Mike & Kris - Enjoying The Ride

Our journey continued as we left the Kenai Peninsula and made our way back to Anchorage. We parked our trailer for several days and caught a plane to the town of King Salmon, Alaska. It’s a small community of around 200 people that is only accessible by boat or plane. The reason for our side trip?? We wanted to visit the famous Brooks Falls at Katmai National Park which is also only accessible by boat or plane. A lot of people fly to Katmai from Homer or Anchorage but they only get a couple of hours in the park. By flying out to King Salmon and staying overnight in a cabin, we were able to get to Katmai on a boat and spend around 10 hours in the park. It was definetly worth it. Katmai National Park is home to over 2000 brown bears and many of them come to Brooks Falls to eat salmon.

The park has a lodge with a restaurant and not much else. But at the end of the trail are a series of viewing platforms that let visitors hang out with the bears. And so that is what we did. We spent all our time on the platforms watching bears come and go.

At one point we counted 11 bears all at once but it varied a lot over the course of a day.

They could care less that we were all watching them. All they did was look for the next salmon. Enjoy the pictures of bears being bears.

We couldn’t decide if they were playing or fighting but no blood was shed.

Look at the paws!

The picture with the Mama and cubs sleeping was the first ones we came across and they were right below the platform. The picture above is another mama bear but her cubs are older. It was amazing!

We had also arranged to hire a salmon fishing guide while in King Salmon. I wasn’t totally sold on this idea but thought it might be fun. We were surprised at how fun it was. The river was jam packed with salmon so everyone on our boat caught their limit within a few hours. It is called “flossing” and the salmon basically swim into the fishing line! It’s still really exciting and would do it again. As you can tell from our warddrobe, the weather was rainy, cloudy, and cool but we didn’t care. Next time we travel to Alaska, we will put King Salmon on our list again.

The cooler weather continued when we arrived back in Anchorage but we tried to get out and drive around. We headed to Whittier which is a cruise ship stop but the weather never cleared and not much to do or see in the rain. You do have to travel through a train tunnel to get there though and that was interesting!

Oh well, Whittier will have to stay on our list of places to see next time.

Finally the sun came out as we were on our way to Valdez.

It is 300 miles from Anchorage and it is a spectacular drive. It is a beautiful port community with unbelievable views.

We have been enjoying the drives, the boats, the food, and watching the fishing from the docks. They even have a salmon hatchery that provides a lot of wildlife viewing. The salmon are churning up the water as they try and move upstream and the sea lions (we counted 9 at one time) are feasting as fast as they can.

Tomorrow we leave Valdez and make our way towards Wrangell-St. Elias National Park-the largest national park in the country at 16 million acres. It is our last stop before we start making our way towards Canada and the start of our journey home.