Hyway 40 between Hinton and Grand Prairie

rag-ftw wrote:
Did you see the momma and her four cubs? . . . We saw her in August of 2012, about a month after the photographer was killed in Denali.

Yep, but we saw her one evening walking along the cliff face paralleling the road on her way to the hatchery. We had 75 yards of swamp water and bushes between us and the bears so my wife was using a 500mm telephoto. But we were close enough that she never got mama and all 4 cubs in the same photo with that long lens. And some of the photos she got showed every hair on mama's face.

Some people were still taking photos as she was approaching the edge of the road where they were standing. But we were back in the truck by that time because it was getting too dark for using a long, slow telephoto and the mosquitoes were eating us alive.

The cubs were a year older and much larger than in the photos a friend took of them at the hatchery in July 2012. Four cubs for one mama is really unusual and we heard that perhaps she adopted two from a dead mother.