Thirty-six wild grizzlies were fishing for salmon and arguing over riverside real estate within a stone`s throw of us at McNeil River Falls. Like their human counterparts, each grizzly seemed to have its own idea of how best to catch fish. Some yawned at the top of the falls, waiting for salmon to jump near their mouths. Others used paws and claws to trap fish against the rocks. Still others swatted fish out of rapids or dived open-mouthed into pools.
During the peak salmon run in July and August, these falls generally are viewed as having the Earth`s largest concentration of grizzlies within a single field of view.
My wife, Barbara, and I were at the McNeil River Game Sanctuary, the last of three stops on our Alaskan bear safari last summer. The spectacle of so many great bears, unfenced and cavorting, was more powerful than any of our previous wildlife experiences.
Among the large mamals of North America, only we and the bears walk with plantigrade feet, meaning the whole soles touch the earth. From a distance, a standing bear appears remarkably human. Reports of ”Bigfoot” suspiciously overlap bear habitat.
Francis Parkman`s classic, ”The Oregon Trail,” published in 1849, predicted that a time would come when the plains of America ”would be a grazing country, the buffalo give place to tame cattle, farmhouses be scattered along the water courses and wolves, bears and Indians be numbered among the things that was.”
During the 19th Century, at least 50,000 grizzlies were spread across the American West, from California to Kansas. Today, fewer than 1,000 seldom seen and officially designated ”threatened” grizzlies remain in the lower 48 states. Alaska still has about 40,000.
But to see the bears in the wild, particularly their annual salmon orgy on the vast Alaska Peninsula southwest of Anchorage, can be an expensive proposition and a logistical nightmare.
Once, we had to make a 500-mile detour back through Anchorage via four scheduled and chartered flights, to link locations within 100 miles of each other. But the results were worth it. We were able to compare how the federal government manages bear viewing in Katmai National Park with how the state does it at McNeil River Game Sanctuary and how private enterprise handles it at Chenik Brown Bear Photography Camp.
We had decided to center our attention on the coastal bears of the Alaska Peninsula for two reasons. First, inland grizzlies tend to be solitary and less interesting to watch. Coastal grizzlies of the same subspecies, often called Alaskan brown bears, gather in groups beside falls that salmon try to jump during their summer run.
The coastal bears` larger size is due to their greater protein intake and natural selection from eons of competition for the prime fishing spots.
The second reason had to do with access and close approach. Barbara and I already had been inland to Denali National Park, 200 miles north of Anchorage, just off the Anchorage-Fairbanks Highway. Because visitors cannot drive private vehicles through Denali, most people travel by free shuttle bus. On several visits, we spotted single grizzlies at a distance through our vehicle window.
A new park ruling prohibits intentional approach on foot closer than one- quarter mile. Although Denali is a relatively inexpensive and convenient place to see moose, caribou, wolf, icy peaks and lots of people in buses, the coast beats it for bear-viewing, paws down.
Our first stop was Katmai, an isolated national park without private vehicle access. We arrived by float plane from the nearest village of King Salmon, and set up our tent in a full campground where we had made
reservations months before. After locking our food in the elevated camp cache, we went to find the bears. We didn`t have to go far.
Just beyond the log buildings of Brooks Lodge (booked for months in advance, but open to the public for excellent meals), the banks of the Brooks River were alive with nearly 100 bear viewers and fishermen. As two ecstatic anglers were reeling in an arm`s-length salmon and an equally big rainbow, a ranger appeared and gave them an order I couldn`t hear. Their smiles vanished and they cut their lines.
Had they broken regulations? No. They were following a park rule: Release your fish if a bear approaches. This time there were three. In the lead was a 600-pound mother, followed by two yearling cubs who swaggered with the cocky uncertainty of new members of a street gang. They hardly acknowledged human presence, and the regulations are designed to keep things that way. If Katmai grizzlies connect humans as a source of fish, fishing and bear-viewing alike will be in big trouble.
Bear and tourist visitation to the river have more than tripled in the past decade. The campground and lodge hold about 120 visitors, but an increasing number of people beat the overnight quotas by chartering 40-minute flights from King Salmon to come for the day. While we were there, an article in the San Francisco Chronicle quoted two Katmai rangers, three fishing guides, one outdoor journalist and five tourists as declaring, word for word: ”an accident waiting to happen.”
At the time of our visit we were told that the last injury from a bear attack had been in 1967, but days later a ranger had an arm mauled after she surprised the same mother and cubs we had seen with the fishermen.
