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The bears moved slowly in the green meadow, looking more like buffalo than one of North America's top predators. Despite some occasional frolicking, the scene was quite sedate. The bears politely ignored the nine people sitting at the meadow's edge. The nine people talked quietly, with the kind of respectfully casual demeanor you might find from a group of art lovers on an all-day tour of the Louvre. Only the clicking of cameras sporting giant telephoto lenses gave them away.
Then the huge male appeared. By his mere presence, this bear put all the bears near him into motion. The reaction was immediate, the way a stick stirs up an ant hill.
Most agitated of all, a female with a pair of yearling cubs wasted no time. She and her cubs broke into a full gallop and made straight for the bear viewing tour.
But instead of screams and chaos arising in the group, calm reigned, punctuated by a few quiet exclamations and a flurry of shutter noise.
Porter had rehearsed this moment for his clients on the floatplane dock in Homer earlier that morning.
"You just don't run," he'd said matter of factly, echoing most bear literature and Alaska park rangers. "You can't let them push you around."
The sow and her cubs passed within meters of Porter's group and ran on until they'd put the people between themselves and their pursuer. The big male, a brown bear Porter guessed might tip the scales at 1,300 pounds, gave a half-hearted chase, then pulled up short of the tourists and indifferently meandered toward the meadow's center.
A number of Homer-based companies offer single-day guided bear-viewing trips to Katmai National Park, flying their clients by floatplane from Beluga Lake to the other side of the inlet.
There are also several Homer companies that advertise boat-run bear-watching tours on the coast of lower Cook Inlet.
The tour booking agencies on the Homer Spit likewise carry all manner of bear-oriented brochures, from overnight trips to expensive fly-out lodges to one-day out-and-back boat trips to Tuxedni Bay.
The options range in price roughly from $300 to $500 for a single day of viewing bears. A little research will reveal a wide-variety of trips to a number of different locations.
Nearly every air charter operation on wheels or floats has a contingency for putting camera-toting customers into the brown bear country across Cook Inlet.
Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists estimate that there may be close to 250 grizzly bears on the Kenai Peninsula. By comparison, literature for Katmai National Park puts the number of grizzly bears on the Alaska Peninsula at between 2,000 and 3,000. The range for this extraordinary concentration of coastal brown bears extends several hundred miles south from Lake Clark National Park and encompasses everything from Cook Inlet and Shelikof Strait on the east to the salmon-choked lake and river systems that drain into Bristol Bay to the west.
The National Park Service estimates that perhaps 10 percent of those bears make their living in the nutrient-rich ecosystems of Katmai, giving the area the densest population of grizzly bears in the world.
More than any other locale, Katmai is the place where Homer's bear-viewing tour operators are making their living as well.
Much of the media coverage of the Cook Inlet brown bears shows one important thing beyond the beauty of the animals and their habitat Alaska Peninsula bear viewing is not a high-risk adventure.
"Bears are really predictable," said guide Chris Day. "And these bears are more tolerant than most bears. Bears that are exposed to people in the right manner" make great company. On the other hand, she added, improper behavior around bears will cause problems and is ultimately a threat to the survival of the bear.
Day summed up her philosophy in one word respect.
"Respect is the key word when it comes to bears," she said.
It is the attitude she tries to convey by providing, first and foremost, an educational experience for her clients.
"We hope that everyone leaves here as an ambassador for bears," Day said. "And not just for the bears but for the country they live in."
Over a dozen brown bears casually grazed the sedge flat within a quarter of a mile of bear viewing guide and pilot Gary Porter's group. The sun was shining. The Aleutian Range reared up, looming over the Katmai coast, which was awash in a lazy calm on a June morning.
The bears moved slowly in the green meadow, looking more like buffalo than one of North America's top predators. Despite some occasional frolicking, the scene was quite sedate. The bears politely ignored the nine people sitting at the meadow's edge. The nine people talked quietly, with the kind of respectfully casual demeanor you might find from a group of art lovers on an all-day tour of the Louvre. Only the clicking of cameras sporting giant telephoto lenses gave them away.
Then the huge male appeared. By his mere presence, this bear put all the bears near him into motion. The reaction was immediate, the way a stick stirs up an ant hill.
Most agitated of all, a female with a pair of yearling cubs wasted no time. She and her cubs broke into a full gallop and made straight for the bear viewing tour.
But instead of screams and chaos arising in the group, calm reigned, punctuated by a few quiet exclamations and a flurry of shutter noise.
Porter had rehearsed this moment for his clients on the floatplane dock in Homer earlier that morning.
"You just don't run," he'd said matter of factly, echoing most bear literature and Alaska park rangers. "You can't let them push you around."
The sow and her cubs passed within meters of Porter's group and ran on until they'd put the people between themselves and their pursuer. The big male, a brown bear Porter guessed might tip the scales at 1,300 pounds, gave a half-hearted chase, then pulled up short of the tourists and indifferently meandered toward the meadow's center.
A number of Homer-based companies offer single-day guided bear-viewing trips to Katmai National Park, flying their clients by floatplane from Beluga Lake to the other side of the inlet.
There are also several Homer companies that advertise boat-run bear-watching tours on the coast of lower Cook Inlet.
The tour booking agencies on the Homer Spit likewise carry all manner of bear-oriented brochures, from overnight trips to expensive fly-out lodges to one-day out-and-back boat trips to Tuxedni Bay.
The options range in price roughly from $300 to $500 for a single day of viewing bears. A little research will reveal a wide-variety of trips to a number of different locations.
Nearly every air charter operation on wheels or floats has a contingency for putting camera-toting customers into the brown bear country across Cook Inlet.
Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists estimate that there may be close to 250 grizzly bears on the Kenai Peninsula. By comparison, literature for Katmai National Park puts the number of grizzly bears on the Alaska Peninsula at between 2,000 and 3,000. The range for this extraordinary concentration of coastal brown bears extends several hundred miles south from Lake Clark National Park and encompasses everything from Cook Inlet and Shelikof Strait on the east to the salmon-choked lake and river systems that drain into Bristol Bay to the west.
The National Park Service estimates that perhaps 10 percent of those bears make their living in the nutrient-rich ecosystems of Katmai, giving the area the densest population of grizzly bears in the world.
More than any other locale, Katmai is the place where Homer's bear-viewing tour operators are making their living as well.
Much of the media coverage of the Cook Inlet brown bears shows one important thing beyond the beauty of the animals and their habitat Alaska Peninsula bear viewing is not a high-risk adventure.
"Bears are really predictable," said guide Chris Day. "And these bears are more tolerant than most bears. Bears that are exposed to people in the right manner" make great company. On the other hand, she added, improper behavior around bears will cause problems and is ultimately a threat to the survival of the bear.
Day summed up her philosophy in one word respect.
"Respect is the key word when it comes to bears," she said.
It is the attitude she tries to convey by providing, first and foremost, an educational experience for her clients.
"We hope that everyone leaves here as an ambassador for bears," Day said. "And not just for the bears but for the country they live in."
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