Katmai National Park

Our second FULL day in Anchorage – Today we spend the day at a place called Katmai National Park, ever heard of it? How about Brooks Falls? Still not ringing a bell? How about the iconic scene where the salmon are migrating and are jumping into a waterfall heading up stream?! Well, if you aren’t familiar with it you absolutely should be, it’s FANTASTIC.

The only way to get to Katmai is by boat or plane – the most popular way is air taxi leaving from Anchorage, Homer, or Kodiak. Before we booked this excursion we waivered back and forth, it was going to be a very expensive trip but knew that it was going to be worth every penny! I mean how often would I be celebrating my 30th birthday in Alaska!? Done. We decided why not? Pushing the ‘Confirm Payment’ button made me cringe, I could feel my heart start to beat faster, my palms started to sweat and I had a moment of instant regret. So glad they didn’t allow for refunds, I might have been tempted to “save the money”. Ugh

We had to drop the rental car off at the airport before 8a and needed to be at Rust’s Flying Service by 7:30a, so off we go. Before dropping the car off we decided we needed to stock up on breakfast and snacks before our BIG day. One thing I didn’t really think about before planning a trip to Alaska was the cost of “snacks” which was a mistake on my part – as I knew things were expensive based on my experience in Iceland. Any who, we probably spent close to $50 on snacks (yes, they ended up lasting us more than just today – don’t judge) and made our way to the airport to drop off the rental. Once at the airport we arranged a shuttle to take us to Rust’s which was just about a mile away. Yes, we absolutely “could” have walked BUT in order to do that we would have to cross 6 lanes of airport traffic and we weren’t really feeling up to playing frogger! Ha ha

Finally, we’ve arrived at Rust’s and began the check in process – I forgot to mention that we would be taking a sea plane from Anchorage to Katmai NP – so for safety reasons they asked us to weigh in wearing our backpacks – eeeek, scales are not my friend. I can’t tell you the last time that I’ve been on a scale, I suppose riding in a sea plane is a good reason to face that fear. We’ve weighed in and now we wait – while we were waiting we examined all the different types of planes and watch customers load onto the plane based on their seating assignments from the pilot. As a bonus we got to see a helicopter take off – I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve seen a helicopter take off in person and not on TV! Felling a bit exposed, we realized that what once was 30 people was now down to 8 – and no pilot in sight. I definitely thought we had been left L I was wrong – yahoo! Our pilot Marc finally came out on the deck and asked us to head towards our plane – he gave us a quick spiel on how to enter and exit the plane and then assigned us our seats! I’ve flown many times, but this is the smallest plane I’ve ever ridden in – I was a bit nervous. As we stand their waiting for our seat assignments it was exciting, where was he going to put each person, were we going to be able to switch on the way back, who was going to sit co-pilot, was he going to let that person touch the ‘yoke’(control wheel), am I going to die?! AHHH, there were so many thoughts running through my mind. He points to me, I could see his lips moving but couldn’t hear a thing, I was totally zoned out. He pointed at me to be the one to sit in the co-pilot seat! Happy Birthday to me! We were travelling with a group of 4 along with a family of 4 – the 9 of us loaded onto the plane, did our safety checks and off we went!

Oooh, I forgot to mention we even go to wear the headsets so we could hear/talk to one another on the flight. The flight was about 2 hours, I was hoping to see a pod of Beluga whales swimming around but in order to avoid the smoke from the 33 forest fires we had to climb pretty high making it extremely difficult to distinguish if the white specs on the water were Beluga whales or white caps!  For the majority of the flight we were over water, off in the distance we could see the peaks of a number of 10,000 ft mountains, oil rigs, volcanoes, as well as a few islands.  The ride over was very smooth – I think we each might have taken a bit of a snooze at some point. I will say that riding co-pilot was not as exciting as I thought it was going to be – the dashboard of the plane was rather high so I could barely see over the top which meant I could only really see out of the small window to my right.

As we were making our way to the beach we spot a momma bear and her three cubs strolling along the beach without a care in the world. The closer we get to the beach the more I thought about how incredible it was to be able to think that the only way the people in this National Park arrived here was by sea plane! Such a remote destination.

