The grizzly was chewing on what appeared to be grass as she looked me in the eye.  To her left and right, her cubs alternated between feeding on the vegetation (maybe berries?) and rolling around.  I stood my ground, awestruck at the scene before me.

Hi there Mrs. Bear

It was my first time seeing a grizzly bear in the wild, let alone a mother with her cubs.

Don't get between mama grizzly and the cubs

Then again, I’m leaving out a couple important details, the two most pertinent being that I was 80 meters away from the bears and that an electric fence separated us.  It was hardly a wilderness encounter.  Instead, I was on the perimeter road of the tent camping area at Lake Louise Campground in Banff NP, Alberta, Canada.  The crowd that had gathered on the road was the thing that had tipped me off to grab my cameras.

I felt sorry for the people trying to snap photos with cell phones

Even though the setting was a bit artificial, it was a great sight.  The bears were truly wild.  The fence was not bear-proof – it’s a deterrent more than a barrier – so there was still an element of danger.  And anyway, I’d rather see the grizzlies in a setting like that than in my backcountry campsite.

Mama bear again

The only disappointments about the experience had to do with the photography.  First, the light wasn’t very good.  Second, it seems that my AF often decided to lock on to the grass in front of the bears rather than the bears themselves, so a number of frames turned out unusable.  Third, and most significant, was I decided to run my 1.4x TC on my 70-200/2.8, which significantly impaired that otherwise tack-sharp lens. (In case you’re thinking “Wait… don’t you have a program that’s supposed to fix blurriness?” well… yes, but the blurs here were focus blurs, not motion blurs.)

Bear cub stands on its hind legs

So, yeah.  The photos were a bit underwhelming, but my first big-mammal experience of the trip  was a reasonable success.