Katmai

A National Park Purge

/ Mike Fitz

I want to write about people if you’ll indulge me. This is a topic that I almost never delve into, since I find the human realm less interesting than the non-human and the overall behavior of my fellow humans to be disappointing. (“Hey let’s start another war.” “Hey, I don’t care if the climate gets warmer.” “The suffering of others isn’t something that affects me.” etc.) I’ll touch on politics too, which I loathe. Not that I don’t remain engaged on issues that matter, and I always vote, but I find politics exhausting. The rhetoric from elected leaders and pundits is often disingenuous at best and too often purposefully deceitful. Our media industry, especially social media platforms, uses it to monetize outrage and divisiveness. I want to avoid adding to the cycle that got us here if that is at all possible.

But to be blunt, we’re experiencing a purge of national park staff that threatens the stability of parks.

I worked in nine U.S. national parks, mostly as an interpretive ranger. Those are the rangers that lead programs, staff the visitor centers, and generally try to give people meaningful experiences. Although I no longer work for the National Park Service (NPS), I maintain close ties to parks across the country through family, friends, colleagues, the Katmai Conservancy, and my work for explore.org. Parks survive as places of significance through the support of the public and the work of NPS employees. The ability, however, of the NPS and other federal agencies to manage our public lands is facing a demanding, unnecessary challenge that will cause harm to these irreplaceable spaces.

By now, you’ve likely heard of the Fork in the Road, an attempt led by Elon Musk at the behest of the President to reduce the size of the U.S. federal workforce. Almost all federal civilian employees were offered a deferred resignation. Setting aside the confusion it sowed, its uncertain legality, and its ignorance of established regulations, the Fork was a not-so-subtle attempt to strong-arm employees into making a hasty decision about their careers. Those who didn’t take the offer were in no small way threatened that their jobs were not secure. “We cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency,” as the Fork in the Road email stated in reference to those who do not accept the resignation offer.

The total number of employees who took the offer hasn’t been fully tallied, but it is likely that a few tens of thousands of people did resign across the entire federal government. As part of his justification, Musk argues that unelected bureaucrats have too much power, even as he fails to understand that he is now the quintessential example of an unelected, unaccountable bureaucrat. It is the Spiderman meme for real.

Cartoon image. Two Spidermen are standing and pointing at each other. Instead of Spiderman wearing the Spiderman mask, their heads are replaced by Elon Musk's face.
Musk photo courtesy of Duncan.Hull – Debbie Rowe, Photographer, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=125330577

The Fork in the Road window is over, so to further reduce the federal workforce the administration is firing thousands of employees who were within a probationary period—a generally 1 – 2 year window that acts as an employment trial. Here is a good primer if you’re interested. During that time, your supervisor can decide whether your performance is acceptable. If it is, then great. Good work. Continue. We’re glad to have you. If it isn’t, then you could be fired due to poor performance. At least that is how it is supposed to work.

On February 14, about 1000 people lost their jobs in the National Park Service. That number could grow. Other land management agencies are targeted too such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (which manages wildlife refuges and endangered species), the U.S. Forest Service (which manages national forests and employs the nation’s largest wildfire fighting force), and the Bureau of Land Management (which manages large swaths of public lands that aren’t refuges, parks, or national forests). 

The Fork in the Road and mass firings are different from Bill Clinton’s methods to reduce the federal workforce in the 1990s. Namely, Clinton’s plan was approved by Congress and implemented over three years. The current administration’s plan is not Congressionally approved. Its tactics are different too. Probationary employees are being fired en masse without consideration of the value of their job, the benefits they provide to the public, the skills they possess, or their work performance. The justification for the firings is nothing more than “not in the public interest” according to the emails they’ve received. That’s not a rational justification. It is pure ideological fervor that harms real people.

How does this affect the national park that I am most connected with, Katmai? Although I’m hopeful that many of Katmai’s probationary staff may be exempted from the firings, a loss of just a few staff members at Katmai will have a disproportionately large negative impact. Katmai’s year-round staff includes perhaps 30 people. In contrast, Yellowstone has closer to 750 year-round staff. Absorbing staffing cuts is generally easier for parks with a larger staff. Additionally, the administration has implemented a hiring freeze for most seasonal positions. Reports indicate that the NPS is allowed to hire 5,000 seasonal staff, but the park staff that I’ve talked to remain unsure if they will be able to hire all the staff they need. Five thousand seasonal employees is well short of the typical 7,000 to 8,000 that are usually hired annually. 

The delay jeopardizes the ability of supervisors to hire, train, and get seasonal rangers in parks for the busiest time of the year. Katmai and most national parks cannot function properly without their seasonal workforce. 

The NPS at Katmai employs about 12 seasonal interpretive rangers for Brooks Camp. These rangers provide mandatory bear safety talks, manage access to the extremely popular Brooks Falls wildlife-viewing platform, help in bear management situations, operate the visitor center, and lead programs. Most of the maintenance, law enforcement, and bear technicians (rangers that manage bear and human conflict) are also seasonal employees. The federal hiring freeze has created extraordinary uncertainty regarding the NPS’s ability to hire seasonal staff and get them ready to run Brooks Camp. The purge of probationary employees may also lead to the loss of some supervisors for the seasonal staff. Due to the administration’s actions, we’re likely at a breaking point where park staff will not be able to keep up with the workload that already exists. 

For decades, the National Park Service has coped with too few employees for the work. Congress also saddles the NPS with perpetual budget deficits. I don’t think I ever had a supervisor in the nine parks that I worked at who wasn’t nearly or actually overwhelmed with work. Both Republicans and Democrats are at fault for this.

I wonder if you visited a park site if you would have noticed, because the NPS is really good at doing more with less. The NPS hides the stress and low morale felt by their employees and crumbling infrastructure behind smiling rangers wearing flat hats. Most people who aren’t employees don’t see the struggle to keep parks functional, the efforts made to ensure that people have good experiences despite ever increasing visitation, the knowledge and commitment necessary to study and protect ecosystems, or feel the day to day stress that comes with never being able to keep up. This spring and summer are likely to be some of the most challenging seasons that NPS employees have ever faced. People will still want to visit parks. They’ll still go to parks, but the NPS will lack the staff to provide for the best, safest experience.

The NPS shouldn’t hide the ramifications of mass firings and the seasonal job hiring freeze.

Layoffs don’t make the work of rangers go away. The public will see the results in the form of shuttered visitor centers, damage to park infrastructure, vandalism, increased emergency response time, wildlife harassment, poaching, road damage, campground closures, overflowing parking areas, and unclean bathrooms. Those things are difficult enough to address when parks are fully staffed. It is easier, cheaper, and more efficient to prevent those issues from occurring than to deal with the aftermath, just like it is easier to prevent infection through proper hygiene than to clean a wound of gangrene. Neglecting public lands now is a tax on the future.

“Where is the money supposed to come from?” you might ask. “After all, the national debt keeps going up and up and up.” If economics matter to you, then please consider that national park tourism generates more revenue than it costs the parks to operate and supports hundreds of thousands of jobs nationwide outside of the NPS. The requested NPS budget in 2023, for example, was $4.75 billion, while the 2023 economic output of national parks was more than $55 billion. For every dollar invested in national parks, taxpayers get much more in return. I bet our Congress and President find money for more bombs in the midst of all this. There always seems to be money for more bombs. They might also fight to provide more tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy because the rich always seem to need more money to feed their greed. So let’s not pretend that firing hardworking and dedicated NPS employees is a true means to reduce debt or taxpayer burden or make government more efficient. It is driven by an ideological agenda.

Our public lands are the nation’s most cherished spaces. The tech billionaires and politicians want you to think that it is GDP, stock values, Walmart, Amazon, Tesla, and Facebook. In reality it is our shared democratic spaces such as parks, wildlife refuges, and national forests. 

Most everyone can agree that the U.S. government can spend its money more wisely and efficiently. I favor that. I would question the rationality of anyone who thinks otherwise. Scapegoating federal employees as the problem, however, isn’t a solution. The goal of elected leaders should be to make government work better, not break it. But here we are.

If you’ve read this far, you’re likely a Brooks River bearcam watcher. It remains to be seen how firings will ultimately affect the operation of Brooks Camp this summer. Yet more people than ever before visited Brooks Camp in 2024 (about 19,000 according to park statistics provided to me). Even if visitation declines overall, the nature of the Brooks Camp experience means that it will remain an intensely managed place. Katmai will be especially challenged to ensure that bears and people are safe at the park’s most visited site. The bearcams on explore.org will not be affected, thankfully, but that is of little solace to me knowing that friends and colleagues may be fired solely for ideology. It is not ethical. It is not in the best interest of the taxpayer. It is cruel.

Finally, there’s been a lot of talk of loyalty from the administration. Federal workers need to be loyal, etc. Loyalty for NPS employees doesn’t mean capitulating to a presidential administration’s ideology, which comes and goes on the will of voters. Loyalty for NPS employees means staying loyal to the NPS mission and purpose, which was established by Congressional law in 1916. It is in the U.S. Code. NPS employees cannot escape it nor should they. 

The NPS mission is somewhat contradictory and often frustrating to fulfill. I lived the contradiction as a ranger when struggling to determine how to best provide for enjoyment without impairing the things that make parks special. Ensuring that parks meet their Congressional mandates is where the loyalty of NPS employees truly rests. That’s how it is supposed to work. It safeguards parks against the whims of politicians.

I would still consider the current methods to purge the government workforce as wrong even if it were applied to areas of government that I disagree with on principle. Don’t hand the reins of power to an unelected billionaire bureaucrat. Consider how you’d react if you are on the other end of overreaching, unchecked presidential powers in the future. If you don’t like the way that the NPS operates, then work through Congress to change it.

