Last Monday was the day! A long awaited trip with a new type of transport to cross off our list: A floatplane!
Today we had our own floatplane – (let’s call it Jenny), pilot Jerry and bearviewing guide Tyler! Destination of our trip: Katmai National Park, which is located on the mainland – just accross Kodiak island.
We checked in at the floatplane harbor and received a pair of rubber boots reaching all the way up to our hips. This will allow us to cross almost every small creek in Katmai National Park.
We got ourselves into the small plane and floated towards the runway (or rather waterway). Jerry then put the throttle up, Jenny accelerated, lifting her nose up. I felt that it takes much more power to get a plane out of the water, but we did it 🙂
Jerry took us on a scenic flight across Kodiak island towards north west. There was rarely any mountain he couldn’t name. We passed a native village called Port Lion, some fishing huts and then later crossed the sea passage over to Katmai National Park. Here the mountains got taller – a lot of them featuring white, snow-covered peaks. We also started to see greyish-brown patches of ash – an indication of what we were heading to: The Valley of 10’000 Smokes! This valley was our special request when we booked the trip. It was created 1912 when volcano Novarupta erupted as the second most violent eruption in North America in the 20th century. The amount of ash covering the adjacent valley was so huge, that ash layers ended up reaching a thickness of up to 200m! While during the last 100 years all the thousands of fumaroles stopped (hence the origin of the name), creeks and rivers quickly carved into the layers of ash, creating spectacular canyons!
Unfortunately on our approach, our destination seemed to be hiding below a cover of clouds. We flew some rounds until Jerry found a small opening in the cover – he took the chance and we dove in! Underneath appeared a orange to brown-greyish landscape. It looked like we were on a different planet like Mars. We flew relatively close to ground to avoid the clouds and curved around to maximize the number of canyon flyovers!
After the valley, we flew over evergreen, completely wild landscapes with vegetation and grass following lines of current and former river beds. We were also able to spot two Moose on the ground! On our way back, we overflew a last mountain pass until we ended up back at the Katmai coast at Hallo Bay. This bay is famous for coastal brownbears to gather and feed on grass or fish for Salmon.
Grizzlies are brownbears located inlands. Kodiak bears are also brownbears but located along the coasts (hence also called coastal brownbears). Kodiak bears or coastal brownbears feed much more on protein rich salmon than grizzlies and hence grow even bigger than their otherwise identical colleages! Kodiak bears are known to be the largest bears!
We landed on a river of this delta and could see what was waiting for us as we counted already 8 bears wandering through the landscape. After we touched down, we left the plane together with Tyler and started walking. It took no more than 30m to meet the first bear. We walked in parallel and than kneeled down. The bear didn’t mind us at all. It continued on feeding, looking up from time to time and even came a little bit closer. We continued our walk along a river where we saw a couple other bears. Again we kneeled down on the ground and let the bear decide on how close they wanted to approach us. One of them walked down the river towards us… Only at around 5m distance it started to go around us. What a feeling! We started to move again and noticed the bear actually following us. You should not walk away from a bear in your back, so we stopped again and kneeled down. This time the bear approached us to 5m and then just sat down watching and what looked like enjoying the view. We did as well and were amazed by how comfortable the bear female felt so close to us. After a couple of minutes he even layed down and took a little nap. 10 minutes later we decided to move on towards the beach – just after that, the bear seemed to be bored as well, heading off into another direction.
On the low-tide beach a couple of bears were digging for clams. Among those a family with 3 cubs and a couple or really big male bores. We went all out to take a closer look at the family. As we came closer, we figured out that they were chased around by a big male bear. At another spot, an even bigger bear was napping on a sandbank. We knew the high tide was coming in, so we decided to wait until his bank was flooded and he had to stand up. Meanwhile we watched another bear trying to fish (the salmon apparently didn’t yet start to run up the river here).
Our plan played out… A couple of minutes later, the napping bear was on his feet – in the water. We as well found ourselves in a weird situation. We had to move back from the rising water, but behind us was the fishing bear now. On the side was the really big male bear and on the other side was another bear moving in. For a moment all of them watched us from around 6m away giving us the feeling, that they wanted to learn hunting humans in packs. Fortunately, as the big guy started moving towards land, it also scared away the other bears such that we were able to walk in parallel.
In the meantime our float plane flew from the river over to the sea and landed a couple of dozens or meters from the beach. We waded towards it, got in and off we were! The scenic flight back took another hour, this time we also received some snacks and hot coffee! We were able to see the place were former Port Lions was located and got washed away by the tsunami in 1964. Furthermore we were able to locate Fort Abercrombie were we would camp for another night!
We landed back in the floatplane bay at Kodiak and were super happy that we booked this trip! Watching the landscape and the Valley of 10’000 Smokes from air as well as getting so close to bears (basically just trusting them to be nice with us) was an unforgettable experience!
