A brown bear crosses open country at Katmai National Park, Alaska, with the coastal range stacked up behind

Katmai National Park, Alaska

Tundra Trek

Most of the bears I photographed in Katmai were gathered around the rivers. This one was somewhere else entirely.

I found it making its way across the open tundra, stopping now and then to forage for blueberries before continuing its slow search for somewhere to nap. With hardly a tree in sight, the landscape stretched out around it—low, spongy vegetation underfoot and enormous mountains rising in the distance. The bear suddenly seemed surprisingly small against the scale of Alaska.

I called it Tundra Trek because the photograph is as much about the journey as the bear itself: one solitary animal moving through an immense, quiet landscape, completely at home in a place that makes everything else seem small.

Nikon Z 7II · Nikkor Z 180-600mm + Z TC-1.4x · 252mm · f/8 · 1/1250 sec · ISO 2000

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