If this is an issue that matters to you and you haven’t contacted your congressional representatives about it, please do. Calling might be better than writing, but this template has some good starting points to communicate. There are a lot of other reasons to write to them as well like their efforts to erase the existence of Trans people. We can get through this but not without holding elected and unelected people accountable, and not without reining in the powers of the presidency.

2023 Fat Bear Week Endorsement

/ Mike Fitz / 10 Comments

Think of a mama bear. What does that idea conjure in your mind? Perhaps it is fierceness, since mother bears are ornery and defensive when necessary. Maybe it is commitment, because mother bears dedicate years to raise a single litter. Perhaps it is sacrifice, since mother bears provide cubs with time and energy that could otherwise serve to promote her own physical health.

We’re fortunate to watch many different female bears at Brooks River in Katmai National Park. Yet there is one whose maternal efforts are legend. One who can fish successfully almost anywhere. One whose fearsome reputation is long-lived among other brown bears, including large adult males. Don’t get in her way. Don’t lurk near her fishing spot. Don’t look at her cubs. Do give 128 Grazer your 2023 Fat Bear Week vote.

Early and late summer photos of 128 Grazer. Photo on left is Grazer on July 8. She is facing left and walking through water. Photo on right is from September 14, 2023. She is facing left and standing in belly deep water. She is round.

Grazer | ɡrāzər |

  • (2005 – Present) A female brown bear documented to use Brooks River in Katmai National Park, Alaska. Also known as bear 128.
  • verb. [with object]
    The effort of a mother bear to maul or attack another bear with little provocation, especially in defense of her cubs: She grazered him.
  • Origin: Bear cam slang. Circa late 2010s and early 2020s.

Grazer is famous among people and (maybe) infamous among brown bears for her extraordinary defensiveness. When she arrived at Brooks River in 2016 with three cubs representing her first known litter, she would confront and attack other bears with little or no provocation. Sometimes it appeared that another bear only had to look in her family’s direction to draw her ire, as bear 83 knows well. 

Her behavior didn’t mellow when those first cubs grew into yearlings the following summer. Nor did she rethink her aggressiveness toward other bears when raising her second litter. While mother bears can change their parenting strategy as they gain skill and experience, Grazer continued on the path forged with her first litter—the best defense is a good offense.

Grazer separated from her most recent litter at the beginning of summer 2023. Since then, she’s lived a brown bear bachelorette’s life. Her pheromones attracted the attention of male bears during the mating season. They chased her tail, with varying degrees of success, right bear 164? After the mating season, and also during it, she focused on eating. A lot. Her waistline carries the weight of her success.

Grazer’s formidable reputation carried into this summer. She ranked high in the hierarchy among bears and was perhaps the river’s most dominant female. Notably, 151 Walker deferred to her frequently in early summer. Walker is a big dude and he’s not shy about displacing bears from preferred fishing spots. Bears have good memories, though. Maybe he had too many bad experiences with her in the past and didn’t want to risk more dangerous confrontations.

In this video, Walker is in full dominance mode as he works to displace another adult male at Brooks Falls. But watch his behavior when Grazer shows up on the boulders above.

And in case you need more examples of Grazer bulldozing bears, here you go. (Watch with sound on for the full effect.)

During my brief time at Brooks River early last summer, I watched bears fish largely without success because the expected salmon run was slow to arrive. Some of the big guys caught some fish. 747, for example, sat at Brooks Falls like he always does and let the fish come to him, but even he wasn’t catching many. Most other bears fared worse. They roamed from one place at the river to another, searching for the few early arriving salmon.

Grazer, though, has practiced—no, perfected—her fishing tactics in many different places. If fish are jumping Brooks Falls, she’ll catch them there. If there’s space in the waterfall’s far pool, she’ll catch them there. She’ll work the jacuzzi below the falls. She’ll fish in the middle of the night. She’ll use her strength and agility to chase down salmon. 

One evening last summer, I stood on the riffles platform watching her work the river in front of me. While the riffles provides brown bears with fishing opportunities, it is often a more challenging place for bears to catch salmon than the falls. The riffles doesn’t provide the same pinch points in topography as the falls and salmon have many escape routes. There aren’t many bears who can make the best of that situation consistently, especially when few salmon are in the water and bears are forced to run through the water to get them.

Grazer parks herself on the near bank upstream of me. She moves into the water after several minutes and spots a lone salmon. She lunges and misses. She chases. Another lunge, another miss. She continues running at full speed through the water while somehow keeping an eye on the salmon. With a final lunge, she fully submerges into a two to three-foot-deep pool and surfaces with the salmon in her jaws. I can see the fish gasping in the air as blood runs from deep puncture wounds in its body. Grazer eats all of it—tail to head—even the gill plates and mandibles.

In early summer when few bears were catching salmon, Grazer found success. She is perhaps the best angler at Brooks River. 

Brown bear standing in river. Water is flowing over boulders forming riffles. Bear is moving in direction of camera. Water drips off her fur. She holds a sockeye salmon in her mouth.
Bear 128 Grazer with a catch in the riffles on July 6, 2023.

Let’s not lose sight of Grazer’s goals either. She’s working to build the fat reserves necessary to sustain her survival during winter hibernation. She’s also building fat in case she gives birth in the den. Bear cubs are born mid winter while mother hibernates. Abundant fat reserves are necessary for mother bears to reproduce, so getting fat is vital to a bear’s reproductive success.

In a way, my 2023 Fat Bear Week endorsement is a recognition of Grazer’s full-bodied and fat-addled collection of work since 2016. When she is raising cubs Grazer is the archetypal mama bear. She’s formidable, strong, brave, skilled, and  successful. She deserves your vote in Fat Bear Week 2023.

Fat Bear Week bracket. Four bears (806 cub vs 428; 402 vs 901) in two first round matches on left. Two bears (32 and 480) are in bye round on left. Four bears (128 Grazer vs 151; 284 vs 164) in two first round matches on right. Two bears (747 and 435) are in bye round on right. Graphical cartoon bears fill the top and bottom center of the bracket.
My Fat Bear Week bracket predictions for 2023. Yes, yes, I know. I don’t predict that Grazer will win. There’s a difference between who I think should win and who I think will actually win, after all. Which bear’s corner are you in? Download your bracket from FatBearWeek.org.

Action Needed: Support a Permit System for Brooks River

/ Mike Fitz / 4 Comments

Brooks River in Katmai National Park, Alaska is historically, culturally, and ecologically unique. The river corridor has harbored Alaska Native peoples for thousands of years, is one of the densest archeological sites in Alaska, and remains a place of profound significance for Alutiiq descendants of former Katmai residents. The underlying geology records stories of great volcanic and glacial change. Hundreds of thousands of sockeye salmon annually use the river for migration and spawning. And, during the last 40 years it has become especially famous for its brown bears and wildlife viewing opportunities. There’s no other place like it.

A mother bears swims through water in front of a grassy shoreline. Her two first year cubs ride on her back. She swims from right to left.
Bear 482 Brett searches for salmon in Brooks River while her two cubs hang on for the ride. July 14, 2021.

Brooks Camp is also experiencing more people than ever before. 

In the midst of skyrocketing visitation last year, Katmai National Park implemented a pilot permit program for Brooks River. The permit system didn’t change wildlife distance regulations at Brooks River or limit the overall number of people who could visit. Instead, it applied only to those who wish to physically enter the river or its banks outside of the designated trails, roadways, bridge, and platforms. No one needed to reserve a permit unless they planned to enter the river or walk off trail along the riverbanks (two activities that I suggest should be avoided to give bears the space they need).

The pilot program appeared to be successful. It provided National Park Service (NPS) staff with an additional opportunity to communicate the special circumstances, rules, and responsibilities that apply to Brooks River. The NPS could revoke the permit in instances where permit holders did not adhere to wildlife distance or fishing regulations, which effectively prohibited the person(s) from reentering the river. It allowed approved Brooks River Guides to continue to give their clients the mandatory bear-safety orientations. And finally, it did not restrict or interfere with subsistence fishing associated with the traditional redfish harvest.

Now, the NPS is looking for public comments about the permit system. If you have the time and care about the bears who make the river their summer home, then please support the plan with a comment on or before April 28. As the Katmai Conservancy suggests, say yes to the permit and ask the NPS to limit the number of permits on a daily or weekly basis.

Modified satellite map image showing permit area for Brooks River. Title text reads, "Brooks River Permit Corridor (Permit Needed Within 50 Yards of River). Areas highlighted in blue represent the permit corridor. The area outlined in red represents the area closed to people from June 15 to August 15.

Why are permits necessary? The relative ease and accessibility of the bear-viewing experience at Brooks Camp has attracted increasing numbers of people. More than 16,000 people visited in 2022—an all time record high—and almost double the visitation of 2008. Brooks River is a mere 1.5 miles (2.6 km) long, yet dozens of brown bears use it during the salmon migration and spawning seasons of summer and early fall. 

People who enter in the river directly occupy the habitat that bears need to fish for salmon. Numerous scientific studies (reviewed here) have documented that human recreation can displace bears in time and space. The presence of people can cause bears to switch from diurnal to crepuscular activities in response to bear-viewing, angling, hiking, and camping. Bears decrease in number and are present for shorter time spans when exposed to people, angling, and bear-viewing. Bears also spend less time fishing and have less fishing success when anglers and bear-viewers are present.

View of river surrounded by boreal forest looking downstream. Five bears are in the water. Nearby, a group of four people stand in the water photographing the bears.
Bears gather at Brooks River to fish for salmon. People in Brooks River risk displacing bears from important foraging areas in the river. This is especially true for bears who do not habituate to our presence. In these situations, we unwittingly become a competitor in the bear’s mind for space, and most of the time that bear won’t challenge us for it.

