May 2008, the first trip

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The view of Katchemak Bay and a glacier from our house- 20 miles outside Homer, Alaska.

     The night before our first trip to Katmai for the 2008 season I step out on the porch at sunset to shake the mud and dirt from my waders and shoes.  In the distance I hear the hearty chuckle of an invisible sandhill crane.  An eagle’s squeaky, sharp pitched caw cracks through the valley and I stare into the mountains turned pink from sunset.  I’m overwhelmed with my love for Alaska, caught in the beauty of the evening’s colors on snow and the anticipation of seeing bears, yes BEARS, tomorrow!  I whack my mud caked shoes against the railing and last summer comes tumbling out of my boots.  As flecks of sand fall to the ground, now popping with the prehistoric roots of horse-tail that dominate the spring landscape, my eyes begin to tear.  But my sentimental moment is immediately broken by the loud honk, honk, honk of a lone duck – a bird noise seldom heard up here in the hills – and I can’t help but laugh out loud at this croaky, and insistent call.  Tomorrow I’ll be with the bears, how will I ever fall asleep with this anticipation?

    Every arrival in Katmai National Park is preceded by a bush plane ride and the aerial view of mountains, volcanoes, glaciers and jagged stone peaks over Caribbean blue ocean.  The coastal landscapes are dominated by the patterns carved by water.  Glacier fueled water and the incoming tide snake through sand and stones.  Braided rivers slash the coastal landscape in swatches of sedge-grass-greens, orange algaes and water stained turquoise with silt. 

Aerial view of Katmai coast with Augustine volcano in the background

    We hit the Katmai coast and one by one I tick off in my mind the landmarks and bays that precede our landing in Hallo Bay.  Rounding the corner of  Swikshak Bay I know we’ve arrived and the plane swoops low to scope for bears in the meadows and on the beach.  The meadows are tan from dead grass and the absence of sedge which in only a months time will fill the miles of meadows in iridescent green. 

Aerial view of Hallo Bay, Katmai National Park

    The landscape looks so different in the tail end of spring.  Bare, grey cottonwood trees and scraggly willow stalks make the hillsides look more like Arizona than the lush Alaska of summer which reminds me of Hawaii it is so green.  My heart screams at the sight of a few tiny brown dots moving across the land – there are bears here!  Our pilot does a fly-by of Hallo Glacier which at this time of year looks curiously un-dramatic.  The snow covered mountains surrounding Hallo Glacier are white too, so they swallow up the icy curves of the glacier as it slowly slides into the sea.  Ice boulders the size of cars gleam baby blue and stick up from the crunchy, rocky ground-up base of the glacier that has ground its way, over decades, through a mass of mountains.  I get overwhelmingly anxious to land.  Claustrophobia takes me over for a moment as the cabin gets hot and stuffy and we pass the meadows for our final landing.  The fat bush plane tires bump as we touch down on the beach, coming to a calm stop some 100 feet from our first bear.  The sight of her is spectacular! 

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    It’s funny how I anticipate having an emotional arrival in Hallo Bay, but it feels almost uneventful in its familiarity, like a complete coming home.  It’s a coming home where all is right because all is right now, pure presence.  It is perhaps the possibility of danger while being in a place still wild that makes me so utterly present.  Through this total awareness, while in a place so stupendously magical and thoroughly not human, I am transformed, or rather returned to the self I truly am.     

    I gaze out over the sandy colored fields and breath into the magic of this place.  We make our way towards several clamming bears on the flats and the silence is spectacular.  We approach a young female, probably four or five years old, digging in the sand and nibbling on the clams that effortlessly end up in her claws.  As we approach she doesn’t even lift her head to look at us – a demonstration of how comfortable she feels near humans.  How great to be in a place where the human name hasn’t yet been sullied by our destructive nature. 

    The mud around her is littered with at least fifty holes and we step past a few piles of bear poo filled with crushed shells.  It seems like a painful way to get calcium, but plenty of bears pop the whole clam into their mouth and chew them whole.  The female we are watching takes the more time consuming route of prying open the shell with one claw and nibbling out the meat.  All this is done while bracing the clam on top of her opposite, flattened out paw – using her hand like a dinner plate. 

    I’m struck by how fat and healthy she looks – you would never know she just starved herself for six months!  Judging by the wide girth of the three other bears nearby I surmise that the pre-winter salmon runs and salmon gorging must have been extremely successful this year.  This is my first time seeing the Alaskan bears in their winter coats and her hair is thick, fluffy, full and luscious.  What a beautiful, healthy, fat and happy bear!  A smaller blonde bear pops out of the berm down the beach and makes her way towards two other bears clamming.  We head their way to check them out.

      We approach the blonde bear who is a bit smaller yet still quite fat and healthy.  The tip of her nose appears curiously white.  Getting closer, then peering through the binoculars, I realize her nose is filled with porcupine quills.  Poor bear, her nose looks like a cactus.  She looks quite young (maybe four or five) so perhaps this was her first, and probably last, run-in with a porcupine.  It doesn’t seem to bother her much as she sniffs the sand and expertly digs up clams.  She digs alongside a darker bear of the same size and shape.  Heads down, sniffing for clams and digging up bite sized treats, they don’t even glance our way.  That is how insignificant us humans are in a place like Hallo Bay. 

    Two gulls squawk across the flats, circle the bears, and land ten feet from them in the sand.  The gulls stare down the bears hoping to eventually procure some leftovers.  It seems that wherever you find bears you find patient gulls hoping for scraps of bear food.  When bears dissapear from a coastal ecosystem, the ravens, eagles, and gulls, the foxes, wolves, and woverines – all scavenging animals- also lose a steady source of food.  It amazes me that that the official Alaskan policy towards bears is to exterminate them, all in the name of “saving” dwindling populations of moose and caribou.  It has been over 45 years since biologists proved that carnivores do not negatively impact prey species, but in fact keep prey populations, and the ecosystem at large, healthy.  So many animals are negatively impacted by the absence of bears, yet the Alaskan government is determined to wipe them out.     

    We spot a dark bear who ambles onto the beach a ways away.  We head to the beach hoping he will continue to stroll along the shore and walk by us. 

    A bald eagle peers down at us from his perch up on the bluff.  He sits in a cottonwood tree that is yet to burst forth with leaves, watching as we walk the beach. 

    We immediately notice a long trail of wolf tracks.  The tracks run straight down the beach and are absolutely immense – almost the size of John’s spread open hand!  This is a large wolf and I wonder - could these be Whisper's tracks?  Approaching a large log I see a set of much smaller wolf tracks zigzagged by the imprint of tiny, delicate fox feet.  These two sets of tracks are criss crossed, and all mussed up, by the huge prints of bear feet.  Both sets of wolf tracks lead to a large white log and there are depressions in the sand in a shady spot behind the log.  It is clear an animal dug a small day bed in the sand.  Perhaps the wolves settled down here for a respite?  My heart races at the knowledge that the wolves are still using this stretch of beach, and I’m determined to spend time at sunset waiting for them on the beach when we return for our camping trips. 

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