Southwest Alaska has glaciers andicebergs in fresh water lakes, towering young mountains and volcanoes, salmon, bears, lots of them and Lake Clark National Park.

We have about 7 different clans in the village.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman, was provided by Agnese Haury.

♪ music ♪ ♪ music ♪ This is a small airport in Anchorage, Alaska.

The state is over 500,000 square miles in area.

More than twice as big as any other state and much of it is sparsely populated, if populated at all.

If you live outside Anchorage or Fairbanks, pretty much the only way to get there is by plane and usually, by small plane.

One convenient feature of small planes is you can talk to the pilot and guide.

I love the flight from Anchorage out to Port Alsworth, because you're starting right out in the city and as you leave Anchorage, you're kind of going out through Cook Inlet over all the mudflats and stuff.

At first you go over flat land, that's marshy, it's tidal land and a lot of sedges, grasses.

For on and on and on you think 'wow this is good for duck hunters, but not very spectacular.

But then all of the sudden, you get into the foothills, and you get the Alaska Range on the eastern side, the Chigmit range on the south and then the Alutian chain, which goes way out in the Pacific and then all of the sudden, bam, you're up into the glaciers.

You've got these cragged peaks, volcanoes all around and you think, 'this is a landscape that not a lot of people get to see.'

Lake Clark became part of the National park system not just because it had one specific attraction, but it kind of offers this huge diverse area that goes all the way from, you have coastal, coastal habitat all the way up through mountainous stuff, tundra wide open tundra areas.

So it's just kind of this collection of habitats all within one big area.

So you're grandmother and grandfather moved here and they were married and your father was born here?

Yeah actually they started out on the other side of the lake, thinking they needed to be where they could get some that earlier sunlight and it just wasn't protected enough from the wind.

So in '44 is when they ended up over on this side and my father and all of his siblings all were born and grew up right here.

This is the last stop before going through Lake Clark Pass, when you're going back in towards Anchorage.

The lake's about 44 miles long, over 900 feet deep.

It's a big glacier carved lake and has a fault line that runs right down the center of it.

The mountains just kind of continue down from the sides all the way down into it.

Your groceries, your building materials, just all your supplies have to be flown in.

There's no other way to get things here.

So you can take a 50 lb sack of flour that costs you a few bucks at the store and you know it's going to cost you another $45-50 to fly it out.

So yeah, it's an expensive place to live too.

This is a lush garden flourishing under the midnight sun of Alaska.

Vegetables, produce is heavy so you pay the price and it's worthwhile to establish a good garden.

And here we have lettuce.

We have carrots.

We have string beans.

We have cauliflower.

We have a lot of cabbage over there.

We have sunflower for sunflower seeds, rhubarb.

Almost anything you could want and of course, they have a chicken coop and laying hens.

Oh, and a rooster.

I started in about '77 that's when I came out here.

It was a little bit different because we didn't have quite as much machinery.

We had an old ford tractor with a little disk and a barrel behind it.

It's fun because the soil is great.

It looks pretty rough until you run a tiller over it.

It's just flat as a floor and has sand in it, rich soil when it's built up.

First of June is the earliest I can really get on it and make it work because we get frost up until the first of June.

We have a pretty short season here, as you can see this is middle of August and it's already starting to cool off.

The summers are only three months long.

Both modern farmers and the traditional Deni'ana people must take advantage of the sun and warm temperatures.

At a few places a long Lake Clark's one hundred plus miles of shoreline, the Deni'ana set up their summer camps, as they have for many generations.

This is the small indigenous summer camp where people come to fish, particularly for sockeye salmon.

It's temporary.

They don't live here all year round.

I knew about you and I thank you for letting me come visit you in your house and I know you promised you'd show me around.

Yeah.

Okay, thanks.

Oh you know we have about seven different clans in the village.

I'm a... that's a Raven clan and she's a... that's true people are in the bay people.

In the bay.

We weren't allowed to speak our own language in school.

What school was that?

It was territorial school in them days or BIA.

It seemed like BIA controlled us.

Did you go to boarding school?

No, we went to school right here in our village.

And supposed you did speak your language, what happened?

You'd get punished.

You'd get punished.

How would they punish?

Spanking.

We'd get a spanking or a slap on the hands with a ruler Or stand in a corner for at least a half hour.

Stand in a corner for about half hour.