Studies specific to Katmai National Park have found that the presence of people can affect when bears fish (Olson et al. 1998) and cause bears to avoid or alter their use of foraging areas (Rode et al. 2007; Smith 2002; Turner and Hamon 2016). Therefore, even a small number of well-behaved and well-intentioned people in the wrong place (like in the river) can have a disproportionately negative effect on brown bears. Disturbance of wildlife can also result in decreased visitor satisfaction (Skibins et al. 2012) and create user conflicts between visitors who are recreating in different ways (bear watching from the platforms or online via webcams vs fishing or photographing bears in the river).

Importantly, and tucked away in the park’s newsletter about the permits, is this: “There is no limit established to the number of permits issued during the permit-required time frame currently, but this will be considered if public feedback to the plan supports a limitation or if conditions change within the Brooks River Corridor to warrant a limitation.” Therefore, I recommend that comments ask the NPS to go beyond merely requiring permits. Comments about the permits should encourage the NPS to establish limits to permits on a daily or weekly basis and perhaps even greater seasonal closures to Brooks River to adequately protect habitat for bears.

I didn’t visit Brooks River in person last year, but rangers and some people I know who had traveled there reported to me that the pilot permit system worked well. While it does not address over-crowding and congestion issues at Brooks Camp caused by record-high levels of visitation, it is certainly a big step in the right direction to ensure the river’s bears have access to the habitat they need to survive. None of the existing regulations would change at Brooks Camp. The permits only make it easier for the NPS to enforce them. But permits alone are not enough. Existing protections for bears can be made more effective if permits were limited in availability. Our national parks, and indeed Brooks Camp, cannot support unlimited numbers of people. The Brooks River corridor is a small area overall. It has limited space for bears and a limited carrying capacity for a high-quality bear-viewing or fishing experiences. Please let the NPS know you support their efforts to protect habitat for bears in the river through the permit system and that the number of permits should be limited on a daily or weekly basis when bears are actively fishing in the river.

Submit your comments here on or before April 28, 2023.

For additional information, please see the comments I wrote on behalf of the Katmai Conservancy, an example comment that you can use, and my Brooks River pledge. As always, when commenting please stay polite and respectful. The people who manage Katmai are intelligent and well-meaning. They do not deserve insults or personal attacks.

Ten Years of Bear Cam and Counting

/ Mike Fitz / 12 Comments

Last summer, explore.org celebrated the 10th anniversary of the bear cams at Brooks River in Katmai National Park. These webcams offer an in-depth look at the behavior and ecology of a population of brown bears, allow us to observe the same individual bears over many years–giving us the chance to learn about their personalities and habits–and provide a platform for rangers and other experts to host live programs and commentary about the bears and their stories. It’s a wildlife watching experience like no other.

As part of the celebration, I chose to highlight some the moments that I thought were most memorable from the last ten years of bear cam. Some explore point-in-time events. Others celebrate the behavior of individual bears who have left their mark on Brooks River in ways we can’t forget or ignore. Each was unforgettable from my perspective. I hope you enjoy them.

Most Defensive Mother: 128 Grazer 

Grazer is an archetypal mother bear. Don’t get in her way and don’t approach her cubs.

Lefty Learns to Fish at Brooks Falls

Old bears can definitely learn new tricks. In July 2015, we watched a fully mature adult male brown bear figure out how to fish where he’d never fished before.

Otis Eats 42 Salmon in a Sitting

Be awed by the capacity of his stomach.

Death of 451’s Spring Cub

When a bear cub falls ill the world will watch.

503’s Saga

A lone yearling finds a new family.

Reign of 856

Few bears will ever experience the prolonged dominance and advantage earned by 856.

2020 Salmon Smorgasbord

What happens when bears have access to unlimited salmon? The 2020 salmon run gave us the answer.

History of Fat Bear Week

A goofy idea becomes a world famous internet sensation.

We are Family: 909, 910, and Cubs

Sister bears reunite while raising cubs to create an extended family.

If that’s not enough, the bear cam community complied links to all of our bear cam live events from 2022. Two stand out in my mind: 1. The impromptu Q&A about a fight between and mother bear and a dominant male, and 2. The bear cam 10th anniversary live chat.

We’ve seen a lot of special moments on the cams during the last ten summers–perhaps too many to recall–so these are only a small snippet of the larger story. What are your most memorable moments from the bear cams?

Fitz’s Fat Bear Week 2022 Endorsement

/ Mike Fitz / 11 Comments

As is tradition—going way back to the before times (2017)—I’ve endorsed a bear for Fat Bear Week. This year’s bracket might be difficult to predict, but with voting commencing today at 12 p.m. Eastern and continuing through October 11, it’s time to throw my weight behind a Fat Bear Week contender. 

I’d let him speak for himself but his mouth is usually too full of salmon.

Friends, humans, and ursids, let us stand in awe of a true competitor. A candidate with conviction. A candidate with strength. A candidate that stands up for what he believes. A candidate the size of a double-wide refrigerator. This Fat Bear Week vote for the mighty 747. 

747 returns to Brooks River every summer as a giant and just keeps getting bigger.

Two photos of same bear, 747. Top photo is a bear standing facing left with medium-brown fur and wounds on his right ear. Bear is facing right. Photo taken on June 25, 20222. Bottom photo is a dark brown and fat bear standing in shallow water facing right. Photo taken September 6, 2022.

Perhaps you don’t want to listen to me. After all, I’ve endorsed 747 before and it hasn’t usually led to his victory. Our culture is celebrity obsessed, though, so maybe you’ll listen the expert opinions of these randos. 

Homer remarked that 747 is the only other individual whose blubber flies like his.

GIF of shirtless Homer Simpson walking on beach wearing red speedo. Woman on chair yelps when she sees him.

Pee Wee Herman agreed that 747 was the fattest bear, but he was incredulous when Amazing Larry said he might vote for another candidate.

GIF. Pee Wee Herman yells at man with mohawk, "You're not going to vote for another bear are you?!?" Man looks at Pee Wee with alarm.

large brown bear stands in shallow water at the base of a waterfall. He's facing directly toward the photographer.r at
*Stares in 747*
National Park Service / L. Law

Dr. Evil threatened world destruction if 747 fails to win.

GIF of Dr. Evil from movie Austin Powers. Camera zooms in on his face while text says, "Vote for 747

I spoke with the President too, believe it or not. (He seems to clear his schedule when you have something to say about Fat Bear Week.) Joe Biden noted that 747 grew proportionally faster than this year’s inflation rate. 

GIF of Joe Biden at podium looking surprised.

747’s summer was one of competition and success. In June and July, he yielded space to bear 856. By August, however, 747 turned the tables. He frequently challenged and displaced his long-time rival. 

It’s hard work staying dominant and getting fat too. Bears as large as 747 tend to overheat easily, and while their limb bones are built to support their great mass sometimes climbing those hills is a struggle.

You also can’t get that fat without eating a lot of food, and 747 excels in this life goal. Although we don’t know exactly how many fish 747 ate this year, a study about brown bears on Kodiak Island may provide some insight. 

Brown bears shed their fur once per year in early to mid summer. Since new fur grows during a bear’s active season, it contains a record of what the bear ate during that time. Studies of captive bears had previously determined the relationship between the mercury content in food and the mercury content in hair. To apply this to bears on Kodiak, researchers first determined how much mercury is found in the Pacific salmon that spawn on Kodiak. They then analyzed the mercury content found in the bears’ hair to gain an estimate of salmon consumption. Large adult males, on average, ate 6,146 pounds (2,788 kg) per bear per year! Some adult males ate a lot more, though, as much as 10,000 pounds of salmon. Since 747 fished at Brooks Falls almost every day between late June and mid September this summer, then his total salmon consumption may likely have been near the upper end of that spectrum.

For fisheries managers and biologists, these statistics are more than pieces of trivia. They are necessary to help inform decisions about salmon escapement goals, so that salmon runs are sustainable for people and the wildlife who depend on them. The aforementioned Kodiak study found that “the estimated population of 2,300 subadult and adult bears [on Kodiak] consumed 3.77 million kg of salmon annually, a mass equal to ~6 percent of the combined escapement and commercial [salmon] harvest (57.6 million kg).” Katmai National Park’s bear population is about as large as Kodiak’s, and when we work to sustain salmon runs we’re also celebrating the life they provide to many other species and individuals, such as bear 747.

Bears get fat to survive winter hibernation, and Katmai National Park’s Fat Bear Week bears are well positioned to weather the oncoming famine. But there’s candidate who eclipses the rest. Your bear might be a 10 but 747 is 1,400 pounds. I’m voting for 747, are you? 

GIF of Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy nodding in agreement.

Download your bracket from FatBearWeek.org and go there to vote in each Fat Bear Week match from October 5 to 11.

THE THING ABOUT BEARS IS THAT A LOT OF THEM ARE BIG. BUT LIKE HAVE YOU SEEN 747?? HE’S SO BIG. A GIANT, REALLY. HE JUST SITS THERE AND FISHES LIKE THERE’S NO TOMORROW. I MEAN HE HARDLY LEFT THE FALLS ALL SUMMER. DOESN’T MATTER HOW COLD THE WATER IS OR WHICH OTHER BEARS ARE THERE….

teenage girl talks loudly into the ear of a teenage boy. Boy does not look amused or interested.

Are national parks accessible to everyone?

/ Mike Fitz / 10 Comments

Brooks Falls is, without question, the most famous place in Katmai National Park and one of the most famous wildlife-watching destinations in North America. Even if you can’t place it on a map, you’ve likely seen it in a wildlife film, in a photograph, or on TV. Search “bear catching salmon,” for example, and nearly all of the first 50 photos are of a bear standing on the lip of Brooks Falls.

