Weekend Window to Katmai National Park
Sept. 20, 2009— -- Katmai National Park and Preserve, in southern Alaska, is home to the greatest concentration of grizzly bears in the world.
Katmai is the place made famous by the documentary film "Grizzly Man," on the strange life and death of Timothy Treadwell, a bear lover who lived with bears in the wild until one took his life.
Grizzly bears are the largest land predators on Earth – topping 1,000 pounds and standing as tall as 10 feet. Alaskans refer to the bears in Katmai that live near the water, and have learned to make use of marine resources, like salmon and clams, as brown bears. Bears that remain 100 miles or more inland are refered to as Grizzlies.
ABC News Producer Michael Harris traveled to Katmai National Park for "GMA" Weekend's "Weekend Window" series. Here's his account of the trip:
I prepped for the shoot at Katmai by calling a colleague at National Geographic Channel, veteran filmmaker Mark Emery, who's been shooting in Alaska for some 30 years.
I asked Emery about the technical challenges of shooting bears in Katmai -- what kind of lenses are needed, how long the shots would have to be, will the photographer be 100 yards away from the bears? Two-hundred yards?
"How about 10 feet away?" Emery laughed. He said to coach the ABC News photographer, Kevin Ely, not to get spooked if he's shooting in one direction and a bear strolls past him from behind.
"Tell Kevin to just stay put," Emery said, "And they'll just keep walking by him."
Emery also suggested bringing an umbrella.
"For rain?" I asked.
"No," he said. "When the bears get too close, sometimes when you open an umbrella, they back off."
To get to Katmai National Park, the crew took an Alaska Airlines flight from Seattle to Anchorage, and then a PenAir prop plane to a small town on the Naknek River called King Salmon.
Our journey into bears then involved an Otter -- a DeHavilland Otter float plane, to be exact -- and a foggy half-hour flight between the snow-capped peaks of the Alaska Peninsula, over the vast Naknek Lake and into the heart of this vast volcanic wilderness, to Brooks Camp and Lodge.
The lodge was founded in 1950 by Alaska aviation legend Ray Petersen in what's considered one of the best salmon and trout fishing spots in Alaska – the mile-long Brooks River.
The bears of Katmai love the fishing here, too. They're usually solitary animals -- but it seems that every bear in the expansive park congregates at this spot in July and September to feed on the sockeye salmon. You'll see as many as 80 or more of these massive creatures at a time. It's a scene unequaled anywhere else in the world.