But my granddaughter knows all her animal words in our language.

[native language] eagle, [native language] is squirrel.

[native language] is camp robber.

[native language] is magpie.

[native language] is blackbear.

He was slapped by a bear before.

So he knows that bears can do damage.

Yup, he knows.

But, the bears don't bother you while you're here.

No.

I'm glad to hear that.

We see bears, but they're always in the bay.

I am mostly Dena'ina because I got raised from my grandparents when I was 6 months old.

We call ourselves Dena'ina I was born in Miller Creek up Lake Clark across from Port Alsworth.

I was councilman.

I was mayor.

I was chief.

I was representative.

You name it, I was it.

When we were growing up, we didn't have electricity.

We didn't have running water.

We didn't have snow machine.

We didn't have four wheelers.

Everything was dog team or walk, when we were growing up.

When we were growing up, my father and them, they lived a really total subsistent lifestyle.

They went out and got game whenever they wanted.

Not by allocation like it is now.

Everything that's available, fish, moose, caribou, black bear, sheep, anything and they got it whenever they wanted to get it and they share.

When another person goes out, maybe a week later or so or two weeks, they'll get a moose or whatever and they'll do the same thing, they'll divide it up amongst the village.

This is birch bark too.

They tell me you can put water in it too.

Yeah, if you can boil water in it, it will probably last a couple of years.

The women are the ones that collect the berries.

We only had blueberries and they made jam out of the blueberries, but the blackberries, nobody kept because they spoil too easy, but cranberries you can put them in a box, pick lots, put in a box and cover it up and store in cateress.

They can stay all winter without freezing it.

Food is scarce like meat, moose and caribou.

It's hard to get, as long as you got fish put up you'll survive.

They didn't have nets in those days.

So they had to more or less spear it or get it out of shallow water.Before Christianity, they had you know they call them shamans and medicine men and I guess they could foresee things, pretty powerful.

They taught a lot of respect for everybody that's around you, everything that's around you, plants, water, air, animals, anything.

Like you know if they're going to get an animal in their language and they'll talk to the animal and tell them 'I'm gonna get you' not because for sport, I'm getting you because I need you.

You know, so that animal could come back again in spirit, if you take care of them.

You know that's what they believe, but they respected everything We never really carried on our past as much as we really should.

There's a lot of things that we forgot, you know when you're going to school and they're making us forgetting our language and then forgetting the stories, forgetting our dances, forgetting our potlucks.

We still do potlucks, but not like they used to.

This is perfect bald eagle habitat.

This lake has plenty of fish and that's what they want and there is one up in the top of the tree.

It's probably a parent because there's a nest right up here.

And out of that nest, you can just barely see the head of a chick bobbing.

The other parent will be somewhere around here because they both take care of the chicks.

This is the perfect place for them, there's ample fish and that means that baby is going to grow up to be a strong adult.

This is the perfect place to see bald eagles.

Lakes provide a natural runway, often the only place to land and take off to get to Katmai National Park and bears, we hop from lake to lake.

If the salmon are running, bears will be there, but we have to fly in and hike to find out.

This is my first endeavor in Katmai National Park.

It's hard to depart a float plane gracefully, when you're wearing waders and this is bear country.

Number of places in Alaska that just get these heavy pushes of salmon all at once, so what brings the bears here is the fish.

It's close to 100 mile range that they'll move throughout the summer, while they're eating.

So they'll hit this river then some other rivers when there's new pushes of salmon coming into other places.

So they're constantly eating in amounts that we can't even imagine.

Yeah this time of year, all they'll do is eat then sleep then eat then sleep and that will actually go through twenty four hours, you'll have bears at the river at night time fishing as well.

How long are the salmon here for?

Well it's about a month and half that there in here thick.

So these bears are really just here for a short time and then they'll go to other streams to catch another salmon run.

Bears will eat just about anything.

Yeah, you can see a lot about their diet even just looking at all the scat that's along the ridge.

This one's made upmostlyof berries.

Berries, yeah.

And then this one is mostly fish and there you can see all the vertebrae and That's really recent.

Yeah.

That's vertebrae.

And then grass, when they're first coming out they're eating a lot of grass and purging their system.

So this is the old?

Yeah, this is going to be old and dried up.

Wow.

So one of the reasons they're so successful is that they can eat just about anything.

Right, yeah.

Very varied diet.

