Best Places to See Bears in Alaska. Does Brooks Falls deserve all this fame?
Published on: July 15, 2021 | Last Updated: April 21, 2025
Every other client enquiry we receive for an Alaska bear safari mentions the ‘fabled’ Brooks Falls Lodge and wants to know if it is either available to book, or when is the best time to visit Brooks Falls for the best grizzly bear viewing? However, let’s just step back for a moment from those eye catching images on the internet of brown bears fishing for salmon and consider the ‘real’ merits (or not) of a visit to Brooks Falls Lodge for your bespoke Alaska wildlife holiday and the many different ways of organising a visit here.
Below in our Brooks Lodge blog we consider the various merits of different ways of getting to the falls and what a stay at Brooks Lodge looks like in the different bear viewing seasons. We also walk you through the Brooks Falls lottery which has become more and more popular over the last decade, as the interest in Alaska brown bears has soared throughout the world. Yes, you can say that Brooks Falls is now a mainstream bear viewing location and is tightly controlled by the park rangers who manage the site. However this does not detract from the beauty of the area and how special it is to have large numbers of brown bears catching salmon at these iconic falls.
How to get to Brooks Lodge: There are more ways than you think
There is only one Brooks Falls Lodge, which is why it is so much in demand, and if you want to stay here in the ‘peak season’ months of July/early August, you need to book 18 months in advance (more on the specifics later). There are actually many different ways of getting to Brooks Falls. The easiest and in some ways the most boring, is simply to book a flight from Anchorage to Brooks. There are several companies in Anchorage who offer this and the cost is normally around 1500USD. Most of these flights stop a King Salmon and then you board another flight from King Salmon to Brooks Falls.
The thing here is to be careful how long the ‘day tour’ is because you have to allow not only flight time there and back, but also the time getting from the plane to the park headquarters and the compulsory debrief by a park ranger before you are allowed to have access to the boardwalk. In addition any food or snacks must be eaten by the headquarters or left in secure lockers. No food can be taken outside of this area to avoid any human/bear conflict, or bears becoming habituated to the presence of food due to careless tourists.
Another option, is to drive down the picturesque Kenai Peninsula to Homer and take a shorter floatplane transfer to Brooks across Cook Inlet and into the world famous Katmai national park. With clear weather, this is an incredibly scenic floatplane journey and if you are lucky like us; you may spot your first brown bears at Brooks from the plane itself! Again, after the flight itself and your debrief by the park rangers, you are looking at a maximum of 4-5 hours of bear viewing at Brooks Falls on foot, with most visitors heading to the final viewing platform which is positioned infront of the highest waterfall.
King Salmon to Brooks Falls: Did you know you can get there by boat?
So not too many people realise that there is a boat transfer option to get the Brooks Falls from King Salmon. Obviously you need to be staying in King Salmon first to make this option work for you and since there are less crowds early in the morning, we would advise that you take the earliest boat out of King Salmon to Brooks. There is also a campsite at Brooks for more adventerous travellers so some of them arrive into Brooks by boat as well.
What we would caution from our own research and feedback is that some of the boat operators out of King Salmon cancel the Brooks Falls transfers with very little notice and are not always helpful with rescheduling or refunds. It also appears that the very skilled floatplane pilots who operate out of King Salmon are more likely to get you over to Brooks Falls in poor weather than the boats, as they don’t have all that rough water to navigate and have decades of experience in choosing safe routes for their passengers.
What about visiting Kulik Lodge instead of Brooks Lodge?
The same company owns both Kulik Lodge and Brooks Falls Lodge and due to the difficulty of getting availability of rooms at Brooks during July and early August, a tactic employed by some travellers is to stay at ‘nearby’ Kulik and take an early morning floatplane ride to Brooks Falls for the famous bear watching. This gets you there before all the ‘day tour flights’ and allows you to access the famous Brooks falls viewing stands before it gets too crowded. However, Kulik Lodge is more luxurious than Brooks and is therefore a more expensive Alaska bear lodge option. The vibe here is more of a fishing lodge than a bear viewing lodge but this is an option that can work for some travellers who have a larger budget and are not successful in the Brooks Falls lodge lottery.
Brooks Lodge Lottery: How to give yourself the best chance to stay here
If you want to stay at the lodge in July/early August you need to be seriously organised, as starting on the in December, two years before your planned Alaska wildlife holiday you need to enter the Brooks Falls lottery. It’s a fairly straighforward process where you pick multiple dates which you will accept a stay at the lodge, with the first set of dates being your preference but also probably the least likely to be successful due to the demand in peak season.
