September 1st, 2026
I had read reviews on the Nat/Hab site about how difficult it is to leave the Ursus and the bears. I understand that now. As much as I was looking forward to having a nice, long shower, a private bathroom, and dry towels, it was hard departing – once you get used to the routine and the people you are sharing the adventure with, it’s hard having it all end. But, since our plane was not arriving until 1:00PM there was time for one more short outing in Geography Bay, where we started out. You can take a lot of picture in 2 hours. Thousands for some people on this trip.
The tide was out, so the bay was basically a big tidal flat, with small channels and a lot of ash/sand – easy walking for a change compared to the previous day. There were also lots pretty green algal mats, channel patterns in the sand, and a few soon-to-be-dry jelly fish to look at as we headed towards a fairly large number of bears close to mouth of the river. At least 11, and at least one cub.
The only difficulty we had was a mud patch, which both myself and my cabin buddy found. He sank down to his knee (but saved his camera), and I had one foot trapped down to my calf. We both had to be pulled out. No damage done.
The were a lot of bears in the tidal flats, but they were scattered about – some fishing, some just lounging around. Our guide picked a nice comfortable, sandy bar in the middle of them all, and we settled in one last time on our green buckets and got to work. This was interesting photography – nice light, a beautiful background of mountains surrounding the bay, and great colors of the water – a lot of green and tan, to go along with the brown bears. Beautiful. We had a few close encounters, nothing like the day before, and got to see one bear rolling around on the sand, looking like a drunk that had fallen off the bar stool. And then he looked back and waved…..really. Here’s the proof.
One huge, very old male wandered by as well.
And then there were just lots of nice photo ops of individual bears with nice backgrounds. Hard to stop shooting.
But as we approached out two hour limit, our guide had us move over to the mother and cub – hard to pass that last opportunity up.
We did have one more photo op on our walk back to the skiff – a not quite adult bald eagle, sitting quietly in a tree. Perfect!. I snapped a few shots with my phone, and then dragged the Sony out of my bag and shot a bunch more. I was hoping it would take flight but no such luck. Still, nice to get some good shots with the Sony.
This photo, and the ones of the cubs, were taken with my phone. I found out a bit later as we were finishing up packing for the flight, that the SD card had somehow become corrupted at the end of our outing. I lost all of cub shots, as well as all of the eagle shots made with the Sony. #$!@^!!!. I’ve never had that happen before. The good news is that it did not happen on any of the other days, when I was taking hundreds of pictures. That would have been a disaster.
We had our last great lunch on the Ursus, finished up packing, and waited for our aerial Uber to arrive. Three of us were on a different plane this time, a smaller version of what we flew in on. Bonus round though – I flew in the co-pilot seat, and there was a full set of controls there! A chance to try out my flying skills. Maybe not. Besides, I fell asleep soon after we get off the ground/water. It would have been fun.
The flight back was perfectly smooth – we really lucked out on weather for this trip. It was in the high 60’s when we landed back in Kodiak. The Nat/Hab leader was waiting for us at the airport, and offered up a few choices for the remainder of the afternoon. I was tired, and really wanted to just get to the hotel, but the rest of the group opted for door number 2, which was a hike in the rain forest. I was shamed into going along. It was a nice hike – easy trail, nice views of the forest and some of the old WWII installations. Thankfully, it was short, and we finally made it back to the hotel.
A pretty amazing day all around. Tomorrow I head off to Anchorage to the non-bear part of my trip.
Peace
Leave a Reply