Of course they're going to pack in all the calories with the fish.

They don't seem to pay any attention to us at all.

No.

One of the things you have to be careful is they're really ignoring us here.

They're a lot more concerned about other bears and how they move around the other bears so the one time you can get into trouble is if they start pushing each other around and they're not paying attention to where you are.

That's why here, unlike other wild life stuff we just keep talking and making noise, so the bears know right where we are and they don't end up running into us and having to react when they're so close.

So how fast do you figure a big boar can run?

Thirty miles an hour?

Yeah, a big boar, they figure right around 30 miles per hour for a short distance.

When you watch them here in the river and stuff, especially when they're following the salmon, just kind of lumbering along.

They don't look like they could go that fast, but yeah they can pick up and go for some short distances really fast.

About how much do you figure that one would weigh?

When that one goes into hibernation, he's probably going to be pushing 8 to 900 pounds.

It's a big, it's a big bear.

If he stood up on his back feet, he'd be taller than I am?

Oh yeah that one's probably approaching 8.5 to 9 ft tall now.

Could dunk a basketball.

Could dunk a basketball, yeah.

A lot of the bears have different techniques.

Some of them will stick their face under water and snorkel and they usually like to keep their ears up above, so they can here what's going on around them.

You'll have other bears that kind of sit right at the edge of the brush to try and jump out and ambush a fish when they see it.

Other bears that will get in turbulent water and just sit there and wait for a fish to bump into them.

Some of them use their paws, some of them use their teeth to catch the fish.

And there are some places, we go later in the fall in the lakes, where the bears will just dive all the way under.

The last thing we'll see is their feet kicking, you know as they go down under.

They can see okay, but they really identify stuff with sound and smell.

So the fish in the water, I don't think they can spot them actually as easy as we can.

This stream is teaming with salmon.

Plenty for everybody, but some salmon look better than others to the bears.

I'm quite close to this sow.

The rule is you can't push yourself to within fifty yards of them, but she seems to be moving in our direction.

We try to talk.

We try to make noise so that she's aware that we're here.

We don't want to surprise her, that's the worst thing we want to do, but in the meantime she's a very good hunter and she's looking for the best salmon.Look at the tank, coming this way.

It's a panzer.

The bears are all around.

We have three, a mother and two cubs coming from upstream.

We got one guy coming around the bend, big, with his head in the water and we've got five, we've got six of them downstream.

At this point, I'm quite pleased that there's plenty of food for them around.

They're not thinking of human beings.

I like the fact that she's scratching cause that means she's watching other things rather than worried about me.This closer one, I think she's watching that stretch of stream for fish, but she also knows we're here so she won't purposefully just come right into this area when we're here and that is part of what you watch for.

We watch the bears and as long as they keep acting natural and moving around us that's fine.

If they start showing direct interest in us then it's time to try to figure out what the bear's trying to do, is it trying to get where we're standing or is it trying to get by us.

What's its interest and which do we need to move then.

Here they go right here.

There's a fin.

You can see a salmon fin out there.

He's trying to get it.

He got it.

You hear them only making those noises when they're eating, but usually only when they're eating together.

So I think part of it is they're happy to be eating and part of it is they're kind of like trying to push their way and keep the fish to themselves.

Because, you'll hear the cubs doing that all the time when they eat together, but if they eat by themselves, then they're not really doing that.

This is actually the age you really want to watch for because these younger bears are still trying to figure out kind of socially where they fit into the whole thing.

So they're out on they're own and sometimes they can get a little bit more pushy and a little more aggressive because they're still kind of figuring out where they fit exactly so they're not sure if people or something if they're supposed to avoid or go closer to our push or what.

Do we sing?

[sings] Go congregation, go.

Go and see.

Now you're scaring it.

A lot of people use the bells and the whistles and different things like that to try and alert the bears.

The problem with them is those are very melodic, it's a lot like they sound with the birds and everything else that are out here.

So the human voice is nice and broken up.

It really seems to get their attention and also mechanical sounds like clapping and things like that will do it too.

After several hours of mingling with bears, it's time to fly into the volcano and glacier country.

You look in the river there and compare that to the lakes next to it, you see three different colors of water in just a small area.

So what's the chocolaty color?

That's the heavier silt that's still in there.

So it hasn't settled out yet, so the real heavier minerals.

