Bear Watching in Hyder, AK

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Most of this post will be about our bear watching today. We went to watch the bears both early this morning and late this evening.

Before we headed out for the day we noticed the fog was not as thick as it had been so we could see a mountain behind our coach this morning.

This is looking just past our coach. You can see the fog is high on the mountain.

We also got a picture of Stewart's welcoming sign. Cute!

 This is a map of the bear viewing area in Hyder, AK. The bears frequent fish creek and the lagoon at the top left of the picture.

This is the view of Fish Creek from one end looking back at the beginning of the viewing platform. Below is the lagoon (as seen from the viewing platform) where bears are also seen.

It started raining steadily not long after we arrived. The bears don't care what the weather is like unless it is hot then they lay low until the day cools off.

 Early this morning we saw this pretty good sized black bear. We were told that the brown/grizzly bears do NOT like the black bears so we will likely not see both kinds of bears at the same time.

 Look at those eyes. It looks like he is eyeing us.

 He ended up eating a salmon carcass left by the gulls or another bear. The rangers told us that a brown bear might pull several salmon out of the creek and throw them on the shore before they stop to eat one of them.

Here goes the black bear trying to catch a live fish. Wish I could post videos but blogger does not accept them at this time.

A very wet bald eagle showed up eating the scraps left by the bear.

The black bear came out again. He went into the bushes without another catch. 

A little bit later near the lagoon, this mother black bear and her twin cubs appeared. There were lots of people on the viewing platform and making so much noise that the mother left her cubs (to distract us from the cubs). The ranger was trying to get everyone to be still and quiet.

Here are the twin cubs hiding in the tall grass.
    We left early this morning without breakfast so after a couple of hours we went home to have breakfast.

It rained almost all day so we stayed home and I worked on the blog. I was able to catch up on my posts. We went back to view the bears after dinner.

A big brown bear/grizzly fishing for dinner. Below...success!

He took a break from eating to look around. This is a BIG brown bear/grizzly.

We got to watch a couple of brown bears catch fish several times each.  

We had a truly blessed evening. It finally got too dark to take pictures but we stayed a little longer.  What a wonderful way to end another truly blessed day!