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Katmai National Park

By Scott Richardson

February 10^th, 2026

I didn’t travel to the wilderness to wait for a restaurant pager to go off.

For years, Katmai National Park lived in my mind through the lens of Brooks Falls: the iconic, calendar-perfect image of bears snatching salmon from mid-air. When I committed to visiting every U.S. National Park, Brooks seemed like the logical choice. It offered lodging, regular flights, and a controlled environment that made the presence of massive bruins feel manageable.

However, the dream shifted ten months before our departure. While drifting on a houseboat in the deep silence of Voyageurs National Park, my wife passed me a National Geographic with an article by Acacia Johnson. She described Brooks Camp as a place where floatplanes lined the beach like taxis and visitors were handed restaurant pagers to wait for a turn on the viewing platforms. Sitting there in the fog-drenched solitude of the Voyageurs, a place where we’d seen only a handful of people on our week-long visit, the idea of a "bear spectacle" felt wrong. We didn't just want to see bears; we wanted to watch them up close, undisturbed by the chorus of hundreds of camera shutters.

That article sparked a pivot. No longer were we willing to gamble on campground lotteries, hunt for elusive lodge openings, or settle for a rushed day-trip. We didn't want a glimpse of Katmai; we wanted to live within it.

Seeking a more visceral connection to the landscape, we found an outfitter to take us to the coast. Here, for decades, a quiet understanding has existed between bears and humans: we are neither food nor foe. Visitors carefully observe bear behavior, avoid disturbing the bears, and remain vigilant with food storage and scent control. By stripping away the physical buffers of platforms and fences, we weren't just observing the bruins; we were entering their world on their terms.

I scoured pages of search results, wading through generic resellers and offshore boat tours with price tags ranging from "a stretch" to a budget-breaking five figures. Wanting a reputable guide who respected park ethics, I turned to the National Park Service’s commercial directory. That’s where I found Scott and Jackie Stone, a wildlife photographer couple who had spent nine seasons living among the coastal brown bears.

Scott’s philosophy was simple: he believed that proximity fosters a mutual respect impossible to find behind a barricade. He promised an immersive marathon, observing bear behavior from sunrise until the midnight sun dipped low. It sounded exhausting and exhilarating: a raw, relatively affordable camp experience that finally felt authentic. A few emails later, we were booked.

We departed Kodiak mid-morning in a 1950s De Havilland Beaver. It was our third time starting a journey by floatplane, a ritual that signals you are entering a wilderness few will ever see. By timing our arrival with high tide, the pilot taxied close to shore, allowing us to offload our gear just steps from camp.

Our safety orientation, held behind the electrified wire fence surrounding our campsite, was almost immediately interrupted by four passing bears. They were sauntering along the exact line of alders the guides had just designated as our "restroom" area, a stark reminder that we were now guests in their home.

The camp itself was tightly clustered: a group of sleeping tents, a central shelter for meals, and a small, private enclosure housing a five-gallon bucket with a toilet seat. Camp was comfortable: well-stocked with more than a dozen freeze-dried meal choices, a snack bucket, and Starlink internet, which I did my best to ignore, seeking a quieter experience away from the populated world.

Restless and eager, Kirsten and I wandered back to the beach. The Katmai coast experiences some of the world's most dramatic tidal shifts, draining half the bay at low tide to reveal a vast, muddy expanse. There’s a native Alaskan proverb: "When the tide is out, the table is set." Sure enough, we soon found our first lone brown bear methodically digging for clams in the mud.

After dinner, we trekked into the basin for the first time. The social hierarchy of the bay was immediately apparent: a sow, pursued by a persistent boar, sprinted directly toward our group. Viewing us as a non-threatening shield, she sought refuge near our group as the boar finally abandoned his chase.

Our guides, who have spent a decade naming and tracking the bears, pointed out a sow named Shelly. Her three "cubs of the year" (COYs) were a whirlwind of activity, relentlessly wrestling in the grass while their mother grazed, entirely indifferent to our presence.

The mood shifted when Shelly caught the scent of a nearby boar. She huffed in distress, a warning that the cubs' lives were at risk. and pulled her young close.

Only once the threat faded did she relax. In a tender display of relief, Shelly sat upright to nurse her cubs before collapsing into a nap of pure exhaustion.

We lingered in the basin as the bears grazed, watching the sun finally dip behind the peaks at 11:00 PM. By the time we trekked back into camp at 12:30 AM, the sky was still bathed in a perpetual dusk.

A light rain settled in the next day, blurring the edges of the basin as we trekked seven miles through the mist. Our persistence paid off when we crossed paths with Shelly and her cubs once more, a familiar family in the vast wilderness.

After a river crossing, we paused to watch two boars engage in a heavy-handed tussle. They traded swats and tested each other's strength before the tension broke, and they drifted their separate ways into the tall grass.

Two bears, Bella and Sidewall lay sprawled in the tall grass, lazily army-crawling from one patch of sedge to the next. In a reversal of the usual roles, Bella seemed to be courting Sidewall, following him for attention, but in the afternoon heat, neither could be bothered to act on the attraction.

As the tide receded, we hiked to the beach to find two adolescent males locked in a mock battle. Their lazy wrestling was just mimicry, a low-stakes rehearsal of the brutal scuffles they would one day endure over territory or a mate.

Despite heavy rain, a few of us set out on a late-night trek, hoping to find wolves. But as the rain intensified and soaked through my layers, we surrendered to the weather a mile in. I stripped down and draped my gear inside the group tent, but by morning, my clothes were still soaked through.

The next morning, our guide Ian led the group out, while Scott and Jackie remained in camp to assist a BBC camera crew scheduled to arrive mid-morning.

Though the rain seemed to quiet the basin, we eventually found Shelly and her cubs near a small pond. The peaceful moment turned tense when another group approached from the opposite side, inadvertently boxing her in. We waited in silence, holding our position until she settled and the other group retreated. Once the threat of the "crowd" vanished, Shelly regained her composure, sat back, and nursed her cubs in the grass.

A fresh set of wolf tracks on the beach led like a dotted line straight back to our campsite.

After lunch, we pushed deeper into the basin in hopes of a sighting, but the wolves remained invisible.

The bears, however, were anything but. We had several close encounters on the trek: a bear named Squinty sauntered past within petting distance, and another circled us entirely as we lay motionless in the grass, an extremely surreal experience to be that close to a seven-foot-tall bear weighing nearly 1,000 pounds.

On our final day, we shifted our focus to the beach, hoping to catch the bears clamming. When the morning tide left the shoreline empty, we retreated into the basin for one last look, only to return later and find Shelly and her cubs far out on the tidal flats. As the water rushed in, it pushed the family toward us; the cubs wrestled in the sand and dug for snacks, scrambling toward their mother every time the rising surf nipped at their paws.

We tucked behind a rocky outcrop to see what the tide might deliver. A sow emerged first, ambling within twenty yards, the closest I had been to a bear all week. She was followed by a curious fox that entertained us by scratching and tumbling as it made its way toward us. Eventually, we followed a bear into a meadow of lupine, where the tall grass would have hid the bear completely if we hadn’t seen it enter. Exhausted by the sheer number of bear encounters we’d had in four days, I drifted off for a quick nap as we watched the bears graze.

At high tide, the buzz of floatplanes signaled the end. We helped the next group unload before climbing into the cabin for the flight across the Shelikof Strait. As we soared toward Kodiak, the island’s electric blue water and jagged cliffs rose to meet us, a final reminder of the scale we had dared to step into.