The Pebble Mine

The Pebble Mine is a proposed project by a multi-national conglomerate that wants to mine gold and copper from the head of Bristol Bay, Alaska.  If built, the Pebble Mine would be the largest open pit mine in North America and would leave behind a mile-wide hole along with tons of toxic waste.  This is bad enough, but the placement of the mine is even worse.  They want to put this mine at the headwaters of the two richest Sockeye Salmon runs in the world.

The mine will be exhausted in fifty years leaving behind toxic waste that, if not contained properly, could easily destroy not only the salmon runs but many other species (such as Beluga whales) that live in the nearby Cook Inlet.  To compound the ridiculousness of this proposed mine, the mine site is not only in the midst of an extraordinarily rich ecosystem, it is also in an extremely seismically active region (the Pacific Rim of Fire) so any containment of the planned toxic wastes would almost certainly be temporary in nature.

If you enjoy eating good wild salmon or just care about the often unnecessary destruction of our natural world please go to this website, learn more about the Pebble Mine and write a letter condemning the mine.

The brown bears of Hallo bay in Katmai national park

"OK, we're going to just follow this sow and cub for a while and see if they start nursing."

And so the ten of us began following the two brown bears through the tall grass trying to get a better view and hoping to see a cub nursing from it's mother.  It went against nearly everything I'd learned about bears.  But this is what we'd come to do in Hallo bay of Katmai national park: to see bears.  We were extremely close, so close that my camera's paltry 5x zoom was more than enough to grab some good shots.  At one point during our pursuit we lost sight of the cub only to have it raise up behind a stream bank not 15 feet away from us.  You can't appreciate the size of these animals until they get up close.  Our guides estimated the cub at 250-300lbs, substantially larger than anyone in our group.  A female brown bear might get up to 900 lbs and an adult male to 1200lbs or more.  

Because the bears at Katmai have such an abundance of food and had not been hunted or fed or had any poor interactions with people they ignored us completely.  Occasionally a small cub would look up at us but none of the older bears paid us any heed.  To keep safe we were told to always stay within arms reach of someone else and not to make any sudden or loud movements.  We were told that as long as we walked around calmly in a group we would experience no problems with the bears.  

When we'd spent enough time with one group of bears there were always more around that we could walk over to and observe.  The bears are particularly fond of Hallo bay because it provides areas to fish, clam and forage and we witnessed bears getting food by all of these methods.  Despite the good fishing and clamming in the area, a large portion of a bear's diet comes from vegetation.  It was strange watching such a large predator munching away contededly on the grasses in the area.

I was fortunate enough to go on this amazing trip thanks to my parents who came up from Washington D.C. to visit this week.  All it all it was an awe inspiring experience and I would highly recommend it and Kbay air (the company we went with) to anyone looking to do some bear viewing.  I'll just let a few of my pictures do the rest of the talking. 

Oh, and the views from the plane were spectacular too: