Best of Katmai 2009
I have a crazy-ass amount of photos from this summer and I'm too tired to manually write up a photo post like I normally do when I post photos. So instead I uploaded my favorite photos of Brooks Camp to Photobucket and you can view them by clicking the link above.
Note that I don't have any photos from my 3-day hiking adventure in the Valley of 10,000 Smokes in there. Or any photos from the Valley. I will be posting those separately along with a post about the trip. :D
Also at some point I will post many more photos of the more scenic stuff and animals in my Flickr account. I'll post about it here in my journal when I do. :)
Fellow housekeeper Kelsey at the top of Mount Dumpling, overlooking Naknek Lake. Dumpling is 2440' in elevation. This was at the start of the season; I dislocated my toe TWICE on the way down! o_O;
Bear cub. Mom was just off frame - I have dozens of photos of them.
My best bear photo of the summer. This boar is standing at the top of the falls in what is supposedly the prime fish-catching spot.
Three cubs are cuter than one!
This wolf was all on her own, no pack. She started off stealing scraps out of the river but eventually caught her own salmon as the summer progressed. She stayed pretty scrappy looking, though.
Two of our ramp dogs about to pull in one of our two Cessna 207s. In the distance is a DeHavilland turbine Otter (not ours, but we do have one). These are the sorts of planes people use to get to Brooks.
Rutherford, a squirrel that rampdog Chad fed and made friends with. Sorta. ;)
I got to go on a coastal flight-see with some rangers. This was my favorite shot of the bunch.
There was this fantastic sunset one evening and a dozen of us (mostly park rangers) were down on the beach snapping photos of it when a bear came along and we had to vacate the beach and get 50 yards up a trail off the beach. It made for a great photo op, though! This one is a bit blurry but the bear is in the best pose of the three shots I got off.
Head guide Carter turned me on to the best sort of jumping picture of all-time: the Levitating Man/Woman! Trey, Sarah, and Kelsey levitate before your very eyes!
(Kelsey was a housekeeper and my best bud this summer. Sarah was a temporary housekeeper who worked with us for a week after we'd lost 2 of our 6 staff of housekeepers. She'd worked at Brooks before and was a hoot!)
Fat Bear! It is amazing to see the difference in how the bears look from the start of the season to the end. They start out so scrawny but by fall they are huge, lumbering, lazy masses of fur and fat.
My second-to-last day at Brooks. This is a view from the lower platform, looking at the bridge across Brooks River near where the river flows into Naknek Lake.
Just in case you didn't know…