As a wildlife photographer, I’ll never forget a handful of wildlife experiences. These aren’t the experiences where you capture a scene at a great distance with a long telephoto lens. These intimate encounters make you feel like you’re no longer just an observer. You’ve been given a passport to the animal world, experiencing their daily life in a way few people see.
One life-changing encounter was photographing brown bears at Katmai National Park in Alaska. Being at eye level with these bears while they gorge on salmon in the river was frightening, exhilarating, and moving. They are preoccupied with fishing and ignore our presence, often walking right by us. At times, they were close enough to smell. I gasped when I could hear them breathe or rip apart a salmon. They were that close.
Most days in Katmai, we’d take a skiff to shore from our boat and plant ourselves at one of the river outlets. There was no need to search for bears when the salmon were running. They keep appearing at the river for the feast. The action was nonstop, whether fishing, sleeping, clamming, or sparring with other bears. There were also plenty of playful cubs and adorable interactions with their mothers.
I’ve had up-close brown bear experiences in Alaska and Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula when the salmon are running. They are typically 20-50 yards away, sometimes closer. When I describe the experience to folks, they ask whether I was worried about my safety. After all, these are intimidating apex predators, with some males weighing over 1000 pounds. While the group was equipped with bear spray, the bears were preoccupied with the salmon and ignored the group of photographers.
Bears usually keep to themselves, but the salmon run brings many bears together, and they are very wary of one another, particularly when boars are around. They are far more worried about other bears than they are about humans. Their full size becomes apparent when they stand up on their hind legs to watch the other bears or scan the water for churning pools of salmon.
Katmai National Park is an immense wilderness area encompassing 4 million acres, established after the 1912 volcanic eruption of Novarupta. Almost the entire park is a beautiful, undeveloped, inaccessible volcanic landscape filled with bears. Many photographers experience the bears with a day trip to Brooks Falls or the Katmai Bear Cams and Fat Bear Week competition. While the photos at Brooks Falls are iconic, I’ve found the most intimate and exhilarating bear experiences occur when you are in the remote rivers and witness all sorts of bear interactions and activity.
I currently run lodge-based trips to Katmai, where we take a daily seaplane to bear hotspots deep in the park’s interior. If bear photography is on your bucket list, check out our Katmai trip. You won’t regret it!