Da Bears

I’ve uploaded a brief video of some of the Scenic and Bear footage from last week's SE Alaska trip. Though the trip wasn't much of a success for Brown Bears, I did quite well with the Black Bears at Anan Creek near Wrangell. There is a tiny bit of aerial footage in the video, but it was not made with my Quadcopter. It is from a float plane. There's some footage from the ferries that I took from Ketchikan to Wrangell and from Wrangell to Juneau. There's also some footage from the small fast boats that I took to Anan Creek and to Le Conte Glacier. The glacier was difficult to film because it was a very gray soggy day, but in some scenes, that actually makes the blue glacial ice bergs seem to glow against the monochromatic background. You can see the video on this site in the Wildlife section or directly on my Vimeo channel at www.Vimeo.com/fishtales/alaskabears

Drone Demo

I did a demo of the DJI Inspire at the retirement community where my Mom lives. I thought the residents might be interested in getting a first hand look at a drone since they hear about them on the news all the time. Unfortunately, about all you hear on the news is something sensational, and usually negative. Some people were surprised at how small it was ( a couple actually thought pilots rode inside the drone). I explained that mine was fairly large for a Quad and that most of them out there were only a couple pounds of plastic and not any bigger than a Seagull. I also told them that most of the bad press that drones are getting come from idiots doing stupid things. So now at least one group of people knows that drones aren’t the evil menace that the media is making them out to be.

Here’s a “Dronie” of the group that attended the demo:

Pack Creek Bears Cancelled

Well, my trip to Pack Creek today for Brown Bears was cancelled due to inclement weather. The whole area is socked in with drizzly overcast that’s too low to call clouds and too high to call fog. we waited at the airport for a couple hours,but finally they cancelled the flight. So no significant number of Brown Bears this trip for my library. I’ll have to start thinking about a plan B.

Corner Bay and Kook Lake

Today’s mission was Non-Habituated Brown Bears on Chichagof Island. All bears in Alaska are wild, but there are degrees of wild. In places like Anan Creek, the Bears are habituated to the presence of Humans. They generally go about their business as long as the humans don’t bother them too much. Non-Habituated Bears, on the other hand, are not used to being near Humans, and are likely to react in more extremes. The place I went today with Pack Creek Bear Tours is a very remote location that doesn’t see very much Human presence. There is a logging operation in the area that practices very low impact sustainable methods, and there are Forrest Service employees that count the Sockeye Salmon returning to Kook Lake to Spawn, but that’s about it. There are many Bears in the area, and they are pretty much undisturbed.

This is the area we went into today. We flew from Juneau to Corner Bay on Chichagof Island by float plane. Then we went to Kook Lake on an old logging road to see the Salmon counting weir and followed the creek down for a mile or so. We met the two Forrest Service workers who stay at Kook lake in a Wall Tent for 10 days at a time to monitor the Salmon counting weir and the equipment in it that does the actual counting. Then we hiked downstream to check out three different observation points that Pack Creek Bear Tours have cleared out. We also inspected one of the Karst caves in the area. The stream coming out of Kook Lake goes underground through Karst caves in several places. The Salmon swim upstream through these caves to get to the lake. Hmm… seems like an interesting dive expedition.

We had our expectations of seeing Bears tempered prior to the trip. The Bears are shy and close encounters were not anticipated (or hoped for). Despite that, we did manage to spot 5 different Bears. One in the Corner Bay estuary just as soon as we got off the float plane. The second was on Corner Creek as we were coming back out of the area. The other three were a Mother and two little cubs that we saw along the shore at Pavlof Harbor just after we landed the Float Plane. We had stopped at Pavlof to see if we could get the plane in close enough to hike to the falls and look for more bears, but we didn’t even need to get off the place to see them.

I have “record shots” of all five Bears to prove that I saw them, but all but the one on Corner Creek were really too far away to get a quality scene. I only got couple scenes of the one at Corner Creek, but they are nice ones and the setting is beautifully primeval.

Here is Corner Bay on Chichagof Island:


This is the only way to get there:


Here is a very distant Bear that we saw shortly after docking the float plane:


This is Kook Lake where pairs of Forrest Service workers man the fish counting weir for 10 day shifts:


This is the source of the stream that the Salmon navigate to arrive at the lake:


Some Alders near Corner Creek. This is a very green place this time of year:


Corner Creek:




This is the Bear we saw looking for a Salmon dinner on Corner Creek:


Another view of the Bear just before it became aware of our presence and scampered up the other side of the creek:

Ferry to Juneau

I honestly don’t know why people spend so much money on Alaskan Cruises when you can see the same stuff for a fraction of the cost by taking one of the Alaska State Marine Highway ferries. They are as big as a cruise ship, quite comfortable and have good food. Since you pay by the meal, you also don’t feel obligated to stuff yourself:<) I had a very pleasant ride from Wrangell to Juneau today, with a brief stop in Petersburg. The day started rainy, but gradually improved slightly as we made out way North. There were a few Whales and Orcas around, but too far to really get a good shot, though people were trying with their iPhones:<)

The trip started with heavy overcast in the Narrows:


Later, the sky started to break up into interesting clouds:


We even had a couple rainbows. This one is pretty subtle, but I was in the rainy part at the time:


And a couple of actual sections of blue sky showing through:

Le Conte Glacier

It was a gray day in Wrangell. The low misty clouds seemed to suck the color out of everything. Even the Evergreens looked like charcoal. It probably wasn’t the best day to see Le Conte Glacier, but it was the only time I had to do it, so I went despite the weather. It rained pretty much continuously, so lots of shots just didn’t work. To top it off, it was a bit windy so there was no hope of shielding my lens from rain drops. But I did manage to get a few useable shots and video scenes. They just look more like winter than summer. I guess if I have to get shots with a wintery look, it’s better to do it when it’s 60 degrees than when it’s 20.

