Home Waters

The mother bear was at the water's edge with her two cubs when I came around a bend in the shoreline and found them - the three of them in a loose cluster at the margin of the turquoise lake, the snow-capped mountains rising behind them in the clear Alaskan air. We had left the skiff that morning and were hiking the shoreline on foot, moving through terrain well away from the river mazes, and found this family in the kind of open, quiet setting the river banks rarely offer. It is the kind of scene that makes you hold your breath before you reach for the camera.

A sow with cubs in Alaska is always a moment of particular attention. She is constantly scanning, always aware, and her cubs stay close - not because they're told to, but because the world beyond her is still largely unknown to them and she is the entire compass of their safety. The two cubs flanked her with the easy proximity of animals that have not yet needed to be anywhere on their own.

Home Waters is the image in this collection that carries the most tenderness. The family group against that backdrop - the turquoise of the lake, the green of the summer hills, the white of the distant peaks - captures something about the Alaska I keep returning to: a landscape that is still large enough to hold its apex predators in full, that still has the room and the salmon and the clean water for a family of grizzlies to be entirely themselves. On a large metal print, the scale of the landscape matches the scale of what the image means.