Brown Bears of Katmai National Park and Preserve

Katmai is an American national park and Preserve, located in southern Alaska, notable for the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes and for its Brown Bears. The park and preserve encompass 4,093,077 acres (6,395.43 sq mi; 16,564.09 km²).  Most of the national park is a designated wilderness area. The park is named afterMount Katmai and is located on the Alaska Peninsula. The area was first designated a National Park in 1918 to protect the area around the major 1912 volcanic eruption of Novarupta, which formed the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, a 40-square-mile (100 km²), 100-to-700-foot-deep (30 to 213 m) pyroclastic flow.  The park includes as many as 18 individual volcanos, seven of which have been active since 1900.

Our daily activity fallowed the same pattern, Fly in to the source by float plane to reach the wilderness where the Salmon and bears are,  after our landing on the alpine lakes we hike around 5 to 6 miles looking for bear activity. This year it was a record salmon run, which slowed down the bear action. Usually the bears will migrates with the Salmon up the river to the spooning ground, but do to the abundance of salmon the bears were despairs along the river with longer hikes to reach the action activity.