Of the nine grizzly bears I have seen in my life, I encountered all of them in the last year or so, and each one made my heart stop, if only for a moment, when I first saw it.
The first time I saw a grizzly bear was off the side of the road in Yellowstone last summer. I was riding shotgun in a van full of seven teenagers (not as dangerous as grizzlies but arguably more volatile). My co-leader of this trip drove our 15-passenger Ford van, affectionately named Babushka, along the road as traffic slowed and came to a stop. “We’re only stopping for a bear,” I’d warned, half kidding, an hour earlier as we drove into the park. Well, now we were stopping.
Tucked into the woods just off the left side of the two-lane road was a mother grizzly bear and her cub. A protective mama bear can be super dangerous to humans if she thinks you’re a threat, but these two were ignoring the growing number of people staring at them.
Human spectators were running along the road from where they’d abandoned their vehicles farther back. Some of the closer gawkers were jumping out of their cars to get a better look, including our teenagers, who had hopped out of the van and started running across the road despite our reprimands not to get too close. It was a mother grizzly, for God’s sake, didn’t you listen to anything we told you about bears?
I looked as long as I could, until the mother led her baby farther into the woods beyond their enraptured audience’s view, and I held the image of that bear in my head for months afterward. She was the wildest animal I’d ever seen.
Now we’re in Alaska, our first night of camping in the front country of Kenai Fjords National Park. Suddenly, two young grizzly bears run across the gravel road next to our campsite. It happens so fast that when one of our friends looks past me and points I barely have time to register the word coming out of her mouth as her eyes widen: “BEARS.”
My boyfriend, our four friends, and I all freeze, forkfuls of our couscous dinner paused halfway between bowl and mouth.
As we stand frozen, painfully aware of the fact that no one is holding bear spray and it, therefore, must still be in the back of our rental minivan 20 feet away, the bears disappear into the trees.
A couple in a large RV, the kind with a photo of a friendly golden retriever over the door, drives past a minute later. “Did you see those black bears?”
Judging by the rate my heart is pounding, those were definitely grizzly bears. Also, I’ve taken enough online bear identification quizzes in the past few years to feel confident enough to spot a grizzly’s telltale shoulder hump. The couple is unconvinced—surely if they were two young grizzlies, the mother wouldn’t be far behind?—but they pull their RV back around a few minutes later. The campground host apparently confirmed our grizzly suspicions.
We make it through several more days in Alaska without seeing any bears, though there’s no shortage of other wildlife; whales, sea lions, sea otters, puffins, and more captivate us on our boat tour of Kenai Fjords. We drive up to visit a friend in Fairbanks, who grills up delicious salmon and buffalo he and his brothers had caught and hunted.
The next morning, we’re up early, dragging our freshly-showered bodies into our increasingly-disgusting rental minivan to drive back south to Denali National Park.
The weather for Denali is not looking good, but our spirits are high. It’s Alaska, right? We’ve had unbelievably gorgeous weather on our trip so far, with blue skies and t-shirt temperatures greeting us every day. We can handle a little rain.
If it wasn’t obvious, this is the part where I’m foreshadowing. It absolutely poured, and we could not handle it.
But first, let’s back up. We had dropped by the Denali visitor’s center the morning before our anticipated backcountry section to grab permits for the 2-night trip we had planned. Denali is divided up into 87 sections called units, 41 of which have restrictions on how many people are allowed to backpack there on a given day. Given that the park stretches for six million acres, one unit is also tens of thousands of acres itself. That means that if you’re the only group backpacking through a particular section of wilderness, it can feel very empty of humans.
And, it turns out, very full of other things.
We chose our unit, the only five people venturing into that particular sector of the sprawling map for the next two days. Permits and extra bear canisters in hand, we headed out to spend the night in Fairbanks.
Now we’re back, frame packs full of gear and food we’d doled out in the parking lot of a Fred Meyer the night prior. A dark green transit bus pulls up to the curb, the only option for backpackers to catch a ride deeper into the park along the 92-mile Denali Park Road.
It’s starting to mist by the time the bus drops us off at the nascence of a stream off the side of the road: our starting point. We hop out, the bus pulls away, and suddenly the five of us are alone.