Le Conte Bay was formed by the receding Glacier of the same name:


There are dozens of waterfalls from the perpetual ice fields atop the mountains:


One of the most interesting things about Glacial Ice is the color it shows due to the extreme compression:








This is the face of the Glacier. The Icebergs calve off of the face, but I didn’t see anything sizable break off:


Some of the smaller floating pieces look like Ice Sculptures. This looks like it could be trimmed up a little bit and make a good Salmon:

Anan Creek Day 2

I went to Anan Creek Bear Observatory for my second day with the Bears. They did a little bit better fishing today than they did yesterday. It seemed like there were quite a few more Salmon trying to make their run up the falls today. So when the Bears did get one, they got it fairly fast and easily. In the afternoon, the run seemed to slack off a bit, so the Bears spent a lot of time waiting like yesterday. I also filmed quite a few Eagles today. They seemed to be in a particularly scenic state of mind.

Had a little bit of sun on the creek above the falls for a few minutes:


Here are One, Two and Three Eagles hanging out near the creek:






Here’s a really close one. It hung out on a branch about 25 feet from the observation deck for an hour:


Lots of Salmon trying to make it up the falls today:


Caught one:


Surrounded by Salmon:


Got another:

Anan Creek Bears

Today was my first day searching for Bears. In all fairness, all I really had to do was get on Breakaway Adventures sleek jet boat and they did the rest. The Anan Creek Bear Observatory is about 40 miles from Wrangell by boat. It takes about an hour to get there, then about 30 minutes to hike in to the falls where you can watch the bears fish. Most of the Bears at Anan Creek are Black Bears, but there are a few Brown Bears (what we call Grizzly Bears in the South). I saw a Mother Brown Bear with three cubs on the other side of the creek, but she didn’t stop to fish there. The cubs were almost as big as an adult Black Bear already. The creek is loaded with Pink Salmon working their way upstream to their spawning grounds. When they reach an obstacle, such as a big rapid or small waterfall, they stack up below waiting their turn to run up, then they stack up above to rest before they move on. There are so many Salmon in Anan Creek, that they obscure the view of the creek bed in places. So the pickings are good for the Bears, and that’s a good thing because one of the things that surprised me the most today is how inept they were at fishing. I only saw one Bear actually get a fish out of the creek, and one had a really near miss. The rest of the time, they seemed to be just hanging around waiting for a fish to commit suicide by swimming into their paws. Lots of fishing, but not much catching. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what it’s like when I go out fishing.

The boat ride to Anan Creek is very scenic. It was a misty morning with some interesting fog and low clouds. I tried a few shots from the boat. I wasn’t sure if HDR was going to work while running at 40 knots, but it’s not bad:




This is the lower Anan Creek estuary where the Salmon first enter the stream:


Here is the rainforest that you hike through to get to the Bears, though you can (and we did) encounter a Bear anywhere along the trail:


There are tons of Eagles hanging around waiting for some scraps of Salmon that the Bears leave. They can also catch their own, and after spawning season when the Salmon all die, they really clean up:


Mostly Black Bears at Anan, but I did see one Brown Bear Mom and three Cubs. Here’s Mom:


And here are two on the Cubs:


Here’s a couple of Black Bears fishing. I know it doesn’t look like they are fishing, there are no cans of beer or even a cooler in sight:


This looks like a good place to fish:


I think I got one:


Hey, Where’d it go???:


It was just here???:


Aw Gee, all I got was a mouthful of water. You should have seen the one that got away:


And finally, I now have definitive photographic evidence that a Bear does shit in the woods:

Ferry to Wrangell

Today I flew from Portland to Ketchikan Alaska, then took one of the big Alaska State Marine Highway ferries to Wrangell. What a difference a few days (and a few thousand miles) make. I’ve traded the blistering heat of the Southwest deserts for the cool misty Alaskan Panhandle. The journey to Wrangell takes about 6 hours, and the ferry is on the inside passage the whole time so you have continuous islands on both sides of the boat. Tomorrow I will see if I can find some Bears to film.

A few of the views on the ferry voyage:

Canyon Lands

Here is the second video offering from my recent Southwestern Deserts and Canyons trip. The first one was all aerial footage. This one is all terrestrially based. It includes some of the same locations that I filmed from the air, but also some places that you can't fly such as US National Parks (not drone friendly), and places that would be impractical such as the slot canyons in Arizona (Antelope Canyon and Cathedral Canyon). You can watch the video here on this site in the Travel Films tab, or directly on my Vimeo channel at www.Vimeo.com/fishtales/canyonlands.

Canyonaire

I just uploaded a short video that is the first production to come of my Southwest Canyon’s and deserts loop. It's 100% aerial footage. I did a lot of flying with my DJI Inspire for the first time since I had radio issues with it in Africa. After 6 weeks at DJI, it was returned to me with much better range. Before, I was only getting about 100 meters out before I was encountering weak signal warnings. It's all better now and I did a number of flights that were over 1km out! You can watch the video here on this site in the Travel tab, or directly on my Vimeo channel at www.Vimeo.com/fishtales/canyonaire. Hope you enjoy the flight!

Closed the loop

Well, I’m back in Oregon after a loop through the Southwest of nearly 4000 miles when you count all of the little side trips. Now I have the task of doing something useful with all of the footage and photos from the trip.

Here is my approximate route, excluding the little jaunts off the beaten path: