Katmai
Park 12 | June 2019
Part + Park 2 (of 4) on our epic adventure to Alaska.
Katmai National Park is pretty close to how I’ve always imagined paradise: Mountains scraping the heavens, sunshine dancing on the water, and humans coexisting peacefully with animals we generally fear.
Our experience here was sublime, but the process of securing our experience here was less so. Katmai is, to put it mildly, very popular. Reservations for Katmai’s lodge open a full 18 months in advance and sell out in seconds. The campground only allows for 60 people to camp each night and those spots also go in seconds. Reservations were set to open approximately six months before our trip and as it happened, that ended up also being the day that our friends (who were also going on the trip) were moving into their new home. I don’t fully recall how it all happened, but I was the person who ended up on my laptop in a coffee shop close to their new place, practically sweating as I prepared to battle for a camping spot for the six of us. The clock clicked to 10am and I scrambled to grab spots for us and get them in the cart. I ended up with spots for all six of us, just a couple days off from our preferred dates. To me, that was a win!
Acquiring campsites were just step one, however. Katmai is unreachable by car. The next thing on our list was to find and align flights for the six of us from Anchorage to King Salmon Airport, where we would disembark and transfer ourselves and all our gear on to a small float plane which would fly us the remainder of the way to Brooks Camp. The float plane options were limited to a couple small companies. Each required us to submit our personal weight + the weight of every piece of luggage we were bringing with us… numbers which we then discovered would be cross-checked in person before we boarded the plane to ensure that weight was evenly distributed.
And so after all this, it felt pretty unbelievable by the time we successfully arrived in King Salmon, boarded the float plane, and found ourselves flying over the gorgeous landscape of the Alaska Peninsula. We had a smooth landing on Naknek Lake next to the mouth of Brooks River and were stunned to see several enormous bears ambling down the beach. This was just the beginning.
There are a couple things happening simultaneously that contribute to Katmai’s magic: One, the Alaska Peninsula brown bear, sometimes called the coastal brown bear (they are the same species as inland grizzlies but are much larger due differences in habitat and diet), is singularly focused on eating salmon. Two, there are strict rules around Brooks Camp to not carry anything with you that is scented — no snacks, no lip balm, nothing — if you are outside of Brooks Lodge or the campground, which is surrounded by an electric fence. When taken together — bears with little interest in food other than salmon and humans who take particular care not to carry anything that might tempt a bear to think twice — you create an otherworldly type of place where its possible to be in relatively close proximity to the bears, without needing to carry bear spray (it’s still officially recommended) or being terribly afraid you would be attacked. Of course, to be very clear, these are wild animals and anything is possible, but we found that with appropriate caution and awareness, this was a very special place to observe the personalities and habits of these animals.
And observe them we did. We witnessed a mother bear nursing her cubs close to the lower river platform bridge and watched endless brown bear politics and negotiations taking place around the best spots to catch salmon under Brooks Falls. J finally got to see the sight he’d long dreamed of: A bear catching a salmon in its mouth and eating it in a river. We squealed over the cuteness of the dark brown “baby baby” bears (those who had just been born weeks earlier) as they clung to their mother’s side and were sobered by the cruelty and intimidation we saw in different bear interactions.
We spent four long, sunshine soaked days here, including a day trip to the Valley of 10,000 Smokes and a June 26 birthday celebration for the ages. It’s wild, but three of us in the group — me, J, and one of his best friends from high school — all have the same birthday. We have dubbed ourselves the June 26 Birthday Club and have spent the day together a few times over the years (we’ve even been carded at Beau Joe’s in Colorado when we all tried to cash in on the free birthday dessert special and shocked the wait staff when our IDs confirmed it really was each of our birthdays), but this was probably our most epic celebration to date. We stayed up late sipping on whiskey from our mugs as the light slowly dimmed over Naknek Lake, reminiscing about our favorite memories from the trip thus far.
All in all, Katmai is place that continues to live large in our mind’s eye, forever imbued with a sense of wonder, respect, and a fair bit of magic.
Pictured below:
Brooks Campground, positioned next to the Brooks River and on the shores of Naknek Lake.
Alaska Peninsula brown bears everywhere one looks — this was one of the wildest nature experiences we’ve ever had.
Valley of 10,000 Smokes.