Our bushwhacking begins in high spirits, cheered by my boyfriend’s recounting the events of Inception from start to finish in plenty of detail. The rain picks up and turns parts of the sloping hillside into mud pits, and a particularly sketchy scramble across unsteady rocks put us all on edge.
Still, we press forward, listening to our own breathing and learning very quickly how slowly a mile can pass when you’re traversing ankle-breaking, trail-less hills, fighting brush the entire way.
An hour or two in, we’ve made it far enough into the hills that the road has disappeared from view, and we stop to catch our breaths and take some snacks out of a bear canister. Throughout our hike, we’ve been calling out to invisible wildlife the way the video we had to watch at the visitor’s center instructed us to: “Hey, bear! Coming through, moose!”
As we pause to eat, each person surveying a different hillside for movement, some appears: two caribou off in the distance. Their antlers rise majestically from their heads, silhouetted against the heavy mist before they eventually notice us and canter away.
Not long after that, a group of mule deer bounds across the same hill the caribou had disappeared from. Curiously, they turn around and bound back towards their origin point, then back in the opposing direction again. We figure they’re wary of us, skittish and not sure where to run to, though it seems weird that they’re not flat out running away.
We pack up our bags and continue moving uphill, and 20 minutes later we find out what the deer were actually scared of.
I don’t remember who saw the bears first, just that suddenly they’re coming towards us not far up the hill from where we’ve just been hiking. A mother grizzly and her two cubs, adorably small but undoubtedly wild animals, following us. Even after they’ve seen us and realized we likely aren’t some strange-looking caribou, they keep coming.
Later, we would speculate that they’d probably smelled us from afar and gotten curious about what we were—presumably they hadn’t encountered too many humans in these six million acres. So they found us and wanted to know what exactly they’d found.
As they advance, the pit in my stomach morphs into a clenched fist of unease. “I think it’s time to start making noise,” I say to our group, who are all doing a great job of moving quickly forward away from the bears—quickly, but not running.
HEY, BEAR. WHOA, BEAR. We’re yelling now, and those of us with trekking poles wave them around above our heads as we hike, glancing behind us. Our loud calls mask the nerves that bubble up when three grizzly bears are following you two miles into the Alaskan wilderness, half a football field behind and moving much, much faster than your average pace over the last few hours. That’s what I will remember most from this encounter: the grace and speed with which the bears amble over the landscape, so clearly at home in this wild place.
Finally, finally, they pause. My hand, which started out on top of the bear spray can at my hip, has now taken the can out of its holster and is holding it out in front of me. I’ve never used this thing, but dammit if my adrenaline couldn’t guide my thumb to the trigger now, ready to flip the safety off at a moment’s notice. But they’ve stopped, and we cruise over the crest of the hill, over the other side and now thoroughly aware of just how wild this place is.
The rest of the day is relatively smooth, though being on high alert for bears is exhausting. I amuse myself by weaving my wildlife yelling into songs (Hey now, you’re a bear, get your game on, go play. Hey now, you’re a bear, get the show on, get paid. All as loudly as possible, of course.)
The weather hasn’t been too bad for the most part, though we’re all still rather wet—I feel soggy two layers deep below my sopping rain jacket. We make camp in a flat clearing next to a tributary of a larger stream we can see in the distance. It’s perfect moose territory, and as we explore the area we find dozens of hoof prints in the mud. An old set of antlers on the ground marks the way to where we’ve scoped out a spot to leave our bear cans for the night.
Our bodies cool now that we’ve stopped hiking, and I shiver through a warm, soggy dinner of Thai peanut ramen. (Hot chocolate helps.) Exhausted and thinking of bears, we finally settle into our tents to sleep.
—
We wake up to rain pitter-pattering on the roof of the tent. Noooo. My sleeping bag is so warm, and the inside of the tent is remarkably dry, and there’s no way my boots have dried from yesterday’s trek.
It takes a monumental effort to leave the tent and go get breakfast. How quickly one can go from warm and dry, to cold and…not.
Thankfully, our group is all on the same page: we’re ready to get out of the backcountry, given the likelihood of another big animal encounter and the fact that the weather can now be classified as “pouring.” It’s wet, our remaining dry things are unlikely to last another night, and the whole situation is approaching “miserable” on the way to becoming “unsafe.”
