I recently went to Alaska with the hope of seeing bears. Not just to see, but to experience. I wanted a close encounter. The publicity looked promising. One of the pervasive images of Alaskan tourism is an enormous brown bear standing at the top of a waterfall, jaws open, about to hoover a migrating salmon which is leaping through the air. Even with a longish lens, the photographer who took this image would have to be no more than 15 metres away I calculated.
At first, the journey shone with promise. On the morning after I arrived in Alaska, the lead story in the Anchorage Daily News told the tale on one Dan Mobley and his German shepherd, Shadow. Dan was gathering wood for his evening campfire down on the banks of the Nakochna River when he came between a mother grizzly bear and her cub.
Mobley backed away fast, but he had inadvertently broken the cardinal rule in the bear book of etiquette. Mobley headed for the river with mama bear in hot pursuit - and gaining fast - when man's best friend bolted to the rescue. Shadow sank his fangs into the startled bear's backside and drove bear and baby back into the forest. As a reward, Mobley's daughter was planning a special meal of chicken and twice-baked potato for Dan and his four-legged saviour.
This story also highlights the curious fact that so-called experts often hold widely divergent views on bear-avoidance strategies. "Leave the pet at home," advised my Lonely Planet Alaska guidebook. "A frightened dog only runs back to its owner, and most dogs are no match for a bear." Yet where would Dan Mobley have been without his faithful Shadow?
Everyone agrees, however, that noise is a good idea when you're walking through bear country. The shop at my hotel in Denali National Park, the McKinley Village, was filled with tinkling noises as well-padded hikers milled around before setting forth on the trail. This was the sound of bear bells. Since bears have a keen sense of hearing, the idea is that bear hears you coming, scampers off into the forest and you pass by, probably without you even realising that you've been up close and personal. The other scenario - a bear does not hear you until you are wading through the bushes in his direction, gets a fright and has to decide whether to run or stand and take you on - is one that you want to avoid. Chances are this will not have a happy ending.
Home to Mount McKinley, the nation's highest peak, Denali National Park hosts at least 200 grizzlies and about the same number of black bears. I was a little disappointed, however, to discover that there has never been a bear fatality in Denali National Park. According to the ranger I asked, there had been only a single serious bear incident during the entire summer. A hiker had come across a bear in a clearing in the midst of a particularly dense stand of forest. With nowhere else to escape, the bear panicked and ran straight into the hiker, stepped on his foot and broke his ankle.
Private cars are banished from the park. The only way to tour Denali is aboard one of the tour buses that are exactly like the yellow school buses on which America goes to school, and so, early the next morning, full of excitement at the prospect of a bear encounter, I set off on tour.
Park authorities go to great lengths to make sure that bears and humans don't get too close. Among other strategies, we were cautioned to practise diligent crumb control.
This means that we could not eat outside the bus, since crumbs might attract bears, the bears might then associate humans with food and thus the balance of nature in the park would be catastrophically altered.
It was a moist day, with low clouds and drizzle, but about an hour into the trip the guide/driver braked to a stop. "Bear! See?" she said. "Ten o'clock, top of the ridge." After considerable squinting, I saw something move. It was probably 2km away. Imagine that a standard household ant just crawled along the very edge of the page you're reading right now. That's about the size of this bear.
Sadly, it didn't get any better than that. In 12 days of hiking, cruising and paddling around various bits of Alaskan real estate, I saw bears foraging along the seashores, bears with cubs and brown humpish rocks that might have been bears, but the distance between bear and I was never less than a kilometre.
At the end of my Alaska journey I returned to Juneau, where I planned to kill a couple of hours wandering around town before my plane left. Juneau is the northern terminal for the cruise ships that ply the Inside Passage, and I was constantly forced off the sidewalk by pairs of well-fleshed septuagenarians in purple leisure suits brandishing terrifying souvenirs.
Eventually, I found myself at the nether end of town, long after the shops had petered out, where the forest presses close to the harbour. There was a dog snuffling around where some fishermen had been cleaning fish. It was a big dog. Huge, in fact, with lots of dark brown matted hair and about the biggest head you ever saw on a dog. I stopped dead, and the brown fluid eyes of ursus arctos swung in my direction. Okay, you might say that this was only a semi-domesticated, trash-eating specimen of a brown bear, but a bear is a bear. I could see its teeth. I could smell its wet-doggy smell. However I didn't want to press my luck and so I spoke politely to it, slowly backed away and returned to the main street of Juneau to buy a trashy souvenir.