I've been in Alaska for over two months now, and I've only just made a very pertinent discovery about myself: I am not a wilderness girl. Nothing about me is wild or rugged. I absolutely hate "roughing it."
Whoops.
It may seem a bit crazy that I decided to drop everything and move to Alaska for five months. However, my assumption was that since I loved nature, Alaska was the place to be…right? I just never understood that there was a difference between "rugged" (ew) and "rustic" (yesss). Despite all this, one of my goals in life is to be an adventurous person (hence the blog about all my "adventures"). Just because I may shriek in horror when one of my nails breaks doesn't mean I won't jump off a bridge or eat a blood cupcake or crawl through a swamp to get that gorgeousss shot of a heron.
Actually, when it comes to nature photography, my aversion to roughing it tends to fade into the back of my mind. And so, when the option arose to take a hike up to some falls to watch the salmon jump, I was thrilled. Reaching the falls, I picked a ledge over the river that wasn't quite wide enough for both me and my camera backpack, pulled out my zoom lens, and settled down with my eye pressed against the viewfinder.
We sat there for an hour. Occasionally, a salmon would break through the frothy spray in a desperate attempt to breach the falls…but mostly, the fish were simply too exhausted to continue upstream. It wasn't exactly the most thrilling shoot of my life––or the most comfortable seat––but I was so pleased with the possibility of one or two good photos that I didn't notice.
I didn't notice the bear, either.
I didn't even glance in its direction until after it had crashed through the bushes and charged into the river. At this point, it took my non-wilderness brain several moments to register that the big brown thing I was seeing was a dangerous animal called a bear.
Upon realizing the danger, however, I did what every nature photographer would do: I started taking pictures. Carefully picking my way backwards along the rocks, I snapped away as the exhausted salmon streaked frantically through the water, trapped between the bear and the falls. Eventually, the bear snagged a salmon in his jaws. AND THEN THERE WAS BLOOD EVERYWHERE!!
At that point, my camera batteries died and I remembered I'm not actually a NatGeo photographer, but a somewhat-clueless farm girl trying to have adventures in the Alaskan wilderness. Oh yeeeah.
