Where we find the majestic Coastal Brown Bears of Alaska

Travel to Katmai National Park and Preserve in southern Alaska to view and photograph the region's famous coastal brown bears.

Our guests experience that each day is better than the last, with increasingly wonderful encounters with these impressive animals.

Katmai National Monument was created in 1918 after the eruption of Novarupta in 1912, the most violent volcanic event of the 20th Century. The area has been a National Park & Preserve since 1980, an area of over three and a half million acres remaining almost entirely free of the influence of man for almost a hundred years.

The ash disgorged from Novarupta totally reset the original grassland ecology of the area. Colonization by alder trees and subsequent nitrogen fixation allowed development of the diverse mix of plants and animals present today. The large tidal range of the Shelikof Strait and the rivers flowing down from the mountain glaciers form a coastal landscape of tidal flats and lagoons which form an ideal habitat for the Alaskan brown bear. Today the area is famed for large numbers of these magnificent animals who grow large on the abundance of salmon running the rivers, clams on the beaches and the protein rich sedges and other salt tolerant plants growing in the tidal lagoons.