the glacier itself filled the whole space of the current lake.  

We saw some new species of birds on the hike, and more upon our return to the lodge. We also got to experience the dramatic tides in this area; the tides can change by up to 25 feet— the difference in the shoreline from the time we left this morning to our return in the afternoon was impressive! Yesterday Kevin walked along the shoreline, but today the water came at least 35 feet closer than that. 

Pictured: Harlequin ducks, Glewingk Glacier and its lake, American three-toed woodpecker

And on to Homer

 July 20 

We left Fox Island after breakfast, retracing our steps by boat to Seward (with stops to admire a sea otter and a marbled murrelet), followed by a four hour drive to Homer on the other side of the Kenai Peninsula. Our path took us north, northwest and finally southwest, as we had to go around the mountains and ice fields in the center of the peninsula. 

Downtown Seward is lovely (once you get away from the harbor and the cruise ships). The national park visitor center was interesting and the sea life (rescue) center was great. The center had exhibits which allowed viewing puffins, ducks, other waterbirds and sea lions both from above and below water level. We could have watched the puffins dive and “fly” underwater all day!  The sea life center was founded after the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in nearby Prince William Sound highlighted the need for wildlife rescue and rehabilitation facilities in Alaska. 

Leaving Seward we drove back through 

Chugach National Forest, which covers 7M acres and much of the Kenai mountain range. At the turnoff to the Sterling highway, we stopped at Tern Lake and were treated to views of a family of Trumpeter Swans and a pair of common Loons. 

The Kenai River is a popular salmon fishing spot. Currently sockeye and coho salmon are both “running” in the river. Salmon is the backbone of life in this part of Alaska, not only as a food source, but for its role in moving nutrients from the ocean to the land. All salmon are born in fresh water, spend years out in the open ocean ( duration depending on species) and then return to their birth rivers to spawn. The time they spend in the ocean means that marine nitrogen and other nutrients return with them. Bears carry both live and dead salmon deep into the forest, where the carcasses contribute to the health of the forest soil. 

Salmon require clean, cool and cold water. Pollution is an obvious risk to them, but so is logging— the extra debris in the water, and the lack of shade at the edges of streams also degrades the water conditions they need. 

We stopped at Anchor River State Park  (so named as a place where Captain James Cook lost an anchor in his exploration of Cook’s Inlet). The beach was covered in gulls, searching for halibut carcasses that wash in from the fishing boats once the fillets have been removed. The fish also attract bald eagles, from which the gulls flee. The town of Anchor River is the furthest west town on the US Highway system. It was too misty to see across the river to Lake Clark National Park on the Alaska Peninsula.

We proceeded on to the town of Homer (

about three times the size of Seward) and then out onto the 5-mile long “Spit”. The Homer Spit is the terminal moraine from the glacier that formed Kachemak Bay. It is quite a tourist location and prides itself as “the halibut capital” as well as “the largest small boat harbor in the US”. We took a small boat across Kachemak Bay to Chinapoot Bay and the Odyssey Lodge, our home for the next two nights. Along the way we saw large groups of Common Murre, who were not too happy about our intrusion! 

Pictured: gulls fighting over a fish head, common murre escaping, bald eagle, approaching odyssey lodge

Kenai Fjords National Park

Saturday July 19

The Kenai Fjords National Park was established in 1980. It protects the Harding Ice Field (one of four remaining ice fields in North America) and the rugged coastline where tidewater glaciers meet the sea. The intersection of the tidal waters, the kelp fields (protected from sea urchin depredation by sea otters) and the deep waters of the Gulf of Alaska creates nutrient rich waters. These in turn attract fish and the eaters of fish. 

We spent the day on a private boat trip in and around the fjords. We saw a lot of small salmon fishing vessels, and a lot of fish eating marine mammals— orcas, humpbacks, harbor seals and stellar sea lions. We also saw fish eating birds —- several members of the auk, gull, and cormorant families, and bald eagles. 

We began our boat trip with a sighting of three mountain goats (a male and a female with her kid), rare to see and even rarer to see only about 50 feet above the water. 

It was wonderful to see humpbacks and orcas…. but we did more than just “see” them.  The two times we saw orcas, they surfaced multiple times and included young ones as well as a couple of the bull males. We even saw a young one breach. It’s not certain whether there were two different pods or not. 

And the humpbacks— we saw the same group of about a dozen on two different occasions Both times we saw them bubble-net feeding. This is a rare cooperative feeding behavior for what are basically solitary animals. It is a behavior that only occurs in a few places for a few weeks of each year, and only includes a fraction of the population of humpbacks each summer in Alaska. We were lucky enough to witness it last summer outside Juneau. To see it again, and from a smaller boat so that our vantage point was much closer to the sea surface, was wonderful. We knew when the whales were about to surface because gulls would start circling in a rather frenzied motion. It was fun to watch the seabirds swarm in to get any fish that escaped the whales. 

We got to see both kinds of puffins (horned and tufted) that live in Alaska. We also got to Rhinoceros Auklets (new for us) and Common Murre, which can dive to 600 feet in search of fish. 

We ate lunch while watching the Holgate glacier “calve” into the Holgate Arm (fjord). What a day!

Pictured: mountain goat, orca with baby, orca “spy hopping”, humpbacks feeding, harbor seals, Holgate glacier calving, tufted puffin, horned puffin 

Fox island

July 18

This morning we left early to catch the train for a four-hour ride to Seward, which is on the Kenai Peninsula. We rode in a glass domed car (with a dining car beneath it that served breakfast). The glass sides and roof, as well as the open platform at the rear of the car, allowed for excellent landscape and wildlife viewing. The route skirted the edge on Turnagain Sound, and then turned south to pass through the Chugash Mountains. The surroundings were breathtaking—- steep forested hillsides, waterfalls, snow-capped peaks, glaciers, wetlands, and lakes. We saw several moose, a glimpse of a black bear, and quite a few bald eagles.  

Once in Seward we boarded a small ship for our 45 minute transit out to Fox Island.  Fox Island is one of three barrier islands that protect Seward from the full force of storms in the Gulf of Alaska. Along the way we saw harbor seals, harbor porpoise, and three sea otters who wrestled and tumbled in the water. 

The lodge on Fox Island is isolated and elegant. Our group fills their capacity so we have the place to ourselves. This afternoon we went sea kayaking for an hour in Halibut Bay, and were rewarded with several water birds, a pigeon guillemot, and a few Horned Puffins. The scenery was spectacular, snow capped mountains and hillsides with an array of blooming flowers. As we gazed out the windows at dinner, we saw a river otter making his way to the beach. The otter carried his fish across the beach and to a lagoon, where its den is suspected to be located.

Pictured: train in the Chugash Mountains, black oystercatcher, sea otters, river otter, Fox Island (zoom in to see the lodge)