And find them! Oops, I forgot a “spoiler alert.” Sorry about that. Maybe by the time you finish today’s background reading assignment, “Ten Things To Love About Icy Strait Point,” you’ll forget. Or at least forgive me and fake surprise and enthusiasm at the appropriate moments: “wow, you found two bears! And eagles, salmon, and a beaver?” Oh shoot, I did it again.
Forget all of that and keep reading to learn why you should consider a bear search excursion in Icy Strait Point, your options for booking, what to expect and not expect on your bear search, and my packing tips for any Alaska land-based wildlife excursion (but with one critical exception for bear searches). And finally (cue dramatic music), find out if we actually found any bears (cue fake interest)!
Unless you’re Mr. Cruise – regularly defying the odds at cruise ship casinos – if you’re dying to see bears in the wild on your cruise to Alaska, Icy Strait Point is your best bet. Why? Because Chichagof Island, where you’ll find Icy Strait Point, is home to the largest concentration of bears in the world. In fact, National Geographic nicknamed it “bear island.”
While Icy Strait Point is also known as an outstanding port for whale watching excursions, if you want to see both bears and whales up close while in Alaska and don’t have time to do both in Icy Strait Point, my recommendation would be to prioritize bears and save whales for Juneau (where I would suggest a combined whale watching and Mendenhall Glacier tour).
In the off chance that I’ve convinced you to book a bear excursion for Icy Strait Point (I could barely convince my six-year-old to put on pants for his first day of school yesterday, so please don’t mistaken my genuine self-doubt for self-deprecating humor), let’s talk about your booking options.
If you’re thinking about booking a wildlife and bear search excursion in Icy Strait Point, you have a few options to consider. You could go the easiest route and book through your cruise ship. Having been to Alaska many times now, I feel comfortable booking on my own through private companies and normally do so, but I still explored this as an option – the biggest advantage being that if your excursion is delayed, the ship will wait for you or pay to fly you to the next port. Celebrity was offering a 2.5 hour wildlife and bear search priced at $119 for both adults and children, but it included a minimum age limit that excluded our six-year-old. So I immediately eliminated that one from contention.
I found two private companies offering a similar excursion, but again, one of them had a minimum age limit over six. So we booked the “Icy Strait Point Exclusive Wildlife and Bear Search Tour” operated by Brown Bear Lodge and booked through Alaska Shore Excursions.
And in retrospect, I’m very glad we booked directly with this company versus going with the excursion offered through Celebrity. Overall, with a significantly reduced child’s fee for our son, we paid less total for a 4.5 hour tour than we would have for the 2.5 hour Celebrity excursion. And although I can’t directly compare the two tours (please chime in if you’ve taken the cruise ship tour or something similar), based purely on the written description provided by Celebrity, it sounds like ours was a much richer experience with a better chance of actually seeing bears.
The Celebrity tour involved walking a “well-marked trail” with three “viewing platforms” from which you might see bears. On our tour we didn’t just travel to a location and hope bears would happen to be there. Instead we had access to a network of people tracking bears in multiple locations and we went to where they were. In fact, it was via a phone call from our guide’s brother that we learned the location of the two bears we ended up seeing on our tour.
I read many Berenstain Bears books with my six-year-old teaching/travel assistant and son,”H,” to get prepared and excited for our bear search in Icy Strait Point. And while the characters in this bear family are a spot-on representation of the average American human family, with an overconfident yet lubberly and inept papa and a sensible and intelligent mama (just kidding – mostly), it turns out these anthropomorphised grizzlies didn’t have much in common with the non-fiction variety seen in Icy Strait Point.
For one thing, we never would have found them looking for a charming pink-trimmed tree house with a trunk comfortably sized for a family of five as they feast on honey and grapple with life’s important lessons. No, we tracked them by looking for this:
I believe the scientific term is “scat,” but you may know it as poop or, for the crude among us, a four letter word that starts with s and ends with t. So, what can you expect on your bear excursion in Icy Strait Point?
If you book the Icy Strait Exclusive Wildlife and Bear Search Tour through Alaska Shore Excursions, you’ll receive an e-mailed ticket along with detailed meeting directions as seen below:
Be sure to print it out and bring it along with your other cruise documents.
Our ship was scheduled to dock at 10am, with our tour beginning 30 minutes later. That gave us plenty of time to disembark and walk to the excursion hub.
The excursion hub is a short, well marked walk from the cruise pier.
At the hub, we quickly and easily spotted a representative from Brown Bear Lodge holding a sign with the name of our excursion. We checked in with him and waited about 5 minutes for the other guests on our tour to check in and for our van to pull up.
As we loaded into our comfortable, newer model, air conditioned van, we were introduced to our local guide, Mike. Mike is a member of the Tlingit tribe and has deep and fascinating ties to the nearby town of Hoonah and the lands that surround it. He was friendly and quickly felt like a buddy I’d known for years, driving me around his small and tight-knit childhood community as he told funny, interesting, and legendary stories about the locals and the landscape. Expect to hear things like, “that’s my cousin driving by in the dump truck. He was attacked by a grizzly once.” With the full story to follow.