On a sunny, warm morning in mid July 2021, I arrive at the boardwalk leading to the falls after hiking the short trail through the surrounding spruce forest. It’s a promising time to visit. The early summer sockeye salmon migration is in full swing and hungry bears are eager to catch them. But about halfway along the boardwalk, I realize the chances of reaching the falls in a timely manner are slim. At a covered platform nicknamed the Treehouse, where the boardwalk forks and leads to different viewpoints of the river, there’s a wall of people.

Under the Treehouse roof, about 25 people surround a frazzled park ranger who clutches a metal clipboard. The clipboard and the scribble of names he places on it are the ranger’s only lifeline to a semblance of order—it’s the waitlist for the groups wanting to gain access to the platform overlooking the falls. Like a restaurant maître d’, the ranger greets new arrivals, take their names, and asks others to wait their turn when people fill the Falls platform to its 40-person capacity. He also imposes a one-hour time limit for people at the Falls so that those who are waiting have a chance to go there.

Few people normally hang out at the Treehouse voluntarily, since if offers no lines of sight to the river and its bears. Therefore, the crowd at the Treehouse this morning indicates that the wait time to access the falls is substantial. Having staffed the platforms as a ranger in the past, I don’t wish to add to this ranger’s workload or anyone’s wait time this morning. Instead, I look for space at the adjacent Riffles Platform where rangers don’t manage a specific capacity.

I don’t find much space there either. About 20 people occupy it already. Even more fill in gaps within a few minutes of my arrival as the queue for the Falls platform grows larger. With 40 people at the falls, 25 in the treehouse, 30 or more at the nearby Riffles platform, and surely more to come, I leave for a a less crowded space.

The lower fourth of Brooks River meanders through seasonally flooded marshes and gravel bars before spilling into the glacially-fed and turquoise-colored Naknek Lake, the largest lake wholly contained within any U.S. national park. The lower river offers space and safety for mother bears and their cubs who choose to avoid the risks posed by the larger males fishing at the falls. Young, recently weaned bears also use the area as a place to socialize and graze on tender grass with less risk of encountering a larger, more dominant competitor. It’s also the most ecologically diverse place along the river so even if there are no bears in sight, there’s usually something to catch your eye.

About 20 minutes after leaving the falls boardwalk I arrive at the lower river and station myself on a platform adjacent to the long footbridge that leads to Brooks Lodge and the park visitor center. The perch allows me to see most of the river mouth as well as the meandering reverse S-curve upstream. Few bears use the lower river as I sit, although the vicinity remains filled with activity. A near continuous high-decibel, high-pitched whine fills the air as float planes arrive and taxi to the lakeshore. They disgorge their passengers out of my line of sight, but each plane must’ve been filled to capacity. Over the next hour, I count more than 200 people crossing the bridge toward the falls. Almost none walk in the opposite direction. I sympathize mentally with the Treehouse ranger who is likely clutching his clipboard even more tightly.

Later in the day, another ranger reports to me that the wait to reach the Falls platform exceeded two hours at its peak. In total more than 350 people arrived at Brooks Camp this day, which doesn’t seem like much, but that’s on top of the pilots and guides who brought people here, the 30 people who stayed in the campground, the 50-60 people who stayed in the lodge, the 30 concession employees, and the 20 park staff. Even with my conservative math, about 500 people occupied Brooks Camp, all attempting to share a 1.5 mile-long river corridor with two to three dozen brown bears. 

By the end of summer 2021 more than 15,000 people visited Brooks Camp—most of whom arrived in July and all of whom used infrastructure largely designed in the 1980s and 1990s to accommodate about half to two-thirds as much at most. It’s double the visitation of 2007, the first year I worked as a ranger at Brooks Camp.

The increasing popularity of Brooks Camp is no surprise. It’s a continuation of a pre-COVID pandemic trend that began around 2010. The surge in visitation is not unique to Katmai either. Many national parks are no longer just crowded; they are overwhelmed. About 5 million people visited Yellowstone in 2021 — 800,000 more than in 2019. More than 14 million people visited Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 2021.  Sixteen million visited Blue Ridge Parkway.

The popularity of national parks is a welcome sign that these spaces are important and meaningful to broad swaths of the public. It wasn’t that long ago, that a National Park Service director wondered aloud whether parks were losing their relevancy. However, at the same time that our national parks experience record high visitation many more people encounter significant barriers that inhibit them from experiencing these places. I might’ve been sharing Brooks River with 500 people that day last July, but millions more are denied the opportunity. In an era of great crowding in our national parks, I wonder, do we have the determination to make parks accessible to everyone? 

The first national parks in the United States were protected for their scenic splendor, unique features, and wildlife. Nothing compares to Yellowstone’s geyser basins, Yosemite’s towering granitic cliffs, or Sequoia’s majestic trees. However, broad public support for these areas in the late 1800s was lacking. Yellowstone, Sequoia, Yosemite and Mount Rainier—the first four national parks created by Congress—were remote and difficult to access. Upon their establishment, they lacked the facilities and basic infrastructure necessary to accommodate large numbers of people. Even so, the park boosters, advocates, and visitors who had experienced these landscapes understood they were special places. 

To build a constituency for parks and facilitate a national park experience for more people, the earliest park managers built roads, trails, campgrounds, and visitor centers. They hired rangers. They allowed concessioners to build and operate hotels, lodges, restaurants, and trinket shops. After Congress established the National Park Service (NPS) in 1916, the fledging agency doubled down on infrastructure development. During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration constructed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles of trails and roads within park boundaries. Soon after, a post-WWII travel boom highlighted a need to modernize parks and accommodate a tsunami of people (visitation to all national parks combined increased from about 3.5 million to almost 30 million between 1931 and 1948). The effort was sanctioned by Congress in 1956 through the Mission 66 program, a 10-year-long and billion-dollar plan to expand and modernize facilities and infrastructure in national parks.

Making parks physically accessible to greater numbers of travelers established the experiential paradigm that national parks function within today. Namely, a physical visit to a park inspires people and leads them to become park stewards and supporters.

The effort, it can be convincingly argued, worked. More people visited. More people had great experiences. More people cared for parks. It helped fuel a burgeoning environmental awareness and protection movement. The paradigm, it seemed, had created more stewards than ever before. But not everyone was pleased with the trajectory of tourism in national parks.

black and white aerial photo of a large parking lot with boat docks and a marina carved into the adjacent water. Mangroves thickets are found near the development.
The construction of the Flamingo visitor center and marina in Everglades National Park was a Mission 66 project.

In Desert Solitaire, one of Ed Abbey’s most well known essays is “Polemic: Industrial Tourism and National Parks.” Much of the book and “Polemic,” especially, is based on Abbey’s experience working as a ranger at then Arches National Monument in the 1950s, a time before pavement bisected the little visited park in southeast Utah. 

Abbey seemed to enjoy his job. He muses something that probably every ranger, including me, has thought at one time or another: “On the rare occasions when I peer into the future more than a few days I can foresee myself returning here for season after season, year after year, indefinitely. What better sinecure could a man with small needs, infinite desires, and philosophic pretensions ask for?”

But, as Abbey saw it, not all was rosy at Arches. He writes, “For there is a cloud on my horizon. A small dark cloud no bigger than my hand. Its name is Progress.” Under the direction of the National Park Service, Arches soon transitioned from an off-the-beaten-path retreat to a major tourist destination.

Abbey experienced Arches as the NPS implemented its Mission 66 plan. He worried and warned that national parks were threatened by “industrial tourism” whose “chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robbed and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks.”

Abbey’s “Polemic,” true to the title word’s meaning, is a scathing criticism of development in national parks and the NPS’s efforts to expand it. “Where once a few adventurous people came on weekends to camp for a night or two and enjoy a taste of the primitive and remote, you will now find serpentine streams of baroque automobiles pouring in and out, all through the spring and summer, in numbers that would have seemed fantastic when I worked there: from 3,000 to 30,000 to 300,000 per year.” * 

*Abbey might have exaggerated the numbers here, although visitation did increase substantially between the time Abbey last worked at Arches in 1957 when, according to National Park Service statistics, annual visitation was 25,400 to 135,000 visitors in 1968 when Desert Solitaire was published. In 2021, visitation exceeded 1.7 million.*

Abbey outlined several ways to alleviate crowding and further development such as an end to road building in parks, putting more rangers into the field, and banning cars from parks. “No more cars in national parks. Let the people walk,” he writes. “The automotive combine has almost succeeded in strangling our cities; we need not let it also destroy our national parks.”

If Abbey was angry then, he might feel a rage today. More than 297 million people visited national parks in 2021 during a pandemic. More than 327 million people visited national park areas in 2019. Record high visitation stresses the already expansive and often underfunded infrastructure of parks. Parking lots are consistently full; excess cars line the road or their drivers shove their vehicles onto narrow shoulders. Some areas, such as Acadia’s Cadillac Mountain that you need a permit to get in the park parking lot. Herds of us overwhelm trails and overlooks too. Climbing Yosemite’s Half Dome requires a permit awarded through lottery as does Zion’s Angels Landing. You now need a “timed entry permit” to enter Rocky Mountain National Park and drive Glacier National Park’s iconic Going-to-the-Sun Road. Remote hiking areas, where Abbey’s preferred visitors go, are often filled too. When I worked as a backcountry ranger at North Cascades in summer 2017, most every backcountry campsite filled during summer weekends. The overflow spilled into the surrounding national forests, public lands with significantly fewer rangers than national parks. 

