I saw a bear! A brown bear, to be exact… with her cub… fishing for salmon. And my gut instinct wasn’t to run, but to film it. The staff at the Eagle River Nature Center were quite impressed with the video I got.

Shortly after, I did a full blown Alaska Minute.

And later in the day, I drove up to Hatcher Pass and the Independence Mine State Park, which was blanketed with snow. I came across a family of birds — I know think they are some kind of ptarmigan, probably either willow ptarmigan, which is the Alaska state bird, or white-tailed ptarmigan. I didn’t do a great job getting the birds in the shot for part of this video — sorry about that! You can also see the camera get jostled around when I jumped because a bird took off behind me.