Grizzlies!!!

We are camping in Alaska this week for a family reunion and there will definitely be LOTS more photos to come, but I had to share these from yesterday morning. We hiked about half a mile from our campsite to do some salmon fishing and this is what we saw. 

A mama bear and her cubs (about 30 yards away from us) at the Russian River in the Kenai Peninsula

Bear Cubs!!! I don't know about you, but when I think of bear cubs I think small and cuddly. These were neither!

We had literally fished in this exact spot the day before.  The tables are for fishermen to filet their salmon.
The bears came to snack on scraps.  When there were no scraps, they decided they wanted to snack on us!

So amazing to be so close to grizzly bears in the wild!  The way I see it, we saved on zoo admission and got a great cardio workout in a few minutes later when we had to run away from them.

This is when our little photo shoot turned into every man for himself as mama bear started chasing us on the trail!
I was thinking, "we are totally going to be on TV today... and I haven't showered in 4 days, shoot!"
But luckily "When Bears Attack - the Grizzly edition" will have to wait until next time
as we made it safely to our RV's. I would like to think that I was calm, cool, and collected...

But the photographic evidence suggests otherwise:

This is me running like mad and screaming for dear life!

All I wanted was to do a fun 'jump photo' with some bears in the background for my Alaska photo album. Instead I got this 'I'ma crap my pants photo' as I narrowly escaped death by grizzly!