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Bears of the Interior
Denali shuttles carry passengers into grizzly-viewing country
By Leon Unruh / Alaska.com
For many people, Denali National Park offers the most reliable chance to see bears.
Although other wild areas have more bears and greater concentrations of them, those areas often require an expensive boat or plane trip. Denali, however, is just a two-hour drive from Fairbanks and a four-hour drive from Anchorage and is reachable by plane, train and bus.
Denali has 300 to 350 grizzlies on the north side of the Alaska Range and an undetermined number on the roadless, undeveloped south side. The south side has some salmon streams and may support more bears than the relatively bleak north side. Studies are being performed to determine the number of bears.
Most visitors see the bears by riding on shuttle or other tour buses along the park's single road into the back country, a 95-mile adventure of mostly gravel road that slips across valleys and along cliffs to Wonder Lake and then Kantishna.
Because human interaction is kept to a minimum, the bears are still the king of the open tundra and wander curiously and unafraid across the land and sometimes up to the buses.
Unlike Katmai National Park, McNeil River State Game Sanctuary, Pack Creek or Anan Creek wildlife areas, Denali has no "bear viewing area." The bears don't congregate because there's no centrally located food source, such as a salmon stream.
Denali's grizzlies -- the visible ones -- don't have a high-protein diet that includes salmon. They get most of their food from plant roots and berries and from catching small animals and occasionally moose and caribou. (Sometimes bus riders get to watch a moose-bear battle unfold.)
The grizzlies have blonde coats, are smaller than their coastal counterparts and are sometimes called Toklat grizzlies, after one of the park's large river valleys.
Bears appear just about anywhere in the park. Especially in the back country and in closed-in areas (such as trails through streamside willow breaks), hikers should take precautions such as making plenty of noise and watching that they don't surprise a bear.
Hikers who cross between a sow and cubs face great danger.
Bear-resistant food containers are required for backcountry campers. The containers can be rented in Anchorage or borrowed from the Backcountry Desk at the Denali visitors center.
Denali also has black bears, particularly in forested areas and not so much along the Park Road. Campgrounds may be visited by black bears.
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