People will be applying throughout the entire month of December and then the owners of Brooks Lodge will reach out to you sometime in January to let you know which dates you have been successful with and also to take a 50% deposit to confirm your reservation at Brooks Lodge. You need to be quite fast to pay this deposit otherwise your space at the accommodation will be offered to someone else who applied in the lottery. It does seems incredibly early to be reserving space for a Alaska wildlife holiday 18 months away but on the positive side of things it gives you plenty of time to discuss and plan what other Alaska bear safaris you can add to your Brooks Falls stay.
Brooks Lodge bear viewing has wonderful highlights from June right through to the end of September. Early season bear viewing is when you have more chance to see mother and cubs and the end of the season is when the bear eat the last remnants of the massive salmon run, so the fish are now dying in the rivers. The reason why so many people want to visit Brooks Falls in the mid July to mid August period is that generally is the peak salmon run season and when you have the best chance of photographing bears catching salmon.
There are however many different ways of looking at Brooks and bear viewing in Alaska in general – especially given the very significant cost involved – so it would be a good idea to email us, or pick up the phone for a chat with Allan who is a regular visitor to Alaska and has visited many of the different national parks. Check out ‘out of season’ Brooks Falls lodge stay combined with Wolverine Creek grizzly bear safari and for the best bear viewing in Alaska check out our Top 5 places to see bears in Alaska blog.
Best time to visit Brooks Falls: Peak salmon runs change each year
So again, following on from my words of caution about the difficulty with current global weather patterns about predicting the best time for bear viewing in Alaska, I prefer to promote a bigger ‘window of opportunity’ for your bear viewing at Brooks and provide a summary of what you might be able to see coming at different times of the year.
The reason the bears are there is for the salmon and there are not only one species of salmon but five so the brown bears will be fishing at different times in the Alaska summer to take advantage of this annual harvest. The problem is that this is a multi-year cycle and there are many factors involved which will influence the number of fish returning to the rivers where they were born. If for example, there was a bad year of weather or lice infestations three years before which affected the survival rates of the salmon fry, then three years later you will see a weak run of salmon and that will have a knock on effect on how many bears you see fishing for salmon at Brooks.
Month by Month guide to Brooks Falls bear season
Late June into early July bear viewing at Brooks Falls will give you a much better chance of seeing female grizzly bears and cubs. Simply because the main salmon runs have not yet started or peaked and therefore the large male brown bears or adolescents – both of which pose a threat to the cubs – have not yet arrived at their favourite fishing spots.
Mid-July to mid-August generally sees a peak in the salmon runs, with different species peaking at different times. This is definitely the time for the serious photographers and wildlife lovers wanting to get that grizzly bear catching salmon photo for their collection. Because Brooks Lodge accommodates around 60-80 clients and there is a campsite, as well as many fly-in bear viewing tours; don’t expect this time of year to be quiet. However staying at Brooks Lodge itself or the campsite gives you a big advantage as the boardwalks and observation platforms are open from sunrise to sunset and the fly-in bear viewing tours don’t arrive until between 10 to 11am and have to leave by 5pm, so you can see that there are some lovely ‘quiet’ windows of bear observation to be had early in the morning and late evening and that is how we would go about things.
Finally, we have late August and the entire month of September with the salmon runs losing vigour and the brown bears feeding on dead or dying salmon. This can still be a great time for ‘bear action’, with plenty of bears continuing to bulk up for the winter and far less human visitors to the Brooks Falls stands. Infact, our first experience of visiting Brooks was during the month of September and we came home with some beautiful images of ‘fat’ bears in great condition.
Summary of Brooks Falls and alternatives for you to consider
Time and time again we have clients returning from Brooks Falls and telling us how special the bear viewing experience was. Even with visitor time at the main platform controlled by the park rangers to ensure everyone gets a chance to see the bears, people still love the location, sheer number of bears seen and the images they were able to capture. Most of our clients travel to Brooks Falls from Homer by floatplane as part of a much longer Alaska wildlife holiday, which usually visits Katmai wilderness lodge, Kodiak Island and then has a self-drive extension to Seward, Homer and Nikiski.
Some of our clients prefer a more wilderness feel to their Alaska bear tours and that is why they prefer to visit Katmai wilderness lodge, where walking with bears is part of the everyday experience and the bear viewing is less controlled and more instinctive, in the company of an Alaskan wildlife guide with many years of experience. Group sizes are also smaller at Katmai wilderness lodge so the encounters with the brown bears feel more intimate and natural. Take a look at our Walking with the Brown Bears of Katmai Wilderness Lodge tour here and contact us if you would like to reserve spaces for its grand re-opening in summer 2027.