Clearly, the industry of tourism has grown substantially during the last several decades. Although the implications of this reality is not something I wish to tackle in this essay, our national parks are at a tipping point beyond which I worry the experience of visiting them as well as its wildlife, plants, and scenery will suffer. While I support rethinking how we use cars in national parks and we certainly should not be building new roads, denigrating those who experience parks by car is not the answer. I now see Abbey’s objections to visiting parks by car as ableist. 

As an aside, I should note how far my thinking has evolved on this issue. Starting my career twenty years ago, I agreed with Abbey’s no-cars-in-parks stance. Cars are a menace, I thought. (And to be honest, that remains true in many ways. Automobiles kill tens of thousands of people and hundreds of millions of vertebrate animals in the U.S. each year. Transportation also accounts for about 30% of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions. Driving less would do our world a lot of good.)

Fresh out of college and equipped with good health, I privately sneered at those who drove through parks without riding a bicycle or spending time on the trail. Like Abbey, I wondered, are you really having valid national park experience if you don’t risk hypothermia or sunburn? Yet, most of the time I drove into parks, parked my car and then rode my bike or hiked. I was, hypocritically, dependent on the car and, more importantly, I didn’t consider that the experience of those visiting parks primarily by car as equally valid an experience as my own. Of equal or perhaps even more concern was my rejection of the needs of people who couldn’t visit. “Oh, you can’t come,” I thought, “That sucks but what am I supposed to do about it?” Nature deficit disorder is real, but let’s not pretend that experiencing a national park by car is a cause. There are other much more systemic issues at heart. 

When we’ve traditionally explored how to address crowding in national parks, most of the ideas, especially those that have emerged out of the NPS bureaucracy, center around encouraging people to visit less crowded parks, to use shuttles where available like at Zion and Acadia, to visit during less crowded times and seasons, and to encourage people to do more planning or plan like like ranger. Comparatively little thought has been given toward efforts designed to connect parks with people who experience barriers that hinder them from visiting. 

Perhaps your employer doesn’t provide time off. Perhaps you cannot afford the time and money to visit parks. Perhaps you are among the two-thirds of Americans who experience chronic disease, some of which are serious enough to hinder travel and outdoor activities. Perhaps the COVID-pandemic exacerbates this, especially if you are among the immunocompromised that society seems willing to leave behind. Perhaps you have a decent salary and are relatively healthy from a physical standpoint, yet experience stress or depression that negatively impact your ability to travel. After all, we seem to be more stressed than ever. Perhaps you’re not White and the legacies of segregation in parks, discrimination in the conservation movement, and lynchings in rural areas create feelings of unwelcome and fear in outdoor spaces. Perhaps micro-aggressions from the largely White visitation and ranger staff make you feel like an outsider. Perhaps you’re Indigenous and parks are places of historical trauma where the U.S. government warred with and forcibly removed your ancestors to advance Euro-American settlement.

With these barriers in place, focusing primarily on congestion in parks is like rearranging chairs in a crowded room, while ignoring everyone that can’t even get in the building.

No panacea exists to solve accessibility issues in our parks. And, thankfully, a growing number of organizations are working toward solutions such as Brown People Camping, Disabled Hikers, Latino Outdoors, National Ability Center, Outdoor Afro, Unlikely Hikers, and Wilderness Inquiry to name a few. There’s one way, however, that the NPS can break the prevailing paradigm almost immediately to provide people from all backgrounds with meaningful national park experiences, and with little more than an internet connection, which brings me back to Katmai. 

While at Brooks River, I don’t share the river with only the few hundred people on the ground with me. I share every moment with many thousands of people watching from around the world. In 2012, Katmai National Park partnered with explore.org to host streaming webcams at Brooks River. Several webcams (collectively and affectionately known as the bearcams) stream live footage of Brooks River each summer and fall, allowing anyone with an internet connection the opportunity to watch bears fishing for salmon.

Each year, the bearcams receive millions of views. During 2021, for example, the bearcams saw 16.5 million page views on explore.org. People also watched from 110 countries and all 50 states. The programs that rangers and I host on the bearcams reached hundreds of thousands of people collectively. These numbers are several orders of magnitude larger than even the record setting visitation experienced at Brooks River during the same year. 

Although the bearcam experience lacks the immersiveness of an on-site visit, its depth far surpasses anything you’d typically get in person. A webcam experience isn’t limited by flight schedules, vacation days, outdoor skills, fitness, or wellness. It lasts as long as you want. It is accessible whenever you want. Through the bearcams, we watch bears not for a hurried few hours. We watch across weeks, seasons, and years. We see bears return to the river every year of their lives. We watch mother bears rear multiple litters of cubs, and those cubs, in turn, mature through sub-adulthood and adulthood. We discern the breadth of each bear’s individuality as it decides how to make a living. We witness the ebb and flow of the largest salmon runs left on the planet, how the fish underpin Katmai’s ecosystem, and how their year-to-year variability influences the behavior of bears and other wildlife. There’s no wildlife-watching experience quite like it.

If you haven’t experienced a national park through a webcam, then it might be difficult to envision that watching a park through a webcam can be meaningful. But, friends, it is true. A study comparing and contrasting on-site (i.e. in-person) and online (webcam) visitors to Brooks River found that webcam viewers emotionally connected with bears at higher levels than on-site visitors. The same study found that webcam viewers also support protections for bears at higher levels than people who visit in-person. In fact, support for bears and national parks among webcam viewers equalled or exceeded those reported by on-site visitors on almost all metrics evaluated in the study. Subsequent research has found that the bearcams provide mental health benefits and that people greatly value the individual animals that they see through webcams. To expand these lines of research, I’m collaborating with Dr. Lynne Lewis from Bates College, Dr. Leslie Richardson from the NPS and Dr. Jeffrey Skibins from East Carolina University to conduct and analyze more on-site and online surveys of Katmai’s visitors. Our analyses of online surveys from 2019 and 2020, for example, have confirmed previous results and have even underscored the importance of individual, easily recognized bears in people’s experience.

As the aforementioned crowding issues demonstrate, providing space for everyone who wants to visit parks in-person isn’t feasible or sustainable for Katmai or any other national park. It is feasible, however, to provide meaningful, memorable wildlife and nature-based experiences through the democratizing and stewardship-raising force of webcams. (And if you don’t believe me after all this, please go to the bearcams and ask for yourself in the comments.) It’s long past time for more national parks to utilize webcams to bridge barriers that hinder people from finding meaning and value in national parks and other wild spaces.

  • Kcanada / 4 hours ago. My comment about the webcams: Explore, and specifically the Katmai webcams, have been the most profound experience of a National Park and wild animals in my life. We see intimate views of wild brown bears living their lives. It’s extraordinary. But, for me, there are two things that define the experience. - the fact that I have had the chance to know these bears as individual animals, and to appreciate that individuality. I have not felt the same connection with webcams where the opportunity is not the same. It changes from being generic or abstract bears, to bears that I can individually know, whether it is a twenty nine year old female or a very small young female bear on her first year on her own struggling to find her way. - the fact that the park and Explore are intensively committed to the webcams. The ongoing presence of the bearcam fellow and the rangers building the knowledge and promoting a webcam community of people who are passionate about the well-being of these bears and the wilderness more broadly. These two factors have enriched my experience and my knowledge in a way that can’t be overstated. It wouldn’t be the same without them.
  • AnitaFederalWay / 4 hours ago. I have been watching the bear cams for about 5 years. It has profoundly changed my view of brown bears. Before the cams I was afraid of them and while a huge national park advocate and visitor i was not in support of their reintroduction. Now my views have completely changed and i totally support their reintroduction. I spent countless hours enjoying the bears and ear interaction. It is great to be able to experience this with others who also enjoy them. I have found that I am much more observant of my environment.
  • Wuvtail / 4 hours ago. Until I found this cam from explore several years ago, I had never given our national parks much thought at all as being important. This cam has given me a window into a world I would never be able to see in person and a much greater appreciation of our national parks and the need for them to be preserved.
  • Stacey / 4 hours ago. The bear cams inspired me to want to become a national park ranger! I never thought about bears—or about national parks—until I started watching the cams in 2013. But thanks to the cams, I talk about bears to anyone who will listen! :-) And I was inspired to volunteer at Katmai last summer. Thanks to all for all you’ve helped us learn through the cams!

I’ll be the first to admit that the bearcam experience is different than visiting Katmai in-person, and my advocacy for the use of webcams does not mean I believe webcams can or should replace the in-person park experience. Nothing that a computer screen provides can truly replicate the wellspring of awe that I feel while standing at Brooks Falls and seeing a dozen bears compete for fishing spots.  But, for almost everyone except very fortunate individuals like me, the in-person bear watching experience is ephemeral. Only a tiny fraction of Brooks Camp’s visitors return more than once, according to the two most recent in-depth visitor surveys (2006 and 2014). It’s a once-in-a-lifetime trip for many. For others, it’s not feasible at all.

We can’t build our way out of crowding and access issues like we did after the post-WWII tourism boom or try to shove people into parks during increasingly crowded “non-peak hours” or “shoulder” seasons, not if we want to ensure a high-quality experience, the integrity of park ecosystems, or address the systemic barriers that prevent many people from visiting parks. In contrast, webcams in national parks can provide a form of nature-based equity. They create life-long and devoted stewards among those who may never visit in-person. They help our nature-starved societies find connections with the non-human realm. They heal people.

National parks rank among the nation’s most revered landscapes, and their place within American culture is no accident. In the 150 years since Yellowstone National Park’s establishment, the national park idea has evolved. Yellowstone and other parks are much more than places “set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” We value parks for the solace they give us, the fun we experience in them, the wonder and awe they inspire, the opportunity to consider our shared history, and, of course, for the plants, animals, and natural processes that parks harbor. I cherish my time in parks. Everyone deserves access to similar opportunities. 

