No visit to Alaska is complete without seeing either a grizzly (brown) or black bear. Use this guide to find out a few facts about both types, plus the best places to go bear watching in Alaska.
Request a Brochure
Canada, Alaska & The Arctic
Grizzly chasing a salmon, Katmai National Park.
After polar bears grizzlies are the largest bears, with males reaching up to three metres when stood on their hind legs, and weighing up to 1,200 pounds. They live in the uplands of western North America, with large populations in British Columbia and Alaska.
Grizzly bears (sometimes simply referred to as brown bears) are normally solitary, active animals, but they gather in numbers alongside rivers during the salmon spawn. Every other year females produce between one and four cubs of which they are very protective. They will attack if they think they or their cubs are threatened.
Their colouring ranges widely across geographic areas, from blond to deep brown or red and they have a large hump over their shoulders which is a muscle mass used to power the forelimbs in digging, while the hind legs are even more powerful. The head is large and round with a concave facial profile and they have much longer claws than most other bears. In spite of their massive size, these bears can run at speeds of up to 64 kilometres per hour.
Grizzly bears are omnivorous, with their diet consisting of grasses, roots, berries and shellfish as well as moose, deer, sheep, elk and, of course, salmon. Grizzly bears readily scavenge for food, behaviour that can lead them into conflict with other species, such as wolves and humans. During early spring, as the bears emerge from their dens, elk and bison calves are actively sought. In preparation for winter, bears gain hundreds of kilogrammes of fat in an Autumnal feeding frenzy before going into hibernation. The dens themselves are typically located at elevations above 6,000 feet on northern-facing slopes.
After hibernation grizzly bears leave their mountain dens in the spring and can be found throughout the forested regions of British Columbia, Alaska, Yukon and Northwest Territories. The bears avoid human contact if they can and consequently can prove rather elusive. The time for the best sightings is when the salmon are spawning, when bears descend from the mountains to join in the salmon feeding frenzy in the rivers. Generally speaking, salmon spawn in Alaska in July, during August in northern British Columbia and in September in southern parts of B.C. Katmai National Park and the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, and the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia, provide some of the finest bear viewing opportunities anywhere in the world.
The best bear viewing opportunities centre on national parks where there are very limited accommodation options. For this reason many of the remote national park lodges are rustic with very limited facilities but are usually in utterly spectacular locations and staffed by extremely knowledgeable guides. We work with the best wilderness lodges, often private, to ensure you get the most out of your stay. Some wonderful bear watching destinations are accessible by a short light aircraft flight from larger towns, giving more accommodation options, whilst others are accessed by small comfortable yachts.