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Bears

The following photos are all Black Bears even though not all their coats are black. Black Bears come in a wide variety of colors, even within the same family. A sow can have different colored cubs. One of the favorites is a bear known locally as Nikki. She has been around the Mendenhall Glacier for almost 20 years and has had many sets of cubs.

  • Cinnamon black bear (Nikki)
  • Sibs
  • Nikki with all three cubs
  • What’s that?
  • My blueberries
  • A cinnamon black bear
  • Black & Brown (both are black bears)
  • The bears love eating dandelions in the spring.
  • Black bear carefully eating the new leaves of Devil’s Club.
Cub Play
Each series starts with the year I shot it so you can tell where one series ends and another starts.
  • 2018
  • 2017
  • June 2020
Brown Bears
In August 2018 I had the opportunity to go to Pack Creek near Juneau to watch some Brown Bears. We ended up seeing 12 different bears. This was one of the first ones we saw, it came down the beach towards us and then had a nice morning scratch.
This is also Pack Creek on Admiralty Island. While there are brown bears in the Juneau area, we usually see far more black bears so going to a place like Pack Creek gives us a rare treat.
  • Diving in!
  • Playing with its food.
May 2020 I got to go back out to Admiralty to see the brown bears. The fish weren’t running at that time of year but the bears were clamming at low tide and eating lots of grass in the meadow. We saw mostly boars and even watched a pair mating out on the tide flats.
  • Digging for clams
  • This boar was curious about us.
  • Looks like a yoga instructor
  • This one spent a lot of time eating grass in the meadow.
  • So tiring chasing the grass around