Bears Hate Selfies

For the first time (but hopefully not the last), a guest post! This one is (mostly) written by Nick, who recently starred in the post about walking the rivers. (Fun upcoming note: Rylee and Cheryl have also indicated interest in writing guest posts. Now all I have to do is bat my eyes and/or cattle prod them until they actually do. LE Jim has so far refused, and I have yet to convince LE Mike, but I'm trying.) As a disclaimer, I did editorialize this a bit. Anything in blue  is Nick, and anything in black is me, and square brackets [ ] mean I took something out that he wrote, for whatever reason. Here we go! On one of my days off [ ], I wanted to go on an adventure. I really like Brooks Camp; it's a unique and interesting place that doesn’t seem like it would exist on planet Earth. It’s known to have one of the highest concentrations of very large brown bears in the world roaming closely alongside numerous visitors and staff each day. Bears and people coexist here and with surp...

Map and info placed by the NPS at the start of the trail     You may remember from a previous post my adventure hiking Mount Dumpling early in the season; The cow parsnip (poison ivy on steroids) towering over my head, and all the wild unpleasantness. In case you've forgotten, back in July, on one of my off days, I attempted the hike with one of the Law Enforcement Rangers (Jim). Dumpling is about the only hike you can do on a single-day trip to Katmai, because it's relatively close to Brooks Camp (whereas the Valley hikes are 20-something miles in before you even GET there) and is only about four and a half miles each way, with an elevation gain of somewhere around 2,300 feet. Nine mile hike round trip. No problem, right?          To get to the trailhead from the Visitor Center, you follow this lovely little trail to the campground. Why is the trail so lovely? Because it's frequently traveled. By bears. Nine times out of ten when I've tried to use tha...

      Another day, another day out. This time it was my day off, so it was all just for the fun of it, with nothing work-related expected of me. I'd bullied the LE boys into taking me on another adventure. I don't know where Mike and Jim originally intended to go, but remembering the creek we hadn't had time to explore, I overruled both of them (how I was so frequently allowed to do that, I still have no idea) and we agreed to go back. I was in my cabin, suiting up for the inevitable fall(s) into a creek filled with dead fish and bears, when there was a knock on the door.      I figured it was the LE boys telling me to hurry up already, so I hollered out a few probably inappropriate things, flung open the door, and almost ran right into a very startled Nick.     So a few points of clarification here: this is NOT the Ranger Nick from Denali. This is one of the Bear Techs here at Katmai, charged with making wild bears mind arbitrary boundaries and r...

Flyer by Rylee     Covid precautions meant that most of the Katmai traditions had to be skipped this year. We'd had a Fourth of July party outside, but had almost immediately been read the riot act about large gatherings. Fancy First Fridays (when everyone who is off duty gets all dolled up and hangs out on the first Friday of each month) were still sort of happening, though not on the usual scale, and Cheryl and I had missed almost all of them. Katmai Halloween fell on a day during the park shutdown, so anyone who was IN the park was pretty much under house arrest in their cabins. It had been a rather depressing year for any park employee who thrived in social settings.      To lift spirits, LE Mike decided we should have an art show. Most everyone's first reaction was to protest their total lack of artistic abilities. Aside from our two resident artists (Rylee, and Maintenance Nick), most of us were fairly hopeless. Stick figures stretched the limits of our ab...