In the United States at least, many of us are eager to return to some semblance of normalcy in a COVID-positive world. Our governments and public discourse are a hot mess of arguments about how to best achieve this. In the context of national parks, other public lands, and wild areas, however, “normal” does not equate universal access. It never has. This upcoming spring and summer, national parks will once again be overwhelmed with people. Rangers will do their best to cope, but without more rangers and the regulatory and policy tools to address congestion, the NPS will go back to its default mode: put out active fires, ignore the tinder, and hope the flames don’t spread.

Katmai National Park existed within the standard visitation paradigm for decades. For those who visit to watch bears in-person, it is an amazing and profound experience. When I worked there as an interpretive ranger, when I’ve visited during my free time, and when I’ve returned as a fellow with explore.org, those moments when I watched bears expressing their survival instincts are experiences more meaningful and memorable than almost any thing else I’ve done in my life thus far. 

I last worked as a ranger in Katmai in 2016 though. Without webcams Brooks River would be a fading memory by now, no matter how many photos I took or journal pages I wrote. With the bearcams I, along with anyone else with an internet connection, can return at any time to find inspiration in the beauty of our world as well as the tenacity and intelligence of wild animals. Watching bears, whether in-person on online, creates life-long memories and inspires stewardship. Are national parks truly spaces for everyone? Not yet, but if more parks use webcams as a tool to reach people there’s no reason they can’t be.

Guess the Cover Bear: Winners

/ Mike Fitz / 4 Comments

Most of the bears who use Brooks River in Katmai National Park are known individuals that return to fish for salmon year after year. Many return for their entire lives, and their stories are an integral part of my book, The Bears of Brooks Falls. Last month, I invited readers to guess the identities of the bears on the print and audio covers. I placed entrants into separate drawings for the chance to win free copies of the print and audio book as well as a personalized signed copy of the print book. Here are the answers and the lucky winners.

On the print book cover, two of the three bears are fairly distinctive yet all three are legends.

Book Cover. Background image shows three bears at edge of waterfall while one salmon jumps out of the water. Text is "The Bears of Brooks Falls: Wildlife and Survival on Alaska's Brooks River; Michael Fitz"

Sitting below the falls is everyone’s favorite example of patience and efficiency, 480 Otis. His face is a bit obscured due to the camera angle. The photo was also taken before he acquired a bit of a wonky right ear, but you might recognize his classic Eeyore-like posture.

screen shot of corner of book cover. Bear sits at lower left at base of waterfall. Text says, "Wildlife and Survival on Alaska's Brooks River | Michael Fitz."

Standing on the lip of the falls at upper left is 6 Headbob, a bear identified as a young adult male in 1988. When I first saw him in 2007, Headbob was a large and skilled angler who had free access to his preferred spot on the lip. (I do wonder how he would’ve fared if he had to compete with Grazer this year.) Headbob was one of the first bears to teach me about longevity and survival for older individuals in this long-lived species.

Screen shot of section of book cover. Bear stands on edge of waterfall at upper left. Text says, "The Bears of

The other bear on the lip is difficult to identify. In this photo he’s a young adult soon to mature into one the river’s most dominant bears. It is 856. Starting in 2011, he reigned as the river’s most dominant bear for most of a decade. No one predicted his rise to the top of the hierarchy. Even though 856 took a slight step back this summer and began to yield to the mighty 747, it may be many years before we encounter another bear with a similar combination of his size, assertiveness, and fighting skills.

Screen shot of section of book cover. Bear stands on edge of waterfall at upper left.
photo of bear standing in flowing water. Bear is walking toward
This National Park Service photo of 856 was taken on July 6, 2006. The difference in 856’s coat color between this photo and the book cover is due to shedding. Brown bears shed their fur in early summer, so the audio book cover was likely taken in late July 2006 or 2007.

Now to the audio book cover. At upper right is 489 Ted and at lower left we see 32 Chunk. Ted is recognizable by his triangle-shaped ears and distinctive scar on his left hip.

Book Cover. Background image shows two bears standing in shallow white water. Text is "The Bears of Brooks Falls: Wildlife and Survival on Alaska's Brooks River; Michael Fitz; read by John Pruden."

His scar, notably, is the remnant of a large wound he received in 2007. Fair warning: the video is gasp worthy. Ted showcased a bear’s ability to get on with life despite pain.

Bear standing in shallow water in a corner of a waterfall. Bear is facing toward camera and has large flap of skin hanging from its left hip.
Bear 489 Ted on August 3, 2007. National Park Service photo.

Chunk is a bit harder to identify. In this photo, he has no obvious distinctive features like Ted. Instead, I recognize him by his face and body shape. Even during his subadult and young adult years, Chunk always had a pear-shaped body.

Screen shot of section of book cover. Bear stands in foamy water facing the camera.

Since Ted’s wound is relatively small in the cover photo and he was last seen in 2013 and since Chunk appears to be a sizable young adult, then this places the photo sometime during 2011 – 2013.

Only one person correctly identified all the bears on the print book cover. Congratulations to Mariah Denhart from California for correctly identifying all the bears on the print book cover. She receives a personalized signed copy from yours truly. No one correctly guessed the both cover bears on the audio book, so I placed all entrants from that category with at least one correct ID into a separate drawing. Congratulations to Jolene Nagle from West Virginia who wins a free copy of the audio book. Lastly, congratulations to Mike Hass from Oklahoma who wins a free print book from a drawing of all “Guess the Cover Bear” entrants. I’ll be touch with each winner via email with more details.

Thank you to everyone who participated. I’ve been overjoyed by the positive notes and reactions that have been sent my way about the book. Most importantly, though, I hope it enhances your understanding of Brooks River, its bears, and your bearcam watching experience on explore.org. May it inspire you to protect this special place for bears, salmon, people, and all the area’s inhabitants now in the future.

PS: Bearcam fan and sometimes National Park Service volunteer Stacey Schmeidel has been leading a book club about The Bears of Brooks Falls this summer. The next meeting is September 11 when the club discusses Chapter 11: Keystone. Please sign up for the Zoom meeting if you want to participate.

Upcoming Book Events

/ Mike Fitz / 3 Comments

We’re in the thick of the bear-watching season at Brooks River in Katmai National Park, Alaska, and I returned only recently from a two week trip to the river to host live bearcam events. I didn’t get enough sleep during that time, yet the fatigue was a minor inconvenience so I could experience the bears in person, and more importantly, share that experience with people around the world. Please tune into the bearcams every day for perhaps the best, live wildlife-watching experience on the internet.

Katmai’s rangers and I have many live bearcam events in store for the rest of the summer. But if you are looking for a different type of bear-related event, I’m excited to join two great bookstores on opposite corners of the United States for talks about my book The Bears of Brooks Falls: Wildlife and Survival in Alaska’s Brooks River.

On July 22 at 9 p.m. Eastern (6 p.m. Pacific), I’m joined by bearcam fan, national park volunteer, and fearless book club leader Stacey Schmeidel for a Q&A with Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, WA. Register for this event.

https://twitter.com/FitzIke/status/1417498040504569867

On July 29 at 6 p.m. Eastern (3 p.m. Pacific) I’ll talk with Heidi Carter, owner of Bogan Books in Fort Kent, Maine—the most northeastern bookstore in the United States. Join this event on the Bogan Books Facebook Page.

See you then.

Q & A: The Bears of Brooks Falls Book Club

/ Mike Fitz / 14 Comments

Bearcam is back for 2021, and while it’s still very early in the season several bears—including Grazer, Holly, and their yearlings—have made an appearance. As Rangers Naomi Boak and Lian Law discussed with me during our Welcome to Bearcam live chat, there are many fascinating storylines to follow this year. At the risk of offering a shameless plug, my book, The Bears of Brooks Falls, explores many of those stories too.

A dedicated book club has sprung up to discuss the book. At the end of each meeting, participants answer one question: If you could ask the author anything, what would be? Below, I’m happy to answer those questions. If you are interested in joining the book club for their next discussion on June 19 via Zoom, please sign up.

Questions from the club’s discussion of Part One: Creation and Discovery (May 29, 2021)

Can you clarify WHY there used to be fewer bears at the falls? In the past, were they hazed away? Did they stay away from the falls because anglers were given priority there?

In Part One of my book, I discuss the events that led to the proclamation of Katmai National Monument in 1918 and the monument’s evolution into one of the largest national parks in the United States.  Bears were not a major tourist attraction at Brooks River until long after Brooks Lodge was established. It wasn’t because anglers were given priority. It was because the bear population was much smaller than today. The national monument was expanded in 1931 to include areas such as Brooks River to protect habitat for wildlife like bears, but:

By all accounts, few bears used the river when Brooks Lodge first opened for business in 1950. Bears and any type of bear-management activities were absent from the reports of the first rangers stationed at Brooks Camp. Ranger Russell Todd, for example, never saw a bear on foot in the summer of 1954. The presence of people alone was apparently enough of a deterrent to displace bears from the river except at night. In 1957, biologists conducting salmon research at Brooks River for the US Fish and Wildlife Service reported bears “loudly evident” every night during September at the salmon- counting weir strung across the head of the river.

How many bears lived within the monument at that time remains an open question, but it was likely not many. The population may even have been at a nadir, the result of decades of heavy hunting pressure near the monument and, I suspect, the lingering effects of the 1912 eruption. After a two- summer biological investigation of the monument in 1953 and 1954, Victor Cahalane reported: “It is impossible to make even a rough estimate of the population of bears in Katmai National Monument.” Yet he tried. According to his and other anecdotal sightings, including one from a pilot who claimed to have seen 60 bears along Savonoski River in early September 1954, Cahalane ventured that about 200 bears lived in the monument.

