Grizzly Encounters

McNEIL RIVER STATE GAME SANCTUARY, Alaska--My hip boots sank into the muck, and mosquitoes buzzed in my ears. Offshore, a snow-streaked volcanic island puffed wisps of smoke.

It was late June, and we were surrounded by footprints on an isolated beach. Baby prints. Chubby prints. Prints the size of dinner plates, with long, lethal-looking claws.

We were not alone.

All around us in the 4-foot-tall sedge-grass meadows, I glimpsed brown, moving fur. Bears were everywhere.

Suddenly the underbrush to the left of us crackled, and our little conga line came to an abrupt halt.

“Mudface!” someone whispered loudly.

Mudface--the biggest, baddest bear on the river--was rumored to be close to camp.

Samantha Wilson, our young ranger-biologist, clapped her hands, and someone called, “Yo, Mudface!”

One never wants to surprise a grizzly.

We held our breath. No Mudface. We slogged on, carefully noting where brown fur crested the top of the grass.

For the next four days I would become one with “The Many-Headed It,” as one of our group of 10 called us. Wherever we went, we went together, in lock-step. This was not detention camp. We were the lucky ones, in fact. Our names had been drawn in the lottery for a chance last summer to come to McNeil River State Game Sanctuary, on the edge of Kamishak Bay about 250 air miles southwest of Anchorage, to watch and live with brown bears, known fondly to some and fearfully to others as grizzlies.

The sanctuary was created in 1967 by the Alaska legislature to protect the McNeil River and its unusually large concentration of brown bears, which gather here every year to fish for salmon. The river becomes a veritable banquet table in salmon season--wide with shallow, rocky falls creating a natural barrier to the abundant salmon swimming upriver and thus prime fishing spots for bears. Although bruins are primarily solitary creatures, the feast here is irresistible.

As are the bears. For me, seeing any animal in the wild is a gift. It’s magical to watch them in their world, even for a few short moments.

But the rest of the world may not see it quite that way. In fact, when a colleague in California heard I was going to watch bears, she asked in astonishment, “Why would anyone want to go see bears?” (This was not a totally unexpected reaction, coming as it did from someone who had just vacationed in Paris.) I promised I would take her question to the field.

Maybe it is as simple as what one biologist said about the McNeil River: “Perhaps, by learning to live with bears, people can learn to live with one another.”

McNeil Sanctuary grants four-day permits for its bear trips from June 7 to Aug. 25 each year. Aspiring visitors must apply for permits by March 1; their applications are entered into a random drawing. To control the number of visitors, only 10 are chosen for each four-day trip, with three standbys. As luck would have it, I got standby status.

Visitors must be self-sufficient, bringing a weatherproof tent, sleeping bag, foam pad, stove, fuel, cooking kit and utensils, food for six to eight days (you’ll need extra in case you get weathered in), first-aid kit, rain gear (the weather is typically wet, windy and cool), flashlight, backpack, day pack and hip waders. This is wilderness camping, after all. There are no roads and no stores.

Taking a small floatplane, I arrived at McNeil River on a sparkling summer evening, joining a group that had already been there for a couple of days. I began my lessons in “bear etiquette” with Samantha, or Sam, one of the three rangers at the sanctuary. Here the rules are made for bears. When rangers talk about “stress” and “harassment,” first-time visitors think it’s humans’ stress level and harassment that are at issue. But here the world is flip-flopped; the concern is for the bears. We learned how to tell whether a bear is stressed, how to relieve stress for bears and how to minimize human harassment of bears.

The first rule is to stand your ground. Stay still. Never move quickly or the bear will want to chase you. Prey runs.

If the bear doesn’t retreat, one should wave his or her arms slowly, talk and clap. Some of the young bears “like to bluff and bluff charge,” Sam said. “If you don’t back down, they’ll veer off and go another direction.”

Remembering this was tricky. The first day, two teenage bruins came bounding up from the creek straight for me. I was so excited I smacked into the person behind me.

After the Mudface alert, we sucked through the muck of the tidal flats, sloshed across Mitfik Creek and sank down on a grassy knoll where we were soon within arm’s length of passing bears.

A scrappy-looking female grizzly lumbered down the opposite bank and plunged across the creek. Another bear appeared around a bend in the river, belly-flopped in the water, came up with nothing and slowly, dejectedly splashed downstream.

“Oh,” someone said lazily, “two bears coming down the hill behind us.”

Two little fuzzy, golden ears popped up in a meadow of wild iris, followed by an enormous teddy-bear head with tiny eyes and a mouth full of sedge grasses. Soon we were surrounded by six bears, snoozing, chewing grass and lolling around in the water. One pretty blond female sashayed right past our front-row seats on a bear path paralleling the creek.

