Lens: Zeiss 24mm f1.8 e-mount
Camera: NEX-7, ISO100, f8, 1/250, raw
Sat in the van that is driving us to our hotel in Kodiak city, I just struggled to hang up with my wife Claudia, as happy as she was to finally speak with me and hear that I’m OK after the last four days into the wild. I’m now settling into a mixed set of feelings, which range from confusion to detachment, with a bit of both relief and melancholy just to make the things more complicated. I reckon that it has not been a long time at all since we left “civilization” and went in “the woods”, and yet the whole experience was in many ways so extremely far from my “normal” world that now everything seems dreamy and fake.
Take this very morning, for example. I happened to fly over the ocean, mountains and glaciers, landing in a lake full of icebergs (the bush pilots in Kodiak are incredible, give them a bucket of water and they will land on it) just before going for a hike that brought me in a large valley, where I counted twelve huge bears. At the end of the hike, they were all around us, the closest less than 20 meters. I didn’t freak out just because the ranger with us looked perfectly calm for the whole time.
And yet, the brutal unpredictability of these giants has been sadly proven just a few years ago and very close from where I was standing. One or two bears, in all perfectly similar to the ones around me, mauled and eventually ate Timothy Treadwell and Annie Huguenard. I have to admit that after four days spent in the grizzly land I can’t avoid to feel some sort of respect for Timothy and his insane attempt to become a Grizzly Man.