Steady levels of salmon and a reduction in hunting pressure outside the monument were probably the main factors that allowed the area’s bear population to slowly increase, but at Brooks Camp people inadvertently helped accelerate the bears’ use of the river. By the end of the 1960s, a small and growing contingent of bears had become accustomed to the easy access to unsecured food at nearby garbage dumps, the lodge’s burn barrels, and unsecured supplies. By the mid- 1970s, Brooks Camp had become well known as a place to find at least a few bears, and several had begun to fish in the river during the day when people were active. (Pg. 172-173, The Bears of Brooks Falls)

I will add that over the last 40 years, salmon runs in the Naknek River watershed have been quite strong and that, perhaps more than anything else, has allowed the bear population to increase in the park. Additionally, during much of that time, park staff management have emphasized minimizing bear-human conflicts. The experience of cubs that accompanied their mothers to Brooks River may now consist largely of relatively benign contacts with people. This probably allowed the number and proportion of adult bears tolerant of people to increase.

It sounds, from Mike’s description [in Chapter 3 — Ramble], that the outlet of Brooks Lake into Brooks River is pretty shallow. Could global warming threaten the snowfall on the mountains, dropping the level of the lake and halting the flow of the river? If so, could that be a risk in the near future?

Although I can only provide a speculative answer, and while Lake Brooks will be affected by a warmer atmosphere, its water flow may not change appreciably. Lake Brooks occupies a deep basin that is almost completely below the water table of the surrounding land. There are no glaciers in its headwaters, unlike nearby Naknek Lake, so it’s already adapted in a sense to a hydrology that is highly influenced by annual precipitation. Snowmelt is only one influence. After most of the snow melts from the watershed in late spring, then summertime rain seems to have the biggest influence on water levels in the lake. Wetter summers can raise lake levels more than a foot compared to dry summers. Importantly, much of its water is sourced from spring-fed streams and springs under the lake surface. So, even during drought years, the lake basin experiences some recharge.

Climate change is certainly altering Katmai’s landscape, both the land and water. In 2019, we saw the impacts of a very hot, dry summer on Brooks River. Water levels were quite low and water temperatures were quite hot during an early July heat wave that year. However, water continued to flow through the river, albeit at a reduced level.. That’s just one year, though. By the end of the century—especially if we don’t get our act together and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible—the summer of 2019 will be one of the coolest of this century. Droughts and heat waves may become the norm in Katmai. For more information on the present and future of Katmai’s climate, please see chapter 17 of The Bears of Brooks Falls.

Can you clarify the distance from Brooks River to Margot Creek? Is it common — or uncommon — to see “our” cam bears at Margot Creek?

The shoreline of Naknek Lake between Brooks River and Margot Creek is about 13 miles, well within a day’s walk for a brown bear. If a bear takes a few shortcuts through the forest, then the walk is closer to 10-12 miles.

Google Earth image showing relative locations of Brooks Falls (upper left) and Margot Creek (lower right). Thickly vegetated land surrounds milky blue lake. North is the top of the map. The scale at lower right is 2 miles

Several identifiable Brooks River bears use Margot Creek in August including 402, 435 Holly, 480 Otis, and 856. I would not be surprised if there are others well. But, salmon are dispersed widely in central Katmai in August when bears fish at Margot Creek. Unlike early summer and early fall when Brooks River is the only place to fish, bears have many other alternatives to Margot Creek in mid summer so not all Brooks River bears need to go there.

Can you talk about your research process? The book draws on your personal experience — but it clearly draws on extensive research, too. 

When I began drafting the manuscript, I thought most of my research was finished since I had to study a lot to prepare programs and talk about bears when I was a park ranger at Katmai and through my current job at explore.org. That head start was helpful but not thorough enough. It was merely the foundation to build upon.

As I wrote, I wanted to be sure that my facts and conclusions were backed up by personal observations, experience, and the best available science. While working on the manuscript, I probably spent half my time reading research and half my time writing.

I began writing each chapter by outlining it. Then after I established what I wanted to write about and the stories that would add depth to the facts, I read or skimmed through the relevant books and scientific papers that I saved previously to establish the basic facts that I wanted to include and confirm what I thought I knew. This led me down many rabbit holes. I probably read dozens of papers for some chapters, especially Chapter 4 on hibernation. Tracking down specific facts and, hopefully, ensuring that I represented them accurately in the book was a tedious yet necessary task. Readers deserve no less.

Not a bear question, but a question for you as an author: What did it hurt to leave out of the book? What did you have to omit that you wish you’d been able to keep?

Quite a lot, actually. For example, I drafted chapters on glaciation and the evolution of Brooks River, but after consulting with an editor I decided to cut those. They weren’t a great fit for the narrative I tried to build. I also wanted to include the story of Holly adopting a yearling 503 in 2014 but couldn’t find the right place for it when I outlined the book. I considered using that story as the framework for Chapter 5: Family, but since adoption in bears is so uncommon I thought it best to focus on a bear whose maternal experiences were engaging yet more typical. That’s how I settled on 273 and her cub for Chapter 5. I’m happy with the final result of that chapter, yet I still wish I had found a way for Holly to be a part of it.

Questions from the club’s discussion of Chapter 6: Mating Season (June 6, 2021)

What if a female [bear] doesn’t want to mate? How much “say” does she have in the decision?

The female bear can’t control estrus or the signals that indicate to males that she is in estrus. However, female bears seem to have a lot of say in the timing of copulation. Although male bears are much larger than females, I’ve never seen a male bear force himself on a female bear. Instead, he doggedly follows her until she is ready to accept his advances. I also wonder if prolonged courtship can provide female bears with the chance to shed a suitor that they do not prefer. As I write in the book, a bear’s sense of smell is so powerful that a female can’t hide from a male. But, since mating opportunities are so limited for males, it’s not uncommon for more than one male to catch the scent of an estrous female. A prolonged estrus cycle coupled with a lengthy courtship could increase competition between males—an unconscious way for her to attract the most “fit” mate.

What is the ratio of males/females at Brooks River?

It hovers near 50:50, but last year there were more females than males. Because large adult male bears occupy the most productive fishing spots at Brooks Falls, it can sometimes seem like there are more males on the river than females. In July 2020 park bear monitoring staff identified slightly more female bears than males (29 adult females, 22 adult males, 14 subadult females, 11 subadult males).

Can you talk a bit about inbreeding? It seems like a lot of the bears we see mating are likely related to each other…

There’s only one confirmed case (through DNA analysis) of consanguineous couplings (inbreeding) between related bears at Brooks River.

24 BB was a very dominant male bear at Brooks River from the late 1990s through 2007. He was the equivalent of 856 during that time, and because of his dominance few bears would ever challenge him for fishing spots or for access to estrus females. BB sired a litter with the female 209. Bear 402, who still uses Brooks River, was one of the cubs from that litter born in 1998. 24 BB then sired a litter with 402. The offspring from the 402/24 relationship were weaned by 402 and identified as independent bears, but have not been seen in many years. I should note that this is common among subadult bears and their absence may not be reflective of interbreeding between a father bear and a daughter bear.

The limited DNA analysis of bears in 2005-2007 did not document any litters from a mother/son relationship. I think it’s unlikely that a bear could mate with its mother for a couple of reasons. 1. Male bears compete for the opportunity to mate with females and a larger, more dominant male would certainly outcompete a younger male bear for access. So while a young male bear is mature enough to mate around age 6, he’s still quite small compared to older males. 2. Young male bears often disperse away from their mother’s home range, and consequently their ranges as adults might not overlap. Mother bears remember who their offspring are too, and mom is often intolerant of the approach of her former cubs (we sometimes see a mother charge her former cubs, even years after family breakup, almost as if she is saying, “I told you to leave. Now stay away”).

Katmai’s brown bear population is quite large and robust. About 2,200 bears were estimated to live wholly or partly within Katmai National Park and Preserve in 2007. Although, we don’t know its true frequency, inbreeding between bears is probably uncommon here since the population is so large.

Why do mating males want to keep females in sight? It seems like all this following females around would distract males from eating and getting fat.

Courtship between bears isn’t always a prolonged process. In fact, sometimes bears couple soon after meeting. Potential male suitors, therefore, need to guard access to their prospective mates, lest they lose a rare mating opportunity.

The pursuit of mating opportunities certainly distracts male bears from other life tasks like fishing for salmon. I remember one July when 856 seemed like he didn’t stop courting females for the entire month. While the other males at the river got their fill of fish, 856 fished only occasionally because he was more interesting in reproduction. Near the end of July, he looked well muscled from the exercise of the pursuit but looked as though he had little body fat.

A large brown bear stands in shallow water. He looks toward the left side of the photo. A partly eaten salmon rests at his front paws.

856 often spends a lot of time courting females in early summer and less time fishing compared to many other adult bears. He can afford to do so because his high level of dominance provides access to fishing spots wherever he goes.

“Survival of the fittest” is often thought to refer to athletic fitness or survival instincts, when it is more accurately framed in terms of reproductive fitness. Perhaps the male bears who have the energy reserves and stamina to court female bears for long periods of time with little food are the most reproductively fit. It’s also important to consider that the bears’ mating season ends in early summer, just when food becomes plentiful in Katmai, so a male who doesn’t eat much in June has ample opportunities to make up for it during the next few months.

Questions from the book club’s discussion of Chapter 14: Boundaries (June 12, 2021)

Is there any research showing how reduced attendance during the 2020 pandemic affected the salmon and/or the bears?

As far as I know, there’s nothing publicly available yet. However, biologists at Katmai National Park expanded the bear-monitoring program last year to collect data that might help answer that question. It was an unexpected research opportunity to observe bears at Brooks River at a time of year when typically it is loaded with people.