The first thing you must do when arriving at Katmai is attend a bear talk – here the rangers will tell you the do’s and don’ts of the park, what to do if you encounter a bear, and what other animals can been seen within the park. One of my favorite things about Katmai is that this is the bears home we are visitors – most of the time I find that humans are destroying their natural habitats for our pleasure and it breaks my heart. The last thing we want to do is startle a bear – to prevent this we were encouraged to travel in groups of 3 or more and to always be making noises, singing, talking, laughing, something to let the bears know that we were there or coming. There were a couple of different “viewing” spots along the trail for spectators to stop and watch the bears. The National Parks Service built an elevated bridge that allows the bears to continue with their normal day to day life keeping the visitors out of harms way. We were also taught never to run from a bear, if we were to encounter a bear on our walk from one camp to the other, we were to continue speaking with a normal, calm tone and then we were to back up moving away from the bear. The bear has the right of way – how awesome is that?!

We quickly ate our lunch and left all of our treasured snacks with the pilot and began making our way to the bridge over Brooks River. At the first lookout spot we were able to see a few bears off in the distance taking a nice stroll through the river – as we are standing there in awe we hear this sound – it gets louder and louder and then it stops, then we hear it again and again – panicked we thought it was the grunting of an unhappy male bear. Turns out it is in fact a male, but a human male that has fallen asleep on the bench. Ha ha ha Poor guy was so sleepy and just wanted to take a nap next to the bears, can you blame him!?

We stood in awe for a while and then decided to continue towards Brooks Falls. We were ready to see the salmon jumping and the brown bears fishing! It was a little over a mile from the river to the falls – on this walk was going to be our best opportunity to have an real life bear encounter – I was pumped (not sure the others wanted to meet a bear on the trail, but I sure did.)

We arrived at the gate for the Brooks Falls lookout without a bear sighting, but have no fear the opportunity is still there for the way back! The rangers control the number of visitors they allow out on the platform at a certain time – you put your name on the list and are limited to an hour at a time. The falls are just as picturesque as I expected, one of the unique things about wildlife is there is no guarantee – we were not guaranteed to see any brown bears or salmon at the falls, which we really hoped was not the case. Lucky for us there were two bears sitting at the bottom of the falls but the fish weren’t jumping like we expected. The bears were enjoying the water pushing against their bodies, to my surprise they would take a breath and down they would go – what I envisioned as snorkeling – you could see their head looking around underneath the water and BAMMM they would come up with a salmon! Each bear had its own special place they’d eat their meal – the bear furthest away preferred to eat his in the water; he found a larger rock that was only halfway submerged and sit there before tearing apart the fish. The bear that was closest to us preferred to eat his meal on land  - he would catch the fish, walk towards the shoreline, under the platform and sit in the shade of a tree. This is where we got to see how exactly the bear would consume this fish – you might think that the bear just bites the head off or pops the whole fish in their mouth but you are wrong! The bear basically fillets the fish, first it tears the skin off and then eats only the meat of the fish, leaving the intestines and bones for the scavengers. We watched this for what seemed like hours – to me this was the most Alaska thing I could think of – being in the presence of brown bears, salmon jumping, looking down river to see people fly fishing while bears stroll out of the woods and into the river, all while surrounded by mountains!  Nature, wildlife, and fresh air are three of the main things that make my heart happy – as you can imagine I was in paradise! I didn’t even pay any attention to the sun that was beating down on my exposed shoulders – I didn’t have a care in the world.

Our hour was up, we’d spent as much time as they would allow on our first visit so we made our way back to the rangers and decided to spend some time on the Riffles platform. From this platform you could still see the falls but just from a bit further down river – right out in front of us was a juvenile brown bear, you could tell he was a younger bear as he was having a hard time catching fish. I’m sure I had a huge smile on my face as I sat there and watched him learning how to fish. You could tell he was watching the fish with such focus until he just couldn’t take it anymore and then he would jump with his front paws out splashing into the river. He did this time after time, only coming up empty handed. Pretty sure my heart broke each and every time he would dive into the water and come up empty handed – man I just wanted him to catch a fish. After a few failed attempts he decided it was best to move on and began chasing ducks or birds or just splashing around in the river. (This brought my heart GREAT joy.)  I named this little dude Kenai – from the movie Brother Bear! (If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it, such an adorable cartoon movie!) While on the Riffles platform we were looking up stream and noticed that the fish were jumping more now than they were when we were there, so we picked up our packs and began the walk back towards the Falls platform.

It was our second trip to the Falls platform that I realized the fish ONLY jump when the bears aren’t sitting in the water! Smart little fish, why would they jump out of the water exposing themselves to a sitting bear?! Doh. With each jump I found myself cheering quietly for the fish to make it over the falls so they could continue their trek up river. I began to see a pattern with each jump – the ones who didn’t make it over the falls were jumping straight up or didn’t have enough ‘oomph’ to make it over the falls – successful fish were larger and jumped about 3 feet in the air while arching to the right, as soon as that fish knew it made it over the falls it shot off like a rocket upstream.  Can you imagine how much energy a fish exerts each and every time it attempts to jump over the falls? Those little buggers are tough!

