My flight home from Anchorage wasn't exactly smooth, the departure was delayed an hour, and the it got worse once I arrived at LAX, a jammed cargo door, then the Alaska Air luggage belt system broke down, so instead of 8PM, I arrived home after Midnight. That 4 hour delay was nothing compared to the two photo tours that I was returning from!
This years tours were exceptional, the weather was the worst, we lost more days to continuous rain than any other June or July trip ever in the past 15 years. But between the rained-out days, the photography was exceptionally good. We had 3 brown bear mothers with cubs in a single meadow one morning, and naturally there was a little bit of friction between the bears. A good-sized yearling cub went after two spring cubs that were playing, trying to join them, but the mother bear stepped in and chased the yearling. That brought out a larger mother bear, the boss of that meadow, that chased the mother and spring cubs away. They returned a few minutes later and this time everything was peaceful. We had all the bears to ourselves until 8.30, when another photography group arrived that had slept-in.
Even with the days of rain, we had so much fun and there was nothing but positive attitudes on the entire tour, I am lucky to have the best participants ever, thank you!
If you have never photographed brown bear cubs, you would be surprised how much they play, a single strand of giant kelp kept this yearling, and our group, entertained for about 40 minutes. That is a lot of images at 10 or 11 frames per second.
Generally brown bears ignore photographers so getting one to look up at in the direction of the camera is a challenge, getting 3 bears to look up and stare in the same direction naturally without pressuring them is pure luck. We got 'lucky' time after time by being in the right place at the perfect time.
June has really been great for bears with cubs over the last couple of years with less crowds and better weather than later dates like August. Let me know right away if you are thinking about joining us. There are still some spots available for both tours in 2019, for more details see follow this link: http://www.robertotoole.com/bear-tour/
Please email me right away with any questions or for more info. Thanks.