Except for the gun Mike had strapped to his side as a safety precaution, there was a relaxed, laid back vibe. There were only 10 people in our group and we never felt rushed to get from one place to another or like we couldn’t get our questions answered (as is sometimes the case with large cruise ship excursions). In fact, Mike asked at the very beginning if anyone needed to be back at the ship after our allotted four hours for another tour or other afternoon plans, and when no one answered in the affirmative, he mentioned that sometimes he keeps groups out longer if they’re hot on the trail of something interesting or want to linger at one of the stops. We did end up staying out an extra 30 minutes or so which allowed for a beaver spotting and another view of a bear we’d seen earlier at a different location.
Be prepared for a long drive, about an hour each direction and some additional driving between possible bear and wildlife spotting locations. However, the scenery is spectacular and the commentary will make it fly by. Mike began by taking us on a short tour of his hometown of Hoonah, located just a few minutes from the cruise pier in Icy Strait Point. Beyond Hoonah, we waved goodbye to paved roads as they grew skinnier in the rear view mirror and continued onto packed sand and gravel logging roads deep into the rain forest of Chichagof Island. We stopped to view a giant eagle’s nest and at several possible bear and wildlife viewing areas.
Bear tracking takes patience and if you’re serious about seeing one in the wild you have to go to where they are, which may mean hiking on rough trails (actually formed by the bears themselves) with uneven terrain. Our guide and his brother helped everyone navigate the forest and made sure each person got a good view of…dun dun dun…the bears! But I would caution those with mobility issues away from this particular tour. You could skip the hiking part, but you may not see any bears if you do.
We saw two male bears in and near a river, one feasting on salmon. But keep in mind that while whale watching tours in Icy Strait Point typically offer a guaranteed refund if Shamu decides to ghost you, “was it something I said?,” bear search tours offer no such guarantee. While Mike will do everything he possibly can to lead you to bears, it’s not like Tinder where you swipe left for 500 lb 5-year old male and arrange to meet him at the bend in the creek at 1:45pm for a salmon lunch.
…even if you don’t see bears. We saw bald eagles and other birds, hundreds of salmon swimming up stream to spawn, and a beaver.
The salmon were particularly fascinating to watch with Mike explaining their life cycle and mating behaviors as we all stood captivated. He also showed us this skull pictured below with teeth causing me to fear a salmon attack more than the bears! Now I know what the gun was for!
And the beaver was particularly fortuitous as I’d, just an hour earlier, been talking in the van about having never seen one, even in a zoo. This made me think that maybe there was an app to order up wildlife: one semiaquatic rodent for the deprived cruise prof.
Mike was gracious enough to offer us a snack of his famous smoked salmon served with crackers and a buffet of wild berries plucked directly from their bushes by H, Mr. Cruise and I, but named, described, and judged safe to eat by Mike.
We also got a lesson on the local flora, learning about those Mike’s grandmother used for healing purposes and which plant bears eat to unclog their plumbing after hibernation: skunk cabbage! When I asked Mike if I could eat some because, “I have that same problem when cruising,” he sadly said no, but told me it can be used as a medicinal treatment for headaches and coughs.
For any wildlife excursion in Alaska you’ll want to prepare for varied weather conditions by layering and packing a waterproof jacket and hiking boots. Here are some top-rated recommendations that can be purchased on Amazon:
You’ll also want a light packable backpack stocked with water, snacks, sunscreen, and bug repellent and a collapsable hiking stick if you have any balance or tripping concerns.
Here are my recommendations for sunscreen and bug repellent. I prefer bug wipes as they are easier to pack and apply (especially around sensitive areas like the face). Juice Beauty is my favorite sunscreen because it’s natural and organic, effective, and not chalky or greasy.
A quality set of binoculars and a good camera are also must-packs. These items can be expensive, but are worth the investment if you travel frequently. I recommend these if you don’t already have some you like:
For all other Alaska wildlife excursions I would also recommend packing bear bells to alert bears that you’re nearby, so you don’t startle them. But in this case, leave the bear bells back on the ship. Your guide will be well trained in bear safety and will take all the necessary precautions.
I’ve seen plenty of bears at the zoo, but it’s always been with mixed emotions – appreciation, but also unease and even sadness at times. But to see them in the wild, where they are home, free to pluck salmon from the river and lumber through dense vegetation, to feast on skunk cabbage shoots after a long winter rest, to breed and raise cubs, to die and feed what remains. There’s no sadness. Only pure, uncontaminated awe.
And to Mike and the Tlingit people, thank you for your many generations of wise and careful stewardship over these lands and for showing and sharing some of what you’ve learned about them with me and, more importantly, with my young son. These experiences will stay with him, will mold and solidify how he views other people and the natural world. I hope they will inspire him to open his mind and heart to the unique and valuable experiences of others and that he’ll develop a fierce love of and drive to protect our one earth – that he will inspire those of his generation to be and do a little better.
But most of all that he will treasure the memory of excitedly traipsing through the rain forest with his mom and dad where he would peer around a tree to catch his first glimpse of what we’d all come for…an Alaskan grizzly.
And with that…
Class Dismissed.
Homework (10 points): Check out my other Alaska port posts here. And don’t forget to subscribe to the blog to receive new Cruising 101 content direct to your e-mail (scroll up to the top right if on a computer or keep scrolling down if on a mobile device) and follow me on social media:
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