At the end of a very long day hiking around Katmai National Park (Alaska) in the rain knee-deep in mud this mother and cub seemed to look as wet and muddy as I felt - smile. As always in Katmai, we respect the bears from a distance, but they usually tend to gravitate to my group as a trusted shield from the roaming adult males (called boars) and move closer to us. I can see from the timestamps on the images that we spent 44 minutes waiting for both of them to look our way at the same time; we were lucky to have the added bonus of the cub touching mom :)

Since the sky is much brighter than the bears, it was extremely bright and washed-out in the image, so I replaced the background sky to make the scene resemble more closely what my eyes saw.