“Oooooh, she’s a doll,” said Ron, an engineer from the Midwest.

She swung her head in our direction, wearing a seemingly ho-hum expression. But suddenly she stopped. She had heard something. She swung her head in the other direction and started to pick up the pace. A big, very black male rounded the river bend in hot pursuit.

I wasn’t sure I had breathed for, oh, 25 minutes or so.

Then, to my surprise, Herm, our group comedian, reached into his backpack, pulled out a peanut-butter and honey sandwich and began to eat.

“Herm!” I said in alarm. “What are you doing? We’re surrounded by bears.”

I’ve lived in Alaska for 28 years and have had my share of close encounters with bears. Bears have a phenomenal sense of smell, and peanut butter is decidedly aromatic.

Furthermore, Herm wasn’t the only one waving the “Come and Get Me” banner. Down the line, Sam was eating a tuna sandwich. Jim and Ellen, schoolteachers from an Eskimo village on the Yukon River, were barbecuing chicken in a bag, the smoke wafting overhead like a red-flag signal.

Lying back in the grass for a post-sandwich snooze, Herm cocked his head, opened one eye and said, “Don’t worry, Nan. This is our third day. You’ll be like us soon. I’m just getting into ‘One Day in the Life of a Bear’: Munch a little grass, catch a few fish, chase a few girls, take a nap.”

What I would learn at McNeil in the following days was that the bears were aware of us but not interested in us (or our food). They were much more attuned to what the other bears were doing. Food is plentiful, and with the careful management at McNeil, the bears have never learned to associate humans with food.

For six hours we lay in this field surrounded by brown bears, the largest land carnivores on Earth. It seemed a good time to ask what draws people here.

“I think bears are cute,” said Herm, who thought the desire could be traced to the storybook bears of childhood, from Winnie-the-Pooh to Yogi Bear. Ron wanted to see the “top of the food chain” and feel the exhilaration of being close to a creature so powerful it “can kill you with one swipe of his paw.”

Keith, a massage therapist, put that in perspective. “Yes, bears can kill you,” he said, “but so can people--and they’re even more violent and unpredictable and yet, hey, we still hang out with them.”

Back at camp that evening, I asked Tom Griffin, one of the biologists, why he thought bear-viewing had become so popular in Alaska in the past several years.

“I have a lot of philosophies about that,” he said. “People are over-urbanized. Their lives are very scheduled. People like to be in control. Yet there’s a yearning, I think, for something else. Watching wildlife is like an unscripted movie. People leave here feeling very relaxed.”

Part of that relaxation, I was learning, clearly came from slowing down to Bear Time.

The next day on our way to McNeil River Falls--a two-mile, moderately strenuous slog, scramble and hike--we climbed up the cliff to take the bluff walk where we could peer down and see the “bear beds,” terraced ledges where mothers often take their cubs for napping. As many as 68 bears have been counted fishing at the falls at one time during the height of the salmon season.

As we pushed our way through the alders, we yelled “Ho, bear!” “Hey, bears!” “No surprises, bears!”

At the falls, only one bear was trying his luck at fishing. It was Woofie, the No. 2 alpha male. (Over the years, biologists and visitors together have christened these bears while watching their dramas and little soap operas play out.)

“Woofie isn’t the biggest bear,” Tom said, “but he has the attitude of the biggest bear. Attitude is important. Size is also important.”

On my last trip to the falls on Day 4, the fish were jumping, eight bears had gathered and a barroom brawl was about to break out on the opposite side of the river. Woofie had ambled down from the meadow. An unidentified male was lurking near Woofie’s fishing hole. There was much salivating and lip popping.

Then they started to do something so charming that I burst out laughing.

“Look,” said Sam the ranger, “they’re doing the ‘cowboy walk.’”

Just like two gunslingers about to go for their weapons, those two bears widened their stance and started shifting their weight back and forth, stamping from one foot to the other.

Instead of shooting, they started jaw-sparring, the bear version of air-kissing. They never made contact but slowly snapped their jaws on either side of the other’s head. It looked almost affectionate. Then the big male took a tiny step backward, signaling his defeat. The champ, Woofie, sauntered by disdainfully and flopped back into his fishing hole.

“Bears do everything in slow motion,” Sam said. “But when they move, they can move fast.”

Baldie, a big guy with a bad haircut (he had rubbed off huge patches of his fur), sat 15 feet in front of us. We were beginning to feel sorry for him. He occasionally swatted the water, but he couldn’t seem to catch anything.

