The Cessna in which you are a passenger bounces to a halt on an Alaskan beach. The pilot opens the door and cheerfully points out massive, clawed bear tracks in the sand. You set off on foot along the beach and, rounding a point, spot a group of grizzlies patrolling the water’s edge a couple of hundred yards away.

Do you:

a) Leg it back to the plane.

b) Retreat slowly and as inconspicuously as possible.

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c) Load up with cumbersome equipment and walk purposefully towards one of the world’s most dangerous predators?

If you are a crew from the BBC’s Natural History Unit, working on the new series Life, the answer is, of course, c). And if you are tagging along with the crew, then that is your answer, too, though perhaps you don’t move with quite the same jaunty sense of purpose.

As you get closer, some thoughts occur: is walking towards grizzlies the most counterintuitive thing that a human being can do? Can’t the others hear my heart beating? Can’t the bears hear my heart beating?

We are here in Katmai National Park because it is perhaps the best place in the world to witness brown bears fishing for their survival. This is one of Nature’s most gluttonous feasts, the bears gorging themselves in an effort to ensure that they make it through six months of hibernation. “They have a narrow opportunity of two months when the salmon are running to pile on the pounds,” says Adam Chapman. “If they don’t, they will die. It’s critical.”

Chapman, the producer, and Gavin Thurston, an award-winning cameraman, are spending five weeks among the bears and have invited me to join their grizzly embed. In this coastal wilderness the bears, who have not been hunted here for generations, do not see people as a threat or a food source, making it possible to film them intimately for extended periods. It’s perfect for the film-makers — yet the grizzlies remain unpredictable and extremely dangerous, quite capable of turning nasty and discovering that, once you penetrate the outer hide of North Face fleece, people make pretty good eating.

Back in Anchorage, there was a story in the local paper about a grizzly with cubs that was being hunted after mauling two people and chasing others. Although grizzly-related fatalities are uncommon — 52 were recorded in North America between 1900 and 2003 — I still need reassurance. In London I had watched Grizzly Man, the documentary by Werner Herzog about Timothy Treadwell, the misguided chap who convinced himself that people could be friends with the bears of Katmai. He went as close as he could to the bears, loping around on all fours and talking to them in silly voices. He and his girlfriend were mauled and partly eaten in October 2003 after pitching their tent in an area experiencing heavy ursine traffic.

“We thought he was going to get killed a lot sooner,” says Clint Hlebechuk, the local bear guru for this BBC expedition.

Every summer Clint and his wife Simyra build a camp at a place called Hallo Bay, a short distance along the coast from where Treadwell perished. This is where we stay, in cabins with wooden floors and tented walls. “I have never had to destroy a bear, never had a client hurt,” he says.

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