Lions and Tigers...No...Bears. Oh my!

ALASKA! Go. Best time, the end of July, through the first week in September. Best way to travel, car, camper van, ( Runamucka, RV. , if you must.) Why then? The vast swarms of mosquitoes mostly disappear and you can move about outside your transport. Route, go up on the coastal ferry, try it from Prince Rupert, B.C. because you see more of the wondrous coast and come back the Alcan Highway to Haines Junction and then take the Corsair Highway to Hyder, Alaska. I’m leaving details of this for a later blog. This is about bears, BIG BROWN BEAUTIFUL BEARS!!!

Marilyn and I are hiking about in a state park about ten miles north of Anchorage, the city which shelters about 75% of Alaska’s total population and 99% of the sane ones. We turn a twist in the trail and there stands a wolf! Well only 15% female wolf its owner tells us. So we pet her and join them. About five minutes later, Daisy blocks our path, and her owner frowns. ‘ Can’t go that way, there’s a bear in there and I’m not armed.’ Just who the hell does he think he’s fooling!

I voice my disbelief, but Daisy won’t let me proceed, so we take a fork, get to the water falls, take pictures and start back. This time we can take the shorter trail and dammed if we don’t pass a very large still steaming pile of bear doodoo! Bears! Armed hikers, on the city limits! That’s Alaska, but Hyder, Alaska is where the real bears are, or at least the best bear watching I could ever imagine.

Hyder rests fifty feet from the British Columbia border. The paved road ceases as you cross to Alaska, but the adventure begins!. There’s a great campground on this side, two or three nice hotels, a luxury inn, and a couple of really good restaurants which serve local game plus excellent French food. But over in Hyder, there’s nothing but some log cabins, a general store and the dirt road to Fish Creek and the largest glacier in Alaska.

The deeply cut creek has no fences, it’s just you and the bears with a few park rangers standing by. Since the creek is swarming with fat salmon, the grizzes ignore humans. You can sit on the edge of the creek and the bears are about fifty feet out and ten feet down. Fishing all the time, with cubs, yearlings and the three-year-olds who have been cut loose from momma, but don’t know how to deal with life without her. So they hang around and eat too. There was a pair there named Bill and Monica, for Clinton and his cigar loving lady. Brother and sister, they pawed and sham fought while some of the world’s most famous wild life photographers shot thousands of feet of tape and hundreds of photos. One told us, ‘ You can make a couple grand for one shot of two bears going at it, or a mother feeding a cub a salmon so big it can’t hold it, and if it could its teeth are too tiny to cut through the fish’s skin. It keeps the little buggers busy while momma fattens up for winter.’

There are often ten or so bears on the creek, but carefully spaced, territory is very important to these monsters. We saw them in July and they were thin, agile, and faster than a NFL line backer. But when we came back in September, they were so fat, they just laid in the stream and snapped as the fish went by. By late September, they eat all the dead salmon, but when things are good, they prefer the roe, then the head, and finally the skin. To watch one hook a claw in the gills of a two foot long fish, hold it out and take another claw and carefully slit it open, then daintily feast is a wondrous sight. Oh yes, the locals say ,’ Give a griz a chance to think and he'll make the right decisions 99 out of a 100 times. And when they’re on their hind legs, they’re harmless, not about to charge you. You can’t run or out climb em, so stand still and smile. Smile alot! One ranger turned around and one was less than ten feet away. He smiled big time. Bear smiled back and sauntered off. He went home and changed his pants. So it goes.