How’s this for a surprise? I just got home from Alaska a few days ago… and I’ve already processed the 20,000+ photos from the trip and have a new gallery in the archive!
This was my Alaska Brown Bear “Red Salmon” tour, which I co-led with friend and colleague Kate Rice of KAR Photography. Kate and Adam have been nudging me to do more Alaska trips in recent years, and there’s certainly been interest from my guests. So for this one, we co-led the trip in Katmai National Park, with Kate as our lead naturalist bear guide. We each brought in guest to form one super tour group. And yeah, it was super. Everyone had a lot of fun!
We also had some bad luck with weather—our bush pilots had to cancel their first flights in over two months!—losing one-and-a-half days of exploration due to high wind and low clouds. And we had plenty of rain. But perhaps it was for the best. After all, if I took 20K photos in three days, I can only imagine how many I’d have with a full trip under our belts. Nobody could complain about what we did see. The salmon were plentiful and the bears were fantastic.
As always, you can jump straight to the gallery to see the full collection (hint: use the Slideshow function!). A short preview is below.
Our very first decent wildlife photo op occurred almost immediately after we got off the float plane. This red fox was out hunting and passed quite close to us.
It’s hard to tell, but it may have a bit of heterochromia, with one eye being darker than the other.
I have photographed plenty of bears before, but this was my first time seeing them pursue sockeyes. What a great splash of color!
We had great luck with sows and cubs on this trip, including multiple sets of triplets.
A sow shows her yearling cub how it’s done.
A salmon thrashes about while stuck in the shallows. Once they start their 100+ mile journey up the river system, these salmon stop eating. They’re weak and quite beat up from the journey.
A sow calls to her yearling cubs, which were playing with a discarded salmon carcass on the tundra.
This spot came back into the spotlight in recent years thanks to my colleagues Kate and Adam Rice. We didn’t have great conditions to photograph from above, but it was nice to see this bear snorkeling a bit while searching for salmon.
This marked my first time photographing Willow Ptarmigan, which blend in with the tundra quite effectively.
We were treated to a great show when these two bears got together for some sparring. Often sub-dominant bears will use these grappling sessions to practice for future serious battles. They wrestling, bite, and paw each other, but significant injuries are rare.
It was quite a treat seeing this white-furred cub. Brown bears come in all sorts of different colors, but an almost pure white coat like this is quite rare.
I’d not only had relatively little luck photographic bears catching salmon directly in front of me, but we hadn’t seen any yearling cubs catch their own fish… until the white cub caught a sockeye nearby!
View the full Alaska 2026 gallery in the archive (71 images).
Want to join me on a future bear adventure? We’re heading back to Alaska for the Remote Lodge spring trip next June, and in 2028 I will likely return to the Great Bear Rainforest. I hope to schedule another Red Salmon trip no later than 2029. Visit the Tours & Workshops page for more info about these tours.