So we hike out, striking a path through trees and brush that fight back, walking on slick stones through streams where we can and fighting up thickly-layered hillsides when we can’t.
A few hours of this is easily the most tiring backpacking I’ve ever done. We only ever got four miles from the road, and yet finding our way back to it, through more unfamiliar territory filled with countless wildlife we can’t see, is daunting.
And exhilarating—in a weird way, I’m still having fun. But exhausting nonetheless, as our yells break the silence of a drizzly, grey day.
After miles of uphill, we reach the top of a ridge, and the mossy green landscape sprawls before us. The road finally feels within reach. We stop for a few minutes of rest and photo-taking next to a dropped antler, grateful for the wide visibility.
After a few minutes enjoying open landscape and flat-ish ground, we begin our descent, our wildlife calls a bit more cheerful with the end so close. Someone spies a white spot in the distance—an animal, maybe? But the white stays stagnant, so maybe it’s just a rock.
As we get closer, the white splotch morphs into what could be an antler on the opposing hillside next to the stream we’re following. The trees rooted along the side of this stream stretch their branches at us and claw at our packs, putting up a hell of a fight. Eventually, we have to make a decision: up through the thick brush? Or take the low route through the slick rocks and trees, fighting up and down river beds?
We go high. Tall grass swishes as we pass through it, obscuring our vision. Bears have clearly bedded down here; we pass several matted-down napping spots, perfectly grizzly-sized, and recent—one even has a fresh pile of poop.
Finally, we get close enough to see that the white thing in the distance is, in fact, a caribou antler. Then: “I think it’s moving,” someone says. We all stop.
Lying sprawled across the remains of a caribou is a fat grizzly bear, clearly dazed after gorging himself on his lunch. If we had taken the low route through the stream, we would have hiked right by him, perhaps not even realizing it. What can be more dangerous than a mother grizzly? A grizzly protecting his kill.
Please appreciate this pixelated phone picture of the bear starfished across his caribou meal.
We hike quickly after that, thrashing through the grass and scaring up a final bear in the process. He’s no more than 25 yards down the hill from us, and as we’re yelling and hiking he leaps up out of the grass, probably unpleasantly aroused from his afternoon nap. This bear is the closest one we’ve encountered, and I can feel the adrenaline coursing through my body, and yet I can’t help but laugh—he looks like a cartoon character, woken up and spooked so badly that he runs away. And thankfully, he runs quickly, and he’s gone.
A snapped trekking pole and the deepest river crossing I’ve ever encountered later, we arrive at our destination. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see a road in my life. When the bus pulls up, we pile on to join the fresh, nice-smelling passengers who have apparently just spent twenty minutes pulled over to the side of the road for a bunch of grizzly bears.
We just smile at each other and collapse into our seats.
—
For those of you not keeping count, we saw seven grizzlies in Alaska.
SEVEN.
That may not seem like that many to, I don’t know, Bush people and park rangers, but even the Denali park rangers seemed surprised by the five grizzlies we encountered during our 24 hours in the backcountry.
Note that of the nine grizzly bears I’ve seen in my life, I have zero good pictures of any of them. In the case of the Yellowstone bears, they were too far into the woods to snap a picture on my phone from a safe distance–and I was occupied with trying to keep seven teenagers from jumping out of the van and quickly crossing the line into “unsafe distance.” For the rest, my mind was focused on identifying the bear spray’s location (I have one, who has the other?) and moving as quickly as possible.
Making our way through rainy Denali, there’s no time or hand capacity for a camera; one hand grips the bear spray holster on my hip belt while the other waves my trekking pole in the air, all as we’re calling to the bears that we’re mere humans passing through and mean no harm (and would, in fact, like to avoid harm as much as possible, if that’s OK with them).
In our front country campsite in Kenai Fjords, the two young bears have disappeared into the woods too fast for us to consider doing anything but panic about the fact that we’re all holding dinner and the bear spray is in the back of the car, 20 feet away. (We never made that mistake again.)
Maybe someday I’ll take a nice photo of a grizzly bear. The one I have was on the fly, and for good reason, seeing as we scared one final bear out of the grass below us 10 minutes later. But before that, I grabbed my phone, zoomed in and snapped a quick picture, then immediately pocketed it again as we continued traipsing across the hillside. We were hiking through bear country, and we had to be ready for anything.