Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
You just make a reservation at Bald Mountain Air with Gary's wife, Jeannie, drive to Be-
luga Lake in Homer, and climb on board. You don't have to camp out, either, it's over and
back the same day, always a plus for me, since I did my share of moose hunting when I
was a kid and have sworn an oath never to sleep beneath a tent fly again.
It's a ninety-minute flight, and on the way we saw no less than five pods of gray
whales. There were spectacular views of the Barren Islands, Cape Douglas, Afognak,
Shuyak and Kodiak en route. We landed in a delightful little bay on the southern shore of
the Aleutian Peninsula protected by a miniature archipelago and steep mountains still
layered with ash from the explosion of Mount Katmai in 1912. Some of those drifts of ash
had bear tracks running through them. A double waterfall cascaded down one mountain,
and fog played tag with the sun. We ate our lunch on board a sixty-five foot yacht, piled
into a skiff and headed for shore.
And bears. Grizzly bears, the undisputed mammoth of the ursine world. Lots of them.
I did kind of wonder what I was getting into. When I was a kid growing up in Alaska,
my mother said that bears were cantankerous animals that would just as soon eat you as
look at you. Stay away from bears, she said. Okay, Mom, I said, and I did, too.
Now here I was, sitting down so I couldn't run, in hipboots so I couldn't run very fast
anyway, armed only with a camera. It didn't help that one bear tracked us from the skiff to
where we would sit. He was a young bear, Gary said recently booted out by his mother,
and he looked skinny. And hungry.
Another sow with two three-year old cubs could be seen far up the curving beach,
steadily approaching. A boar was napping, a mountain of fat and fur sprawling on the
sand. Others fished the creek, rearing up on their hind legs and splashing down hard on
their front legs, startling the fish into moving so they could see them and catch them. And
eat them.
Goldie, the bear who had followed us up the beach, was a pitiful fisher. He chased after
everything, never caught anything, the salmon simply snapped their tails in scorn. The
collared bear, on the other hand, was so obliging as to catch and eat a fish right in front of
us; she ripped that fish apart like it was Kleenex, there were salmon eggs flying every-
where. The seagulls, hovering hopefully nearby, were pleased.
