Katmai National Park and Brooks Falls

Brooks Falls is a modest waterfall on the Brooks River, but its position turns it into a natural bear buffet. Each summer, sockeye salmon run up the river to spawn, and when they reach the falls they must leap to continue upstream. The bears learned long ago to gather here and take the fish, some snatching them from the air at the lip of the falls, others fishing the plunge pool below.

In peak season, viewers on the park's elevated platforms may see many bears fishing at once, each with its own style and its own place in the loose hierarchy that forms at the falls. Large dominant males take the prime spots at the top of the falls, while others fish the edges. Watching them is a lesson in bear behavior, patience, and personality.

The bears have become individuals to a global audience through the park's live webcams and its annual Fat Bear Week, a lighthearted online bracket in which viewers vote for the bear that has most successfully packed on fat for the coming winter. Behind the fun is a serious point: these bears must gorge all summer to survive months of hibernation, and a healthy, fat bear is a sign of a healthy salmon river.

All of this happens under strict rules. Visitors stay on platforms and designated trails, keep well back from bears on the paths, and never have food where a bear could get it. The safety of both people and bears at Brooks Camp depends on that discipline, and rangers reinforce it constantly.

In June 1912, the volcano Novarupta erupted with tremendous force on the Alaska Peninsula, one of the largest eruptions anywhere in the world in the twentieth century. It blasted out an enormous volume of ash and pumice, darkened skies far away, and drained magma from beneath nearby Mount Katmai, whose summit then collapsed into a crater.

The eruption filled a nearby valley with hundreds of feet of hot ash, from which countless jets of steam and gas rose for years afterward. When an early expedition reached it, the sight of all those fuming vents gave the place its name, the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. That otherworldly landscape led to the region's protection as a national monument in 1918, decades before the bears made it famous.

Today the valley no longer smokes, but it remains a stark, ash-filled expanse cut by rivers, a reminder of the raw geologic power that shaped this coast. It is one of the great volcanic landscapes in North America, and a striking contrast to the green, salmon-rich rivers where the bears fish.

Beyond Brooks Falls, Katmai is a huge and largely trailless wilderness of volcanoes, lakes, tundra, and coastline. Its rivers and lakes support one of the world's great sockeye salmon runs, the foundation that feeds not only the bears but eagles, foxes, and the whole food web.

The park's coast, along Shelikof Strait, hosts its own concentrations of brown bears digging clams and grazing sedge meadows, and its waters and shores hold sea otters, seals, whales, and abundant seabirds. Moose, wolves, and caribou range the interior.

This richness is exactly why Katmai's boundaries were eventually expanded to protect the bears and their salmon, turning a park first meant to guard a volcanic wonder into one of the premier wildlife sanctuaries on the continent.

July is the marquee month, when the salmon run peaks at Brooks Falls and the largest numbers of bears gather to fish, the classic image of Katmai.

Early summer sees the bears emerging and the camp opening, with green landscapes and building anticipation before the salmon arrive in force.

September brings a second wave of bear activity as salmon spawn and die in the shallows and the bears feed hard before winter, the season that leads into Fat Bear Week, along with fall color and thinner crowds.

Winter closes the camp and returns the park to deep snow and silence, when the bears den up and the salmon rivers rest under ice.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.