Certainly the lack of people at the river in 2020, especially when the camp remained closed to the public, allowed bears more space to fish. The greatest influence on the distribution of bears last year, though, was salmon. The record run of sockeye salmon was overwhelming and it provided bears with ample feeding opportunities throughout the river. In a year with fewer fish, I don’t think we wouldn’t have seen bears using the lower river in early summer as much as they did in 2020, no matter how few people visited.

The bears at Brooks are perhaps more human-habituated than other bears. And yet, as 854 Divot’s story proves, they do wander outside the boundaries of the park, where they will encounter humans who don’t operate according to park rules. Can you offer some reassurance — or some insight — about how their human habituation might affect their fate outside park boundaries?

Habituation at Brooks River provides a bear with advantages. It allows access to parts of the river that may otherwise be off limits if the bear isn’t tolerant of people. At Brooks River, people are especially tolerant of bears too through both attitude and regulations designed to protect bears.

Outside the park, they may not encounter the same tolerance. Having a bear prowling outside your cabin at Brooks Camp is one thing. Having it do so near your children and pets is another.

If a habituated bear wanders into King Salmon, for example, its tolerance for humans may lead it to temptation in the form of unsecured food and trash. A habituated bear could more easily become conditioned to seek human foods in that situation. Bears encounter much greater risks around people in those places than they do at Brook Camp.

Some biologists I’ve spoken to speculate that habituation could be context specific. That is, a bear might be able to learn that people in one location are tolerant while people in another location are dangerous. I think this is plausible but I’m not yet convinced it works that way for most bears. Further research is needed.

Inspiration at Katmai Pass

/ Mike Fitz / 3 Comments

August 6, 2015. I stand at the crest of Katmai Pass, remarkably alone in an exceptionally quiet place, not having seen or spoken to a person in five days. Surrounded by wildness, I couldn’t help but think of the transformational moments that occurred here about 100 years before.

While wildlife such as brown bears take center stage in Katmai National Park today, volcanoes originally placed Katmai on the world map. Each national park is unique, but Katmai stands apart from all others for a landscape that did not exist before June 6, 1912.  

ovoid crusts of clay (lower right) lay on top of gray, orange, and brown pumice fields. snow covered mountains

An extinct fumarole in the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes.

On June 6, 1912, around 1 p.m. in the afternoon, Novarupta volcano exploded at the head of the isolated Ukak River valley. The eruption continued for 60 hours, plunging the region into darkness. It was the largest eruption of the 20th century and the fifth largest in recorded human history. Novarupta unleashed roughly 4 cubic miles of ash and 2.6 cubic miles of pyroclastic flows. In total, this represents 3 cubic miles of underground magma, an output greater than the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 and 30 times more than the eruption of Mount Saint Helens in 1980. The eruption drained a magma chamber underneath the 7,600-foot Mount Katmai, creating a 2,000 foot deep caldera, and flooded the area near Novarupta in hundreds of feet ash and pumice.

In the aftermath, the Katmai area, particularly the mainland Pacific coastline and interior regions near Mount Katmai became uninhabited. What seemed to be a wasteland, however, would soon inspire the movement to establish Katmai National Park.

Robert Griggs was a professor of botany at Ohio State University when, in 1915, he led a National Geographic Society expedition to explore vegetative recovery on Kodiak Island. About of foot of ash fell on Kodiak in 1912 and Griggs found the town “bleak and desolate” with only tall shrubs, trees, and hardy perennials surviving above the ash when he visited in 1913.

Upon his return to Kodiak in 1915, however, Griggs found a wholly different place. The island was verdant. As he recalled, “[I] could not . . . believe my eyes. It was not the same Kodiak I had left two years before. . . . I had come to study the revegetation, but I found my problem vanished in an accomplished fact.” Griggs concluded the foot-deep ash, rather than killing the hardy perennials underneath, served as a mulch that retained soil moisture and suppressed competition for space and nutrients.

Instead of remaining on Kodiak watching the grass grow, Griggs decided to explore the area closer to the eruption center with his remaining time. Landing in Katmai Bay with two expedition companions, Griggs discovered a strikingly different scene than the greenery of Kodiak, one that he described as an “entrance to another world.” It seemed the entire world was covered in ash. Traveling conditions were so difficult—they routinely encountered thigh-deep quicksand and dangerous river crossings—that the team could not ascend far up the valley. The little he saw, though, convinced Griggs that the area was worthy of further exploration.

The next year, 1916, Griggs returned determined to reach Mount Katmai, then thought to be the sole source of the 1912 eruption. His larger and better-equipped expedition slogged up valley that July and eventually climbed Mount Katmai, becoming the first people to gaze into its 2,000-foot deep caldera.

While on the caldera rim, Griggs thought he saw wisps steam wafting from the far side of the volcano. He would soon discover what lay on the other side but was wholly unprepared for what he saw. I’ll let this excerpt from my book, The Bears of Brooks Falls, describe what happened next.

July 31, 1916 was a tiresome day for Griggs and his two partners, Donovan Church and Lucius Folsom. Their legs remained fatigued from their second Mount Katmai climb and the ash beds offered little firm ground to stand on.

Not far from the highest point in Katmai Pass, Church gave out, “incapacitated by too many flapjacks at breakfast” and waited while Griggs and Folsom continued onward. Griggs’ first glimpse through the pass didn’t hint of much worth investigating except more ash and pumice, but just as he considered turning back a tiny puff of steam caught his attention. This fumarole, or volcanic gas vent, wasn’t particularly large, but the day was damp and chilly so Griggs used it practically, warming his hands in the condensing steam. Shortly afterward he spotted another plume rising from a larger fumarole in the distance. Curiosity hastened Griggs forward and he climbed a small hillock for a better vantage.

“The sight that flashed into view . . . was one of the most amazing visions ever beheld by mortal eye. The whole valley as far as the eye could reach was full of hundreds, no thousands—literally tens of thousands—of smokes curling up from its fissured floor.

“After a careful estimate, we judged there must be a thousand whose columns exceeded 500 feet. I tried to ‘keep my head’ and observe carefully, yet I exposed two films from my one precious roll in trying for pictures that I should’ve known were impossible. For a few moments we stood gaping at the awe inspiring vision before us…It was as though all the steam engines in the world, assembled together, had popped their safety valves at once and were letting off steam in concert.”

With the day waning and Church still waiting on the other side of Katmai Pass, Griggs and Folsom had little time to explore further, but this was truly virgin territory. No one had set foot in this valley since the eruption irreparably altered it. No one had felt the hot earth under their shoe leather or warmed their hands next to the fumaroles. No one had seen the eruption’s epicenter, the steaming dark gray lava dome Griggs would later name Novarupta. After roughly estimating the number and extent of visible fumaroles, he christened the landscape the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes.

Griggs didn’t return to his base camp until very late in the day. Despite his fatigue he found sleep impossible, his mind whirling with thoughts about the valley he had just found. The landscape was “unseen and unsuspected…until this hour…I had yet only a very inadequate conception of the place we had discovered, but I had seen enough to know that we had accidentally discovered one of the great wonders of the world. I recognized at once that the Katmai district must be made a great national park, accessible to all the people, like Yellowstone.”

black and white photo. man squats at center next to small steam vent. a snow capped mountain is o the horizon. text reads "190. The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. Photograph by L. G. Folsom. Warming my hands at the first little fumarole in the pass. These little sentinels of the Pass continued unchanged through 1918, but had gone out in 1919. It was the sight of these which led to the discovery of the Valley."

From the 1922 book The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes by Robert Griggs.

Griggs returned home later that summer and began immediately to lobby for a national park in the Katmai region. With the support of the National Geographic Society and their contacts in the federal government, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Katmai National Monument in 1918.

Standing in Katmai Pass about 100 years later, I thought of the moments that Griggs and Folsom experienced as they wandered into the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes for the first time. With the heat trapped in the ash and pumice having almost completely dissipated, there are no fumaroles in the pass today. Large lava flows from the southwest flank of Mount Trident, even fresher than the 1912 deposits, constrict the valley leading to the pass from the south. A wrinkled cryptogamic soil covers much of the pumice, anchoring the airy gravel in place. The veneer of glaciers on the nearby volcanoes has thinned as the climate continues to warm.

Still, the scene remains remarkably similar to that in which Griggs experienced. No roads or maintained trails snake their way into the Valley or the pass. The views are unimpaired. No light pollution reaches its night skies. In calm weather, your footsteps and heartbeat are often the only sounds—a quiet so immense that the rip of a jacket’s zipper feels like an intrusion. The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes is contradictory, both wholly different and very much the same as it was when it inspired Griggs to pursue permanent protection for a unique landscape on the face of the Earth.

In 1912, the Alaska Peninsula was forever changed. Rarely has a single event—one that humans witnessed—catalyzed the creation of a national park. If you’ve been fortunate enough to experience the sublimity of wild landscape then perhaps you’ve also experienced something akin to what Griggs felt at Katmai Pass in 1916.  The legacy of the discovery of the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes continues to shape the history of Katmai.

ash and pumice covered plain with hills

Looking north in Katmai Pass near the spot where Griggs and Folsom found their first fumarole. The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes is found just beyond Mount Cerberus at center.

three men stand in front of fumarole at lower left. A valley filled with many steaming fumaroles fills the rest of the middle ground. clouds and mountains fill the upper third

Taken in 1919, “Waiting for Supper to Cook” is perhaps the most iconic historic image of the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. From the 1922 book The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes by Robert Griggs.

canyons carved through pumice and ash on lower half of photo. mountains line horizon. low angled sunlight highlights depth of canyons

The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes near the confluence of Knife Creek and River Lethe.