A surge of salmon
During our visit, commercial fishermen in nearby ocean waters had gone on strike as salmon prices dropped. Katmai bears and sportfishermen normally catch only the ”escapement,” the tiny percentage allowed to get by nets near the mouth of the river. Unknown to us, the nets had just been lifted because of the strike.
We had the platform virtually to ourselves as a surge of salmon welled upstream. Up to 10 were in the air at once, jumping over the falls toward the mouths of nine waiting bears, who at first missed every one. They were as confounded by the surprise feast as a dog thrown a handful of tennis balls.
After the strike was settled the next day, the bears stood in the river as quietly as logs, while the surface remained unbroken.
Barbara and I packed our sleeping bags and hopped a float plane to King Salmon, from where we took a scheduled flight to Anchorage, another to Homer, and yet another float plane across Cook Inlet over Augustine Volcano to Chenik Brown Bear Photography Camp on the same peninsula where we`d started.
Rustically chic Chenik Lodge with its gourmet meals and professionally led natural history walks pleasantly blurs the border between wilderness appreciation and comfort.
The owner, Mike McBride, was having tea with us when he spotted a lone bear approaching. I had my camera ready as the large male ambled over and rolled playfully in the foliage 50 feet away. Here, as we would find at McNeil, our closeness of approach was a judgment call by an experienced guide rather than fixed yardage in a rule book, yet we felt considerably safer than in the national parks.
Guides led us through a landscape that they loved and understood in the wholly wild setting surrounding the lodge. We visited a fox den where two kits played at our feet and explored tide pools as bald eagles swooped overhead. Mike and Diane McBride run Chenik as an outreach of their Kachemak Bay Wilderness Lodge. Their goal at Chenik is to provide the best possible experience, regardless of cost. At $2,250 per person per five-day stay with a limit of just six guests, Chenik may not be for everyone.
Our stay at Chenik completed, Mike took us 9 miles in a Boston Whaler to the McNeil River, where we checked our permits in with Larry Aumiller, a biologist-guide for the Department of Fish and Game. He had his cabin, but visitors stay in tents and use a cook shack for all food storage and meals. Although bears frequently walked by camp, we knew the ultimate experience was a mile away at the only falls for many miles around. At the height of the salmon run, more than 40 bears may be at the falls, and 90 may be in the general area. Our sighting of 36 at once was not uncommon.
With an orgy of salmon and a minimum of people, McNeil is an ideal situation to view bears, if you win the lottery. Each spring a drawing takes place for 10 people a day to visit in July and August. In 1991 only 140 of 1,700 applicants won permits. Winners still have to plan their own food, camping gear and transport via float plane.
While a few McNeil and Chenik visitors get a prime, close and relatively safe bear-viewing experience better than that in any national park, Katmai and Denali do have the advantage of access for thousands.
That matter of conscience
I have mixed feelings about grizzly viewing coming into its own as a new genre of Alaskan adventure travel. I could not in good conscience promote it unless I believed that the effect of more visitors could be offset by public awareness about the plight and rightful place of bears in the modern world. Humans historically have eliminated bears wherever they have come in contact with them through hunting for sport, personal safety, protection of livestock or sale of body parts for exotic Oriental medicines.
The McNeil River bears may be in trouble. Just 3 miles from McNeil and 6 from Chenik is the Paint River, where salmon never have run because they couldn`t jump a 35-foot waterfall. A $2.6-million fish ladder now is under construction on land where hunting is permitted. This new source of fish will lure bears used to the harmless approach of humans out of the protected area. Not only may individual bears be shot at close range like fish in a barrel, but also the great concentration at McNeil may begin to disperse.
The project is being undertaken with state and federal money by an association of commercial fishermen to increase their take of salmon, even though the present catch has proved too large for canneries to market in recent years. Tons of salmon were dumped in the sea in 1991 and unsold cans were donated to the former Soviet Union. The state game board voted down a proposal to protect bears around the Paint River late in 1991. Only increased public pressure will save the grandest recurring convocation of land predators on the planet.
”There is a need for a gentler man than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear,” naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote in the `60s. Grizzly viewing as tourism has been able to come into its own only as humans have begun to give up the urge to dominate nature and recognize the great bear as symbolic of the natural condition of much of North America. Where grizzlies still roam, minimum-impact camping takes on a whole new meaning. Instead of keeping a camp clean to promote an abstract ideal of a better environment, a camper handles food and trash appropriately to preserve his own life, a short- term example of what environmental preservation is all about.
Tourism, properly managed, has the potential to reverse the downward spiral of the great bear. Nearly 1,000 are killed each year in Alaska. My hope is that the sheer number of people who want to see wild bears will prove the economic validity of ecotourism and help protect them as well as the large unspoiled tracts of land they require for their survival.
