Katmai National Park / Brooks Falls

I just visited Katmai National Park (the Brooks Falls/Camp part) on my latest Alaska trip.

This is actually the 3rd time I booked this trip, and the 3rd time is indeed the charm. Initially I looked at the poster at Wrangell-St Elias National Park visitor center of other national parks in Alaska on my 2019 trip, and decided that I want to visit Katmai next. So I booked it for the 2020 July 4th long weekend, and had to cancel it for obvious reasons. Then I booked it again for last year’s (2023) July 4th long weekend, but had to cancel it for other reasons. Finally I booked it again this year and made it. It also turns out that avoiding the July 4th long weekend made things (slightly) easier and cheaper.

I booked the day trip from Anchorage, via Katmai Air. The day trip includes roundtrip flights between Anchorage and King Salmon, operated by Aleutian Airways with their Saab 2000 turboprop planes, then Seaplane from King Salmon to Brooks Camp operated by Katmai Air (from what I could tell, the “runway” on Naknek River used by the seaplanes are still considered part of the King Salmon airport).

This is the (broken, for some reason) GPS tracks of the roundtrip seaplane flights rendered on Google Earth:

And this is the de Havilland Canada DHC-3 Otter with registration number N491K we took on the outbound (for inbound it’s a smaller de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver:

Brooks Falls is world famous as it’s in the “bear country”. Here the grizzly bears hunt for salmons on the river, including the famous “standing on top of fall to wait for salmons to jump into its mouth” strategy (but also many other strategies), in order to prepare for their winter hibernation. This is also where the annual Fat Bear Week takes place 😄

The viewing platform at the fall is very close to the bears, as you can see from this panorama:

But a long range lens or binoculars will still come in handy to help you see the bears clearer/with more details. After canceled our 2020 trip I bought a 600mm-equivalent lens during Black Friday, and it’s all destined for this day (the vast majority of the photos in the album were taken with that lens, though not all the photos I zoomed all the way in).

We saw a cub climb up a spruce tree to the top, with spruce needles all over its face:

We saw 2 bears fighting:

We saw 3 bears (likely a mama and her 2 cubs) sharing a salmon they caught:

We saw people angling in the river near the bears:

We saw a bear standing up in the river with tongue out, like a dog:

We also saw beautiful magpies near the river:

And of course, we saw a lot of bears catching, eating, and tearing apart salmons.

I took 400+ photos that day, and picked 100+ into this album. See also this fediverse thread: