Best Places for Alaska Bear Viewing
You’ll find bears all over Alaska, but the ideal place for a bear-viewing trip is a coastal location where food is plentiful and the human presence is carefully managed.
The plentiful food means bears tolerate each other—and us—much more easily, while managing the human presence means we become predictable to the bears, so they’re less likely to see us as a threat or anything interesting at all. That’s safer for both us and the bears and it means we get to see them acting naturally.
The most iconic destination for bear viewing is Katmai National Park and Preserve in Southwest Alaska. You’ll also find the famous McNeil River State Game Sanctuary and Lake Clark National Park in this region.
But these are far from the only places you can go to see brown bears playing, tending their young, and feeding on fish. A van tour out of Kodiak (the city) gives you good opportunities of seeing at least one or two bears, while a multiday trip to the remote Kodiak Brown Bear Center and Lodge, on the other end of Kodiak (the island) lets you observe the largest brown bears in the world in a small-group setting.
Bear viewing is also a popular activity in Southeast Alaska. Admiralty Island, near Juneau, has one of the world’s highest concentrations of brown bears; in fact, the bears outnumber the humans. If you’d rather see bears in a somewhat more controlled setting, Sitka’s Fortress of the Bear is an educational center that rescues orphaned bears. At the time of this writing, it has eight resident bears.
Black bears are plentiful in Southeast Alaska too, and although they’re smaller and not quite as brazen as brown bears, viewing them is a thrill. Sometimes you’ll even get to see that rarest of sights: black and brown bears fishing together, both lured to the same place by plentiful salmon runs. Some of the best locations for black-bear viewing are Anan Creek Wildlife Observatory near Wrangell and a few lesser-known places on Prince of Wales Island.
If you want to see polar bears, there is a chance you might see them at Point Barrow, near the Arctic city of Utqiaġvik.
Newsletter Signup
By clicking ‘Sign Up,’ I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Hachette Book Group’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
Pin It for Later