Four of us decided to descend to the lower viewing pad. The river roared in front of us, and the bears were eye level to our right and left. There was a little beaten path about 6 feet in front of us where bears cruised the riverbank.

Suddenly Troublemaker, an active, handsome male and a big-time swimmer, took a swan dive off the center rock. He had been showboating all morning--snorkeling upriver, pouncing on fish, floating the rapids downriver--right under Baldie’s nose. He was now padding through the sedges. The challenge was on.

He was 8 feet from us. Forget the telephoto lens.

Four of us were sandwiched together like fragile wisps of grass. I was as close to Rich as I could get without leaping into his arms. Bill was breathing in my ear.

Baldie turned. He slowly started doing the cowboy walk. Troublemaker advanced. Like gargantuan sumo wrestlers, they shifted their weight, lumbering in circles.

Rich and I sucked in our breath at the same instant. There was an electric moment when one big bear was so close to us that our group flinched as one. A voice inside me screamed, “Run!” With two missteps, one ton of fighting fur would have landed on top of us.

Instead, in the most dignified voice I could imagine, Rich whispered, “Don’t you think we should be leaving now?”

We held our collective breath. When Troublemaker stepped back, Baldie turned his back in scorn. A sore loser, Troublemaker thudded around in circles, rubbing his head in the grass, then plunged into the river and floated downstream, where he spied Madonna. He couldn’t win the big fishing hole, so he started chasing girls.

He never got lucky. But he did nearly stop our hearts from beating. I have rarely felt more alive.

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Guidebook: Grizzly Times in Alaska

Getting there: To get to McNeil, you fly into Anchorage or Homer. From LAX, nonstop service is offered on Alaska; restricted round-trip fares begin at $371.20. From LAX to Homer, there is connecting service on Alaska; restricted round-trip fares begin at $661.20.

To those who are successful in the lottery bid, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the managing agency for the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary, will send a list of pilots and air taxi services that fly to McNeil. Plan on spending at least $400 for this service.

Entering the lottery: A permit system limits the number of visitors to the sanctuary to 10 per day from June 7 to Aug. 25. For each four-day period, 10 regular permits and three standby permits are issued by random computer lottery. Applications must be postmarked no later than March 1. There is a nonrefundable $25 fee. The regular permit costs $350 for lottery winners, and the standby permit costs $175.

For a lottery application, go to the state’s Web site at www.state.ak.us. Look for Wildlife and Fish, McNeil River. Or you can request an information packet from the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, Division of Wildlife Conservation, Att.: McNeil River, 333 Raspberry Road, Anchorage, AK 99518-1599; (907) 267-2182.

When to go: The permitting period generally corresponds to the salmon runs on Mitfik Creek and McNeil River. Visitors spend their time on Mitfik Creek in June and on McNeil River in July and August.

Where to stay: You will be camping and must bring everything with you: a good tent, sleeping pads, sleeping bags, stove, fuel, all your food, clothes, camera gear, film etc. There is a cook cabin for cooking and eating.

What to wear: Typical summer weather in Alaska and at McNeil River in particular is often wet, windy and cold, with plenty of mosquitoes. But some days can be hot. You will definitely want to take hip waders for slogging through mud and for river crossings, good rain gear, wool or polypropylene fleece jackets and sweaters, bug repellent, maybe a mosquito hood; sunscreen, fleece hat, baseball cap, sunglasses. Throw in a couple of cotton T-shirts for hot weather (but be advised that cotton is a poor insulator when wet).

Other bear-watching experiences: Katmai National Park and Preserve in southwest Alaska. Prime bear-viewing times are July and September. Permits for the campground at Brooks Lake are needed. For information, Katmai NP&P; Field Headquarters, P.O. Box 7, No. 1 King Salmon Mall, King Salmon, AK 99613, or Katmai-Lake Clark Headquarters, 4230 University Drive, Suite 311, Anchorage, AK 99508-4626; (907) 246-3305, fax (907) 246-2116, www.nps.gov/katm.

Stan Price Brown Bear Sanctuary at Pack Creek on Admiralty Island in southeast Alaska. Permits required June to September. Contact the U.S. Forest Service Information Center in Juneau, (907) 586-8751, or the Admiralty Island National Monument headquarters in Juneau, (907) 586-8800, fax (907) 586-8808.

Anan Wildlife Observatory, 35 miles south of Wrangell in southeast Alaska. Contact Wrangell Ranger District, Tongass National Forest; (907) 874-2323.

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Nan Elliot, coauthor of “National Geographic Guide to America’s Outdoors: Alaska,” published in May, lives in Anchorage.