Why does one travel? For me it’s the places you see and the excitement of somewhere new. For both Mike and I, it was also our opportunity to visit our 50th state. And it’s also the people you meet, and we met a lot of wonderful people in Alaska. Our adventure to Lake Clark National Park, one of the least visited in our amazing park system and only accessible by boat or bush plane, began in Homer, Alaska, at the Destination Alaska office on Lake Beluga. We met our fellow adventurers, Caitlyn, whose husband is serving in the army in Fairbanks, and Caitlyn’s parents, Paul and Audrey.Â
After a very short ride to the Homer airfield, we met William, our pilot. A self-described prima dona, he spends just six weeks every summer flying for Northwind Aviation, shuttling tourists and film crews off the grid, or workers on various charter flights to who knows where. He’s flown in Dubai, the Virgin Islands and all over, including his home state of North Carolina.
Our ride was a DeHavilland Beaver, built in the forties and designed for just this type of flight. Take-offs and landings are exceptionally short; by my estimation less than 200 feet in the right conditions. So just like that, we were up in the air, climbing to 10,000 feet and headed for Lake Clark.
The flight over is maybe thirty minutes where we circled Mt. Iliamna, an active volcano, with two sulfur vents steaming near its 10,006 foot peak. We could practically reach out and touch the mountain and could definitely smell the sulfur. After a brief and stunning tour of the mountains and glaciers, we found a valley that leads to Chinitna Bay, circled and landed on the beach.
After only a ten-minute walk we found ourselves staring in awe of 19 Coastal Brown Bears feasting on the protein rich grasses off the beach and fattening themselves up for the coming winter.
The photos below are a just a snippet of what we saw and fail to do justice to the beauty of Lake Clark National Park and the majesty of the brown bear. Simply an amazing animal, both powerful and lazy, ferocious and beautiful and completely ambivalent to our presence.
