Descending towards Lake Fraser.

At Fraser Lake, our pilot Kyle unloads packages for one of the semi-permanent residents of Fraser from the Fisheries Dept.. The lake functions as a salmon-counting outpost. The salmon-counter guy lives on Fraser & gets supplies once a week on float planes. So his newspaper's a week old, and sometimes two :)

We head off on a trail towards a bridge the bears are known to frequent. Soon, we spot bears in the wild. Note that there is no separation of any kind between the bear and the human - the bears are in the wild. It is their home, and they live & feed out here. They have grown accustomed to human presence, which is why they don't charge at us. We maintain a safe distance from them, but they are actually quite close, just a few dozen feet, at times. They could very easily charge us and make a meal of us if they so desire :)

One of the first bears we spotted in the water.
This pic was taken on a giant 400mm telephoto, but we've found that a 100-300 is quite adequate. The bears move around quite vigorously in the water, and a 400mm can be hard to maneuver.

A bear paws the water vigorously to grab salmon.

Kodiak Bears are generally larger than the grizzlies in Denali because their diet consists of high-protein salmon. Here our bear, after thrashing around the water, very quickly gets his first salmon.

It helps that Lake Fraser is where the salmon are counted, you can spot salmon all over the place.

The bear feasts on salmon while a few seagulls hover around, waiting for their pickings.

The result of eating too much salmon :)

At one point, the bridge boasted half a dozen bears. If you stay put at Fraser long enough, you can witness all of the bear families that live down there. Everybody comes to Fraser to feast on salmon.

A magpie flies over a young bear standing on its feet to check out the humans at Fraser.