My Everyday Photos

In Alaska they like to refer to grizzly bears as brown bears which is fine but it can get confusing because sometimes our black bears are brown but they are certainly not grizzly. The bears spend much of their time digging in the soil with their powerful claws. We learned that they eat a plant called Eskimo potato. This is also the plant that Christopher McCandless from the non-fiction book, Into the Wild, ate and according to the author, its seeds may have been what eventually killed him.

We saw several grizzly/brown bears in Denali. There was one that we saw once or twice a day because it was hanging out in the Savage River area pretty much all of the time. The trails in that area were closed because of the bear. Near as we could tell, the bear was just enjoying entertaining the tourists and photographers and making the caribou scamper occasionally. Sometimes the tourists and photographers were too close and a park service employee asked them to scamper out of the way so the bear could cross the road. I made sure to keep other tourists and photographers between me and the bear.

These photos are all of the Savage River bear.

Just hanging around

Caribou just hanging around

I wonder if I can scare those caribou

Let’s go hang out with the rest of the group

Does this angle make my butt look big?

I am not nearly as close as it might appear

When the bear moved over to the base of the hill below the road I wondered if it was safe.

Those claws are mostly used for digging

There was a park service employee next to me during this time.

Nap time

Is that a tourist I smell?

Stop and scratch

This bear caused a bear jam with traffic in both directions including buses. It had to move pretty quickly to get beyond the vehicles and then make a mad dash across the road.

This is the only bear that was truly too close to us. We were on foot when it came calmly out of the willows to our right and then walked up the road ahead of us. It disappeared around the corner and we were hoping it was moving on as that was the direction we needed to go to return to the car. But no, it turned around and came back towards us before disappearing into the trees on the left side of the photo. It was nerve-wracking to think about walking there. Luckily a dump truck came by and the driver gave us a ride. We saw others walking there and nothing bad happened. At the overlook near our car, we saw that the bear had gone down to the river and hikers down there had scampered away. Ken had bear spray and the bear never was threatening to us but still, we didn’t want to become statistics. This photo was made with a small point and shoot camera while the ones above were made with a long telephoto lens.