I will be making multiple posts about the polar bears. This will just be the first of them. I had never seen wild polar bears before this trip. My understanding about both polar bears and about polar bear viewing on this excursion proved to be mostly wrong. I’ll explain some of that.

Polar bears live in the Arctic. They are the largest and most powerful carnivore on earth. Adult males can be over 8 feet long and weigh 1,600 pounds. They have no natural predators and no fear of humans, making them highly dangerous. Their sense of smell is so good that they can sniff prey up to ten miles away. They are powerful swimmers and have been seen swimming over 60 miles off shore. Our local guide said that bears have been seen swimming for ten days straight. Plus polar bears walk at about 3 miles per hour but they swim at 6 miles per hour or faster.

My vision for sightseeing the polar bears was boating along the coast and out to sea watching ice flows for bears. Nope. There was no ice. We did not see any ice anywhere in the Arctic, except for some snow areas high in the Brooks Range mountains. So, since there were no ice flows for the bears to walk searching for seals, they were all in town. I just received the November issue of Alaska magazine and the feature article is “Kaktovik: Life in the Village of Polar Bears”. According to his article, Kaktovik and Barter Island has about 80 bears roaming four miles of coastline. In our four days, we sighted bears 105 times but we know that we saw some of the same bears multiple days, so I suppose that we saw almost all of the Barter Island and Kaktovik area polar bears.

Kaktovik is on the edge of Barter Island. Barter Island is surrounded by lagoons which have sand bars that shield it from the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Ocean. We spent all of our boat time watching for polar bears in the Kaktovik Lagoon and the Jago Lagoon. We never went out to sea. Most of the time the bears were on sand or gravel bars on the edge of the lagoons. We also saw bears swimming from one side of a lagoon to another side of the lagoon. We also saw bears coming into town. We saw bears at night while we were watching for the Northern Lights. We saw bears from our house while eating meals or lounging about. We went to Kaktovik just hoping to see bears but we never expected to be so overwhelmed by the numbers of bears in this area.

Most of our bear viewing was done from our guide’s boat. (first photo) It was great for our purposes. We could get out on the front, the back, or sit inside in complete comfort and warmth. Don was a registered guide and he really knew his stuff.

We got photos of bear prints in the sand but Don would not let us get out of the boat to take photos of them. He said it was against the rules. The only reason that I wanted to do that was to show comparative size, like my foot to a bear’s foot. For that, you can look at the second photo. This is from the Alaska Magazine November 2019 issue. A polar bear’s paw can be close to 12 inches across. So thanks to Alaska magazine for showing the picture that I wasn’t allowed to take. This will also give you a much better understanding of why polar bears are such great swimmers.

We saw groups of polar bears each day out in the lagoons. The largest groups were seen on our two whole days in Kaktovik. On our third day, we saw at one time (drum roll please) 27 polar bears! You can see a small grouping in the third photo. But that big bear in the back laying down, that might later on have proved to be three bears. We had to keep changing our count as a big mama bear would get up to reveal two cubs under her.

The fourth photo will give you the idea that while we were out in the lagoons searching the sand bars and lagoons for bears, we were right next to Kaktovik. You can also see the Brooks Range mountains behind town, an added bonus.

I included the last photo because I think that when we got to this spot, we thought we could see four bears. Quite a bit later, we came to learn that we were actually seeing maybe twelve bears. You can see some unwinding of the bear piles.