Saign and I have a goal to visit every US National Park together. In 2020 and 2021 we took road trips from Washington State to cover parks that were driveable-ish from our home. If our lives hadn’t changed so much in the last year, I suspect we would have taken our adorable truck camper on some new adventures to cover a few more parks. But, I decided that with the current gas prices and my new flight benefits, the most logical choice would be to cover some of the parks that we wouldn’t want to take a camper to. Enter: The Alaska National Parks!
There are eight national parks in Alaska, and only 3 are accessible by car! Oh hey! My flight benefits will work out great in this scenario. I started reading about the parks (This blog is one of the best resources on how to visit the parks on a budget IMO), and definitely the most exciting park to visit (from what I could tell) would be Katmai National Park. Why? It’s basically full of brown bears and you get to see them play and eat and fight and get pretty close to them and it just sounded magical and amazing.
But as I read more, visiting in 2022 seemed impossible. I started thinking about this trip a few weeks before I planned to go. Katmai is so popular that usually you have to get camping sites booked on January 5th, the date that they go on sale, and quite often even if you try to book as soon as they go on sale on January 5th, you won’t get camping permits. Ho-hum. I decided I’d have to save the Magical Katmai Bears for 2023…or so I thought! About 2 weeks before our trip, I happened to be up later than I should have been and I happened to go to recreation.gov and find camping permits for one night during the time I had off of work! I quickly paid for the permits and was so excited!
The next day, I did more research and learned that August (which is when we had permits) was not the best time to go to Katmai. July and September are when the salmon are running the strongest and when most bears can be seen. I hoped and prayed I’d still get to see some. Even if I got up close to just one, I thought it would be worth it.
To get to Katmai, there are commercial flights (free for my family and I on my flight benefits) to a town called King Salmon, but from there you have to take either a boat or a seaplane to Katmai. The boat at the time was $320, and the plane $350. As a family of three, and as someone who is very frugal, I considered this to be quite an expense. I really really really wanted to see bears if we paid nearly $1000 to get just 24 hours at the park! It felt risky to pay all that money to visit at a time that was not considered ideal.
It also felt a bit risky flying standby to King Salmon: if the planes there were fully booked, we’d miss out on our seaplane and our bears! I looked into staying in King Salmon the night before to give us a little insurance that we’d be able to board our seaplane on time, but all the hotels were booked up AND expensive AND quite frankly didn’t look very nice. There was camping that we probably could have done. Camping that was $150 a night + charged us extra to take showers!
In the end, while it felt risky, I decided that we would fly into King Salmon on the day we had camping reservations in Katmai. I was a bit nervous about things falling apart. In addition to the concern of not getting to the seaplane on time, seaplanes are not safe to fly in many weather conditions, so I was hoping and praying the weather would cooperate.
On August 3rd, we made our way safely to King Salmon! Buuut…then there was the matter of our baggage. We checked our camping gear and food and really didn’t have many options if our baggage didn’t arrive. Thankfully, our baggage arrived, and our driver from the seaplane company arrived, and everything was going smoothly. I was so excited! But still worried the bears might not be around.
Our seaplane was supposed to take off at 2pm, but the company told us, “We’ll probably be able to get you there sooner.” And they did! They took just our family in our own little seaplane an hour early! As we were loading into the plane, the pilot asked, “Does anyone want to ride in the cockpit?” ME ME ME ME!
It was super awesome flying below the clouds on the way to Katmai! Our pilot did a few turns that I thought were for our entertainment. Later I learned that they WERE for our entertainment, but it was because he was trying to show us a moose. I didn’t see it!
As we flew in towards Naknek Lake to land, there they were: Two brown bears just chilling on the beach!
My dreams were coming true! The magical Katmai Bears were there ready to meet me! So so so cool!
After we landed on the beach and were shuffled away from the bears, we got to attend “Bear School,” a requirement for all visitors to Katmai National Park where they teach you how to be safe around the bears. When you’re done with bear school they give you a cute little bear pin to show that you graduated.
From there, we headed off to the campground to set up our tent and THANKFULLY found a crazy excessive amount of camp stove fuel up for grabs (since you can’t fly with camp stove fuel we flew in hoping that we’d be able to score some at the campers exchange). From there, we went to look for bears!
The main spot to see bears is at Brooks Falls, which is a 1.2 mile walk from Brooks Camp. We walked a tiny bit over a bridge on the way to Brooks Falls and found several bears wading in the river, including some juvenile bears who were VERY noisy and upset when their mother wouldn’t share her salmon with them. So cool!
From there we hiked on up towards the Brooks Falls platform where we put our name on a list to be granted access to the Brooks Falls platform to watch the bears. They limit the platform to 40 people, so often during the day there’s a wait to go out to see the bears. Once you’re on the platform, you’re allowed 30 minutes to sit and observe and take pictures before your turn is up. Apparently during peak times that wait can be 2 hours+! Thankfully, we visited during shoulder season, so our longest wait to the platform was 15 minutes. While waiting, there was another platform where we were able to go observe bears, and even that platform was absolutely amazing. We saw tons of bears! I felt so lucky!
We finally got to the Brooks Falls platform where we watched bears playing and eating and lazing and salmon attempting to make their way up river, over a small waterfall (the Brooks Falls) to spawn. It was super cool! We got to see all sorts of different fishing techniques and disagreements between the bears and two adorable bear cubs.
And…that’s pretty much how our time at Brooks Falls went. We stared at bears a LOT. It was super cool! We learned that there are a lot of day-trippers to Katmai (since getting campsites is so difficult, and the lodge is crazy expensive and also difficult to book), so at night when the day-trippers left, we could watch the bears in a less crowded environment (when we were there, they weren’t restricting entrance to the Brooks Falls platform in the evening, so we could stay as long as we wanted. In the evening, I counted 27 bears at one time from the Brooks Falls platform. It was so cool!
I do wish that we had gotten two nights at Katmai, because that would have allowed all the glorious bear watching that we did, plus we could have gone for a hike at the Valley of 10,000 Smokes, which looks pretty cool in pictures. But even with just 24 hours, I still think it was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in my life! Given the seaplane cost, I do see this as a once-in-a-lifetime thing to do, and don’t think I could justify spending the money to return to see the bears again, or to get the Valley of 10,000 Smokes hike in.
All-in-all, 10 Stars, would highly recommend visiting Katmai National Park!
Adventure Fam 