We spent 19 fabulous days in northern Alaska, highlighted by world renowned Denali National Park, a day of scenic flights and exploration in Gates of the Arctic National Park, the epic drive up the Dalton Highway to the Arctic Ocean and a week in Fairbanks waiting for repairs for the third member of our team, Tramp.  Now we were heading south to the waterways, islands, glaciers and hidden secrets of southern Alaska as the summer came to a close, the birch and aspen started taking on fall colours and the temperature dropped.  Our first target was Kodiak Island.

 

 

 

The drive south from Fairbanks to Anchorage is one of the prettiest in Alaska, following fast moving rivers, through high mountains, past glacier-carved valleys and across uncountable streams and creeks.  Or so they say.  For the two days it took us to do the drive the clouds were so low, the rain so relentless, the temperature so chilly that we barely got a sense of this dramatic scenery.

At times there were major pull-outs to view Mount Denali to the north, all we saw was a blanket of white-grey clouds.  We drove through Denali State Park which provided excellent facilities to explore the area on many walking trails, boat launches and picnic areas, we saw them through the pouring rain.  It was grim.

We pulled into the historic and somewhat quirky town of Talkeetna, a former gold mining town and current launch pad for climbers to Denali, today a haven for day-tripping tourists from Anchorage who come by bus or train to see the mountains (ha!), have lunch in one of the many cute cafes and buy souvenirs.  We came by Tramp but we did the same thing, enjoying caribou burgers at the old pub which was the home of the town’s former mayor – a cat.  Yes, Talkeetna’s mayor was a cat until just recently when he died.

We motored past Anchorage, the state’s largest city at 300,000 and overwhelming economic centre, and camped on a cold and drizzly night on the shore of Turnagain Arm, an ocean inlet that leads to the Pacific Ocean.  We watched a line of local fishermen fishing in the rain for silver salmon which were running on nearby Bird Creek.  This Alaskan feature of fishermen almost shoulder to shoulder fishing when the salmon are running is referred to as combat fishing.

The next day we drove down to the mainland tip of the Kenai Peninsula to the end of the road and the town of Homer (the halibut fishing capital of the world!).  The weather got marginally better as we progressed down this southern extension of the state, following the beautiful frothy Kenai River and stopping briefly at Ninilchik, the Russian community established over 100 years ago.

Homer, or more specifically Homer Spit, is the end of the line.  From here you either get on a ferry to go further south or turn around.  We parked Tramp and jumped on the Tustemena, the Alaska Marine Highway’s ship which provides a link between the remote communities in the Aleutian Islands and civilisation.  Our target was the third stop of the ferry’s trip, the thriving town of Kodiak on the huge island of Kodiak.

The Tustemena is a relatively small ship and only slightly younger than us but it headed southward past the last tip of mainland and then across the open seas to the Kodiak Island group.  We slept well, stretching out in a booth designed for six in the open public area and the next morning watched with interest as we pulled into two native communities, Port Lions and Ouzinkie, and watched as people and supplies moved off and on the ship.

When people hear the word Kodiak they often think of the bears.  The island of Kodiak is famous for its brown bears which grow up much bigger than the grizzly bears of northern Alaska because of their richer diet of fish, even though they are all the same species (as opposed to black bears which are smaller and a different species).

But bears have become a major theme of our trip and we came to Kodiak for a bear hunt.  Unfortunately, or as it turned out – fortunately, the major salmon runs on Kodiak Island had started to slow down and the bears had started to disappear.  But across the water in Katmai National Park, a park so remote there are no roads, infrastructure or ports, the pink salmon are still running and the bears are still in their late season fishing frenzy.  So Julie and I jumped into our own four seater Cessna float plane with Scooter, our pilot, and Devon, our guide, and took off for a day of bear hunting.

And what a day it turned out to be!  Playing some strong cards to be the best day of our trip so far, the bear hunt was an extraordinary success.  It’s not easy (for me) to part with the big bucks for such an excursion, especially when the outcome is somewhat unknown, but hey, when in Alaska…

We flew around the town of Kodiak with a population of over 10,000 and supporting the largest Coast Guard base in America, and over the island of Kodak, the second largest island in America, crossed the straight and came in view with Katmai National Park, a beautiful rugged land with snow-capped mountains and numerous dormant volcanoes.  The Aleutian chain of islands is really just a string of volcanoes reaching into the Pacific Ocean and the land is almost completely uninhabitable for humans.

Scooter landed our plane on a glassy bay protected by small islands in a place called Geographic Harbour inside the national park and taxied into the shallow waters.  From there Devon, Julie and I waded ashore in our hip-high waders, even at this stage spotting big brown bears foraging for salmon in the stream that flows into the bay.  OMG, we’re walking straight towards hungry brown bears as if they are invisible, and hoping we are invisible to them.

But with Devon’s pistol and his youthful two months of bear guiding experience we positioned ourselves in the middle of this gravel spit, the small fresh water stream flowing down on both sides of us.  The pink salmon, or humpies as they are locally called, were spawning upstream, as they have done for eons, and the bears had come down to catch their fill, as they have also done for centuries.  And we were standing right in the middle of this amazing scene of nature.

We stood there for two hours, absolutely spellbound by what we saw, witnessing nature so close and so overwhelming that it was hard to believe what we saw.  We came to learn quickly that bears appeared from the high grasses on the stream’s banks from all directions, would fish for a while, maybe drift off, only for other bears to appear.  Sometimes we would be watching a bear on the stream’s banks only for one of us to turn around and say “there’s another one behind us”.

We saw two mothers, each with a set of twins, one of which led her cubs so close past us we were compelled to take a few steps back to give her room.  She and her family would have been less than 10 metres, or 30 feet, from us.  But amazingly, none of the bears took any notice of us, even the huge boar males, and even though we (read Julie) might have been a little scared at times it just became natural to watch the bears fish at close range.

And did they fish!  We were amazed at the different techniques the different bears would prefer.  One bear, who we named The Fisherman, stood up on his hind legs and look down into the pool of water.  When he spotted a fish he liked he would drop down on the fish with his paw and then pull him out.  He did this repeatedly and rarely seemed to miss.

Another bear, clearly older and a bit more scarred around the face who we named Old Man, was a patient but savvy hunter.  He would not rush the process but almost always came up with a fish by pouncing on the hapless humpy, once even sliding in from the bank.  But we named other bears, like Blondie who was much lighter, more golden in colour, and was good at chasing salmon in the shallow waters until they grounded themselves in the shallow gravel so he could easily pick them up.

And then there was White Tips who had little blond tips on the end of each ear.  He liked to pace up and down the stream’s bank, then splash in great fury, almost hoping he would catch a fish.  There was also a bear who was almost black like a black bear.  They all kept their space from each other except on one occasion when sharp words, angry growls, were exchanged.

No words can describe this extraordinary experience – flying into a remote bay of a trackless national park, seeing huge brown bears up close as they fished for salmon, knowing time was getting short before the bears prepare for their hibernation in a month or so.  For two hours we stood in wonder, and took more than two hundred photos, while we watched this spectacle.  By the end of it all we were high enough to fly back to Kodak without Scooter and his float plane.

We jumped back on the Tustemena for the 14 hour return ferry to Homer, celebration beers over dinner, sleeping well on the padded public bench seats with visions of brown bears and pink salmon swirling in our heads.  Alaska continues to deliver the goods!