Bears in Alaska

[vwgolf]

Apologies if this is a silly question from an ignorant Brit but my wife and I are on the Carnival Legend cruise to Alaska on 6th August and the one thing we'd like to see is some bears in the wild. There are a number of excursions from Skagway and Ketchikan that involve bear spotting and I'm just wondering if anybody has been on one of these and which would be the best one to take? Cheers!

[wolfie11]

Ketchikan offers good viewing for black bears if you fly to Anan. I have seen brown bears on the Haines tour out to Chilkoot Lake a couple of times.  

[naxer]

If you're stopping at Icy Straight Point, Chichagof Island has the highest population of brown bears per square mile on earth.

[stobe1]

As much as I love Carnival, if you are coming all the way from Britain to go on an Alaska cruise, I would recommend you take Princess or Holland America.  They "do Alaska" better than Carnival can.

 

Again, I love Carnival and am platinum on them, but for Alaska, try another line. They have more varied itineraties, more ships deployed in Alaska during the season and have a wider range of departure dates and departure ports.

[vwgolf]

Thanks - if only I'd read that before Christmas! We have already booked on Carnival, with whom with cruised several times, as the departure dates suited our work commitments. Both Skagway and Ketchikan are ports of call (but not Icy Straight Point, unfortunately) so I'm hoping we can get some bear spotting in somewhere. Throw in some whales and a bald eagle or two and we'll be happy!

[dyeadave]

The eagles are easy.

U will see them often from the ship, especially around Ketchikan.

whales are best seen at Juneau,. Just book your own trip on a smaller boat than the ship,will try to sell you on.

We see bears infrequently at that time out of here in Skagway.

the best odds for bears (brown) "on the cheap" would be to take the small ferry from here to Haines, on your own, that day,  and hire a car in haines, for the day. There are places where the bears are feeding on salmon over there at that time of year.

this is not guaranteed, but it is a very scenic drive, for the day, out of that town with the odds being good for bear spotting.

otherwise, there are several ways to fly to see bears, but they are all very dear for my Scottish background to recommend!?!

DD

[donaldsc]

It is probably too late for this but if you can find any excursion that takes you to the Anan Creek Wildlife viewing site, you are almost guaranteed to see lots of black bears, maybe some brown bears and many eagles.  We have been there twice and are going again this summer.  The problem is that the number of permits per day is very limited (I believe 60 total per day) and they are probably all gone for summer 2019.  We booked our 4 slots for 2019 in Nov. 2018.

 

Check this out - https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/r10/specialplaces/?cid=fsbdev2_038752

 

DON

[Sunny AZ Girl]

On 1/10/2019 at 2:36 PM, stobe1 said:

As much as I love Carnival, if you are coming all the way from Britain to go on an Alaska cruise, I would recommend you take Princess or Holland America.  They "do Alaska" better than Carnival can.

 

Again, I love Carnival and am platinum on them, but for Alaska, try another line. They have more varied itineraties, more ships deployed in Alaska during the season and have a wider range of departure dates and departure ports.

My one and only cruise on Carnival was to Alaska and it was a wonderful experience!  We are usually RCI cruisers and we loved our Carnival experience, complete with an excellent Naturalist who really added a lot to the cruise.  We were originally booked on Princess, but switched to Carnival because, quite frankly, I could not justify the price difference.

 

This time we are sticking RCI as my DH really is going more for the ship (Ovation) and I am going more for the 11 night itinerary that also will visit Icy Strait Point (bears & whales!), Sitka and Hubbard Glacier.  

[lynncarol]

Not sure re your August visit but in early September a few years ago we took Island Wings flight to Tongass National Forest in Misty Fjords out of Ketchikan. There were tons of bears fishing in the creek for salmon. You could contact the company to see if such sightings are possible in August.

Edited January 17, 2019 by lynncarol
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[Lindbloom]

We took our first cruise to Alaska on the Legend last summer (July 2018), doing the helicopter glacier walk in Skagway (which was awesome) and a 4x4 trek in Ketchikan... no bears in sight for us.  We were told it is a matter of luck, hopefully yours is better than ours. I will say, we took the excursion into Tracy Arm Fjord (I highly recommend) and on the way back to the ship, someone claims to have spotted two wolves and two bears on the same strand of land, but we didn't see them.