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: