Wood-Tikchik State Park employee David Roseman was out for a day of fishing on Lake Aleknagik when he witnessed something he had never seen in his 21 year career at the park, a pair of grizzly bear cubs riding on their mother’s back as she swam 400 yards from a small island in the middle of the lake to the shore.
Grizzly bears are amazing swimmers and float quite easily due to their high fat content and thick oily fur, juvenile grizzlies aren’t the best in the water and don’t start swimming until they are around 30lbs.
Prior to seeing the momma bear acting as a ferry for her offspring Roseman saw the adult bear “snorkel fishing” in the lake. Snorkeling is where bears simply float around with their snouts under water in search of fish. Wood-Tikchik State Park is home to one of the richest fisheries in the world so it stands to reason this type of behavior would be a successful hunting tactic.
About Wood-Tikchik State Park:
At nearly 1.6 million acres, Wood-Tikchik State Park is the largest state park in the nation. This one park encompasses nearly half of the State Park land in Alaska and 15 percent of all state park land in the United States. The park’s acreage is quite diverse and includes 12 lakes, over 1,000 acres, rivers up to 60 miles in length, mountains exceeding 5,000 feet in elevation, and extensive lowlands.
Wood-Tikchik State Park is named for its two systems of large interconnected clear-water lakes located in southwest Alaska, just north of Dillingham. The southern lakes, the Wood River system, drains into Bristol Bay via the Wood River. The northern Tikchik Lake system drain into Bristol Bay by the Nuyakuk and Nushagak Rivers
Wood-Tikchik State Park was created in 1978 for the purposes of protecting the area’s fish and wildlife breeding and support systems and to preserve the continued use of the area for subsistence and recreational activities. The land and water in this region are traditional grounds for subsistence fishing, hunting, and gathering. These activities are an integral part of the culture in this region and provide not only food but a cultural tie to the land.
images from AlaskaStateParks