A beary special holiday!
The lodge is run by a team dedicated to their environment and the wildlife which inhabits it. The animals are recorded year on year, which makes for some great stories about the bears you will be lucky enough to see. The guides run a variety of trips, and it’s fast paced, but you don’t come all this way to sit on the deck and read your book!
We started with a gentle cruise of the inlet, and how years ago glaciers carved out the landscape and filled the deep inlet with clear green water. The towering waterfalls are spectacular, and the curious seals popped up their heads to welcome us. If you are really lucky, you may see a shy black bear exploring the shoreline, or a grizzly turning over rocks looking for shell fish.
After a quick lunch, we hopped on another boat, venturing into the grassy estuary. When the bears wake up from hibernation, they are hungry. They find berries and eat sedge grass until the salmon arrive. The estuary still has plenty of sedge grass and this is where we saw our first grizzly of the trip. The brown hump in the distance mooched and munched its way around the food. From there it just got better and better as we headed to ‘the stands’.
The wooden stands are like bird hides on stilts and they sit on the salmon spawning channel. This is where you wait till the bears fancy their next meal. Not long after we had settled in, a mum arrived with two cubs which had been born last year. After she had checked that there were no big males around, mum concentrated on eating, whilst the cubs played, fought and generally messed around. Everything about the bears is incredible, their teeth and jaws, the massive claws, the way they shake the water off their fur, how they snorkel but most of them leave their cute furry ears above the water. Three mums, seven cubs and a lone youth turned up at this bear fast food joint, thwarting the journey of the salmon heading up their spawning channel. The enthusiastic guides were with us all the time; they took photos, recorded sightings and whispered what they knew about each bear.
Not that it was a competition, or that I was keeping count, but on day one, I saw 23 bears all without binoculars, day two it was 26. I lost count of my eagles, but there must have been over 50 just on our last boat trip. Pine trees almost looked decorated for Christmas with shiny white baubles, which were actually bald eagles. I love these amazing birds, they swoop, and circle, eat the bears’ left overs, sometimes fly down in front of your kayak and catch a fish.
AT the end of a tiring but magical day with nature, each evening you sit down with the lead guide and work out your schedule for the next day. There is so much to choose from; kayaking, estuary tours, wildlife tracking, rain forest walks, the stands and marine life tours. We didn’t opt for the marine life tour, but one group did and were so lucky. They saw orca, dolphins, and seals and hump back whales breaching and feeding. Their pictures were like a TV documentary. Next time……
There is so much more that I could write. The staff are great, food wonderful but it’s the bears who are the star of the show. Just flick through my pictures and if you want to hear more about bears, pick up the phone!
