Salmon Fishing with Bears in Haines Alaska

Since moving to Whitehorse, trips to Haines in Alaska have become a favorite of mine. During the second half of summer and into the fall, all the different Salmon species run up the two rivers in town, the Chilkat and the Chilkoot.

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Mamma bear watching me closely

Fishing in the Chilkoot River is always an experience – usually the salmon are running strong and they put up a good fight. I have to stop and take a rest more than once because my arms hurt and I am exhausted from trying to wind in Salmon.
Things get really exciting when the local bears wander down to catch some salmon of their own.

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Dinner time!

Usually another fisherperson will simply say “bear” in a nonchalant way, and everyone will group up and walk a few meters back from the river.

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Hungry bear

The bears will walk past, not paying attention to us fisherpeople, doing as they please.
When they’re past, we all wander back down the river and continue fishing.

haines bears eating 320x480

Checkout those claws

Some time later the whole process will repeat as the bears walk back in the other direction, now full of salmon.

haines bears fighting 720x480

The two youngsters play-fighting

Haines is a spectacularly beautiful place – I’ll be posting many more photos here shortly.

-Dan

PS Checkout the new gallery feature I’ve got running on The Road Chose Me. Click any of the pics above, then click through the photos in a larger size. Let me know what you think.

2 Responses

  1. Andy K says:

    Hi Dan, I’m glad to see your new posts and get treated to images of the Great White North. I found your blog soon after you finished your long drive, read the whole thing, and I’ve been checking back every now and then hoping for these exact outdoor adventures and photos. So Thanks.

    Since you mentioned the photo gallery, it looks like lightbox for wp. It is very cool and convenient for displaying photos, but do you know if there’s a setting (or a different plugin) to make the box be the same size for every photo? I’ve always thought of installing a gallery/lightbox on my own defunct blog, but I prefer the idea of holding the mouse in one place to click through the gallery. Otherwise, I’ve considered scripting gimp to put a border with the same outer dimensions on all my high-res photos, but that seems like too much work.

    • Dan says:

      Hi Andy,
      Thanks for the kind words about my blog :) I plan to spend a lot more time on it in the coming months and years.
      Lots and lots of very big adventures to show.

      My gallery is lightbox for wp. I’m not sure if you can make the box the same size for every photo…
      With regards to not moving the mouse to click through, you’ll notice you don’t actually have to click the right or left arrow to get to the next or prev photo… you can just click anywhere on the right or left of the current image.
      So that means even though the boxes are resizing between portrait and landscape photos, you don’t have to move your mouse once it’s on the right hand side of whatever image is on the screen. It’s not 100% perfect, but it works pretty well.

      What’s your blog address, I’d love to check it out.
      -Dan

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