While taking the East Fork Transit Buses from Teklanika Campground, my parents and I saw 5 or 6 grizzly bears.

We had gone hiking at Tattlers Creek our second day, not knowing what we would see there 2 days later. In retrospect the bear prints on the side of the road were a clue!

We saw a mom with 3 small spring cubs on Igloo Mountain our afternoon bus trip the 3rd day. We got off at the next stop to go back to that area on the next bus. While we didn’t see the family on Igloo, further along we saw a solitary bear cross the road right in front of us, then graze nearby.

Our last morning at Teklanika we got up early to catch the first transit bus of the day. Thanks to a sharp-eyed passenger,  we saw the bear family again. The mom and cubs were now halfway up the Tattler Creek drainage. The cubs are born dark and frequently have a white collar around their neck. At a distance all 3 cubs looked like adorable black balls of energy, bounding and wrestling all over the mountainside. When we saw them closer some were lighter than others and I clearly saw the white collar on one of them. The mom was the light brown color of the solitary bear in the photo above.

The cubs were so fun to watch through the binoculars!  They would get quite a distance from mom while playing, then run to catch up.  Once 2 of the cubs each stood up on their hind legs and pushed each other. Mom mainly kept grazing and digging for roots. At the second viewing we could only see 2 of the cubs for the longest time. Then the mother gathered the cubs to head further uphill and the 3rd cub came tearing out of a thicket a couple hundred yards away from the rest of the family. People on the bus decided he was the troublemaker of the siblings.

On our return trip past Tattlers we saw a solitary grizzly further down the drainage and we couldn’t see the family. I hope he wasn’t hunting those cute little cubs (males will kill and eat them). As we had also seen Dall sheep, caribou, and a wolf on this first bus of the day, we were having an AMAZING morning.

I plan to put the complete wildlife count from our Teklanika trip in a future post as we had some interesting sitings beyond the Denali Big Five.