The walk back down the Brooks Falls Trail to the Lower River platform with the raised bridge – this was my second opportunity for a real life bear encounter. Unfortunately, I did not did to meet a bear face to face, some may call this a win but it was definitely a fail in my eyes.  Before we entered onto the bridge I made a suggestion that we take a walk closer to the lake, you know just to explore off the beaten path a bit. My friends weren’t really up for that sort to exploration and since I really wasn’t supposed to hike alone, it was agreed we wouldn’t go. About 20 minutes after my suggestion, a mom and her three cubs come on the beach exactly where we would have been walking…DAMMIT.

We spent the last couple hours moving from viewing spot to viewing spot on the bridge each spot witnessing something different. There were 3 different groups made up of a mom and three cubs, one set was taking a swim in the lake while the others were soaking up the sun! On the other side of the bridge there was a couple juveniles roaming around doing their best to catch the salmon. One ended up eating a salmon we’d seen earlier the was dead but still in the water – you do what you need to do to gain weight before the winter! Ever heard the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’- we saw that in action.  As we are standing on the bridge we notice a juvenile starting to venture in the direction of the mom and her cubs – you see the mom stand straight up on her back legs, look at the juvenile and growl – she even started rushing towards him to scare him into running in the opposite direction. There was also a very large bear that started making its way towards the river and at one point there were what I can only assume as two grown male bears chasing a juvenile. L We waited and listened intently for a growl or yelp and thankfully we didn’t hear either. (I don’t like it when wild animals die, makes me very sad.)

Far off into the distance near the woods I noticed another bear making its way towards the river, something was different about this bear – I really feel we had an instant connection! Ha ha This little fella was walking with a limp, he had an injured back paw and I wanted nothing more than to help. At that very moment a couple of rangers were now sharing our viewing point – so I decided to ask them to help the little fella. The answer they gave was the one I really didn’t want to hear “we usually let nature take its course” – poop. Did I mention these Rangers were easy on the eyes?! As we were in the middle of quizzing them about the “time” in the NPS their radios interrupt the conversation letting the rangers know that as part of the bridge celebration they have corn-on-the-cob in cabin 12! As soon as they realized what was said their face lit up and practically ended the conversation right there so they could go grub on this delicacy they call corn on the cob!

On our way back towards the plane we stopped by the Ranger station to get our NP passport stamps! While we were in there a bear was spotted on the beach – we could see it through the window – the ranger on the inside radioed stating that “bear 459 (or something) was taking a stroll on the beach. WOW, they can tell the bears apart – our minds were blown. She then began to tell us how they identify each bear – this female had a lighter color fur, it was more golden than brown, and she had white patches on her paws! They said if you watch the Brooks Falls bear cam you will start to recognize the bears yourself!

The flight back was shorter than the first trip – before we took off on this flight we made sure we had ALL of our snack within arm’s reach, you know the important things in life. While we were in the air our pilot was telling us that while he was waiting for us to leave a couple of bears walked very close to the plane and he got it all on video! He then air dropped us the videos while we were 8,000 ft in the air – and IT WORKED! On the flight back curiosity got the best of me and I started touching the gadgets and you guessed it… I got yelled at, obviously I didn’t touch them again!

We arrived back at Rust’s and called our UBER to take us to the local Duluth Trading Company! Yes, that is a unexpected destination on this trip, but we all wanted to check it out – so we did! While on our way to DTC we all realized our skin was the same color as a cooked lobster…RED – so we started looking for aloe. Unfortunately, DTC didn’t have anything for our sunburned skin we decided to walk to the local Texas Roadhouse to indulge in some hot fresh rolls smothered in cinnamon butter before walking across the street to Walmart where we knew we could find some aloe.

I’m not sure if I’ve told you this before or not but the state of Alaska was experiencing a HEAT WAVE – we were expecting the temperatures to be somewhere around 65/70 when it was really 85/90. While at Walmart we wanted to just check to see if there were any fans available – the places we were staying do not have air conditioners or ceiling fans – so it was very hard to fall asleep at night.

Along with sleeping in the heat – trying to fall asleep when it’s still light outside (like very bright) is very challenging to some. Think about what it looks like on a summers day around 2pm – that amount of light is peaking through the blinds and tricking your brain into thinking its daylight and we should be awake!

Overall today was an incredibly fabulous day and by far has been my favorite days of the trip! (ha ha yes, I’m aware this is only day 2!) Just hope we didn’t peak too soon!