It’s a classic Haines scene in the summer and early fall: fishermen and brown bears dodge each other along the Chilkoot River, while local Sue Rakes watches on.
The rhythm played out as usual around dawn on a recent Saturday. A sow and four cubs meandered toward a packed riverbank. The fishermen scattered, but someone left a black backpack behind.
“Is that your backpack?” Rakes asks the crowd. “Can you get it, please?”
The owner declined, nodding to the advancing sow.
“Well, I’ll go get it,” Rakes said, before she scrambled down to the shore and snagged the bag.
“We can’t give them any rewards at all,” she explained to the seemingly frustrated owner, who said the pack was empty anyways.
Through summer and fall, Rakes spends hours on end at the Chilkoot Lake State Recreation Site. She loves bears, but she’s not really there to watch them. She’s there as an unaffiliated volunteer to watch people and ensure neither they — nor their fish, food or dogs — attract or endanger the bears.
Rakes first visited Haines from North Carolina in the fall of 2022. During her weeklong trip, she saw bears constantly contending with people who were not keeping a safe distance.
The next year, she came back to stay.
"I wanted to move here and try to do something about the bears,” she said. “It was so frustrating.”
She has since become a permanent and sometimes controversial fixture along the river. Her goal is to help educate people about bears and eliminate as many attractants as possible, to minimize the potential for dangerous interactions.
“It literally ramps up in two or three visits from a bear, and then everybody gets afraid, and then everybody gets let’s-kill-bear-fever,” she said.
Bear viewing brings management challenges
The recreation site is notorious for being a relatively small area with lots of bears, lots of people, and lots of potential for dangerous interactions between them.
Hannah Manninen, a wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said Chilkoot is so popular in part because it’s easy to get to. Many other bear viewing spots in Alaska can only be reached by boat or plane.
But it’s also unique because the area is used for far more than bear viewing alone. It also draws hordes of fishermen, campers and tourists on commercial tours.
“If something is established as a bear viewing location, that’s often one of the only things that’s happening there,” Manninen said. “And so you can have more strict regulations or enforcement policies.”
The Alaska Division of Parks and Outdoor Recreation manages the site but declined to comment for this story.
There are regulations in place for tour operators, and signs advise everyone else where they should walk, park, fish and watch for bears. There is also a ranger who spends some of his time at Chilkoot, and a technician who was hired by Fish and Game this year to educate visitors during peak hours.
“The dream or goal would be that there would be a minimum of two technicians,” Manninen said. “It can be a lot for one person to handle.”
Rakes said her aim has been to support that new program by serving as an extra pair of eyes. In her experience, many people who frequent Chilkoot still largely do as they please, particularly when no one is around. So she’s trying to fill the gap.
“I really just want more people to have eyes out here and have people know they’re being watched,” she said.
Rakes also works as a volunteer host at the Chilkoot Campground, where she checks sites for attractants and educates campers. But she said she’s not speaking in that capacity, and that she does this work as a concerned citizen, not as a camp host.
While a lot of people thank Ranks for her volunteer work, she conceded that not everyone is a fan. She said she is sometimes short and firm with people, and that it’s not exactly uncommon for fishermen, campers and tour operators to get upset with her when she tells them what to do. Some have accused her of yelling.
She said she’s worked on adjusting her approach so it’s more effective, including by learning from the paid educator.
This summer in particular, her goal was to crack down on any attractants and reduce the odds that cubs get accustomed to eating human food. She said she hopes that could prevent dangerous conflicts with humans, which she worries could lead to a park closure — or a dead bear.
“My biggest motivator is those four cubs,” she said, “because they’re going to be on their own next spring.”
Activity along the river is winding down now as temperatures drop. Rakes said she’ll be out there for as long as the bears are.
