Ned Rozell , a science writer at the institute, is hiking the trans-Alaska pipeline this summer to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Alaska Science Forum and the pipeline. Ken Kalchert exposed plenty of eyeball a few years ago when he described one of his most vivid memories in 20 years of working on the trans-Alaska pipeline. One day, while he sat in the cab of his 18-wheeler near Galbraith Lake, a large grizzly bear lumbered below. I was scared even though I was in the truck. The bear Kalchert saw was one of Alaska's most adaptable creatures, a brown bear sometimes referred to as the barren ground grizzly.
Brown bears can live almost anywhere in Alaska.
People have seen them throughout the state except for on a few islands in Southeast, the Aleutians beyond Unimak Island, and islands of the Bering Sea. Brown bears away from southern coastal areas of Alaska are often called grizzlies, though scientists consider both the same species. The grizzlies of the treeless far north thrive in the abbreviated arctic summer with far less than their coastal counterparts. Rather than fattening themselves at swollen salmon streams, far-north grizzlies spend much of their time gathering greenery, such as horsetails, sedges, starchy roots, wildflowers, and berries. Northern grizzlies are usually found close to one of their main sources of protein, ground squirrels.