While in Alaska, we took a day trip to Lake Clark National Park for the purpose of photographing bears. Katmai is the iconic spot for bear watching, and by all accounts there are some amazing images to be captured there. However, we’ve also heard that it gets quite crowded with people, and that you only get a limited amount of time on the viewing platforms. We wanted to go somewhere a little less frantic.
Crescent Lake, like most of the park, can only be reached by small plane, and the number of people on the lake is quite limited. We flew in from Anchorage, landed on the lake, then transferred to the boat to begin our adventure. (Though, in truth, the plane ride was an adventure in and of itself!)
Crescent Lake is a glacial-fed lake that is crystal clear in early spring, but turns a vivid greenish-blue color in the summer due to glacial silt. After exiting the plane, we boarded a small pontoon boat to explore the lake and the upper portion of the Crescent River. This boat turned out to be an excellent platform for bear watching, allowing us to get close without risk to us or the bears.
Our day was pretty, cool but not cold, with low wind and partly cloudy skies, which we learned was extremely lucky. Days that are cold, overcast, rainy, and/or windy are more the norm. However, in terms of wildlife, the morning started off slowly. We only saw one bear, at a distance. We did see a lot of bald eagles and mergansers, though, which was fun.
We stopped around noon for lunch, and then headed back out on the water. The afternoon turned out to be a bonanza of wildlife sightings! The bears were the highlight of the day, and we lost count of the bears we saw. We were never quite sure which ones we had already seen in a different spot, but I’m sure the overall count got up into double digits. We also saw several more eagles, and even a very unusual (for this time of year) bull moose very briefly.
Our favorite bears of the day were two bears hunting for salmon in the same spot. These bears had distinctly different personalities and hunting methods, and we nicknamed them “frisky bear” and “chill bear.”
Chill bear simply waded around in the water, mostly submerged, at a very sedate pace. Every now and then, she would calmly bring a salmon up to her mouth with no indication of how she’d caught it. As we watched, she must have caught and eaten at least a dozen fish.
Frisky bear, on the other hand, charged around in the water with enormous energy, yet didn’t catch a single salmon the entire time we watched.
I was able to photograph the bears together, with one of my favorites showing both of their personalities in one shot:
At one point, they also got very close and had a roaring match, but were otherwise showed no hostility to each other and seemed to forgive and forget. Our best guess was that these may have been siblings.
Over the course of the afternoon, we saw many other interactions between bears. We watched a sow with a young cub for a while, and during that time two other bears came too close and got chased by the mom. In the aftermath, the cub seemed to need a little comforting.
During one of our breaks at the lake camp, we even saw a bear getting escorted off the premises by “security” – several “bear dogs” whose jobs are to chase bears away and prevent negative interactions with humans at the camp.
At the end of our day, as we were heading back to the camp to get on a plane for the flight back to Anchorage, we had one final bear come out of the brush and trot along the bank beside our boat for a few minutes, before disappearing into the trees.