Yeah and then that heavier stuff settles out and then you still have the lighter suspended it gives it that turquoise the green and blue colors.

So that's Redoubt volcano, sticking up through the clouds.

And you can really see a lot of steam coming out of it today.

Oh wow, and that's the lava dome.

That's where all of the gas is hissing out of it.

It looks like some creature from outer space that dropped down into the volcano.

I'm going to reach right across you and try to get a photograph of that.

This whole area they figure is volcanic origin as far as the creation of the mountains and then the glacier carving, carving the shape back into them, especially down in the valleys and as we get up here farther, you'll really be able to see that flow and how the glaciers come down through these valleys.

Well glaciers are really rivers of ice.

The ice at the top pushes the rest of it down, but gravity is pulling the whole thing down the whole time.

The bigger, the more force they get.

You can follow the lines, those ribbons that come down the middle.

Each of those ribbons represents where the glacier has carved off part of the side of the valley that it's running through.

So there are indications of where the glacier came from like that one down here.

Being this close to the volcanoes, there's been major eruptions over and over again through the years.

So besides the dirt, gravel, rock, everything else you have in there, you have the actual volcanic ash and pumice and other things that have got mixed in there as well.

The way these volcanic peaks jut out, maybe the big scales on a dinosaur's back sticking up through the ice.

It is a strange land and you can see the color in the ice that blue where it cracks.

Actually, you can see it through the snow too.

We'll fly right down the glacier, kind of follow the flow down to the lake and then we're not going to land right in the lake underneath the glacier with all the ice chunks floating around.

Yeah those specks down there are icebergs.

Yeah and it would be bad to get the plane stuck there cause the ice moves around.

As you can see it would be a long, rough hike back out of here.

This is Kenibuna lake.

Kenibuna.

And this mud as all glacial silt that is deposited here, so you can feel it's all slippery under your feet.

It is, yes.

It's really fine.

Not regular sandy type mud.

Oh my goodness!

That's a moose track.

Those are, each of the pads must be five inches long.

Yeah, it's huge.

This one's been made by a big boar, you can see some real clear ones right there.

This is a brown bear's paw print, right there.

Oh my gosh, there it is right there.

You can see that front pad is about six inches across, so it's about a seven foot tall bear.

So from here we'll head up the shore a little ways and then we can change into our regular hiking boots and we'll try to get up through the moraine ridge and onto the lake that's right at the edge of the glacier there.

As I look around, this strikes me as a young landscape, the birches, the little composites here.

The shrubbery is small.

And you can see this whole area is covered in all kinds of lichen here that are down here breaking down the sand and the rocks.

Yeah and we're walking over them, right.

You see the little ground squirrel up ahead of us there.

Yeah he's putting on quite a display, isn't he?

That tail has to be a social communicator with the other squirrels.

So that 200 foot high little mountain behind us is not really naturally here.

That's a glacier moraine.

Right.

So an area where the glacier is just pushed up a big ridge of rock and gravel and stuff that has collected and has melted back away from it.

It just drops its load.

We're walking on one here too.

You promised me a black bear There she is.

Ahh great!

Eating the soap berries it looks like.

They look like teddy bears in comparison to the brown bears.

Yeah a lot smaller, yeah.

So how much will she weigh?

Probably 300 lbs, somewhere right in there.

And she's probably at her fattest right now.

Yeah getting close to it at least.

Oh my goodness!

Get a great view of all that ice in the glacier now.

So these are real fresh water icebergs.

Yeah, pretty much everyday there is big chunks that are breaking off the glacier and floating out across here.

And you can here it when it happens?

Yeah you can it's like thunder rolling when it breaks off of there.

Where we were up on the snow pack, down to where it hits the lake here was about, it's a good 14 or 15 miles at least that we flew down there.

That's a lot of glacier.

That's a lot of glacier and that's just one little finger of that over big glacier that's just covering this stretch of mountains.

Southwest Alaska and its vast mountain ranges get three months of mild summer.

The rest of the year is mostly rain, fog, snow and ice.

It's a challenging climate but it's also what makes for spectacular wildlife and incomparable landscapes.

[music] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman , was provided by Agnese Haury.

Copies of this and other episodes of In the Americas with David Yetman are available from the Southwest Center.

To order call, 1-800-937-8632.

Please mention the episode number and program title.

Please be sure to visit us at InTheAmericas.com or InTheAmericas.org