I booked this tour through Norwegian. I paid $109 after their $50 discount. Last year I did the Neets Bay Bear Encounter in Ketchikan. I chose that one over this one because my research said that was the best place to see bears on this cruise.

This time I’m trying the cheaper option. This tour is less than half the price of the Neets Bay tour and you don’t have to take a 45 minute boat ride each way.

It was easy to find the tour meeting location.

We have the best driver (in green). He was always laughing. He kept the entire bus laughing the entire ride. 

The bus was nice and comfortable. It wasn’t full so we had room to spread out.

We drove through downtown on our way there. On the way back we’ll have an option of getting dropped off downtown which I will likely take.

Creek Street will be the downtown drop off option. I want to see the salmon run there.

This is our tour location. We have an opportunity to use the portable bathrooms before we get started. Our driver is going to meet us with the bus after the tour so we were able to leave items in the bus if we wanted.

These are our tour guides. It definitely got confusing out on the boardwalk with multiple tours out there at the same time. They probably should have you wear color coded stickers because they struggled to keep track of who was in their group.

It didn’t take long before we saw our first bear.

 

There is an area on the other side of this property where people in cars can just park and get most of the show we got for free.

The salmon are not nearly as plentiful here as they were in Neets Bay. This is a lot of bears looking through dead fish.

This bear missed a salmon running behind him.

This is definitely a live salmon catch. I saw a lot of this a Neets Bay but not very much of it here.

Another tour guide said this was a two year old bear catching his first fish. The fish isn’t moving so I have my doubts on whether or not it’s alive.

Don’t step in it.

The two year old bear dropped his fish on our trail. I believe members of our group encountered that bear during our free time at the totem pole area.

After about an hour of bear watching we went next door to the totem pole park. The carver is out of town. Otherwise we would get to meet him.

We were given 30 minutes to eat, shop or explore.

They have a blacksmith. 

I spent most of my free time looking at the totem poles outside.

After that our bus driver picked us up. 

I took the downtown drop off option by Creek Street and took the shuttle bus back to the ship after I was done.

I really enjoyed this tour. It’s not as good as Neets Bay. But I did get to see four black bears including a two year old and a lot of totem poles.

My understanding is we were extremely lucky to see four bears. I heard they don’t normally come out when it’s sunny and they rarely see more than one at a time. But my experience was great. Not as great as Neets, but I still got to see black bears in the wild at less than half the price of Neets.