What makes the Natural History Unit one of the crown jewels of the BBC is the ability of its camera crews to get to places few of us will ever reach and show us animal behaviour that only a handful of humans have ever witnessed in the flesh.

In tonight’s (November 23) Life episode, about predators, for example, you will see astonishing footage of a killer whale hunting seals. There aren’t many package tours to the remote corner of the Falkland Islands where this was filmed and even fewer people who would volunteer to put on a dry suit and do an impression of an elephant seal pup in a tidal pool frequented by the largest and most predatory members of the dolphin family.

However, there is one spectacle in this episode that can be viewed by even the very moderately intrepid wildlife lover. The programme contains a remarkable segment e of Alaskan grizzly bears fishing for salmon. The ultra slow motion film reveals every flash of claw and ripple of muscle in the kind of detail that the naked human eye could never compute.

But there is nothing as spine-tinglingly thrilling as being so close to a grizzly that you can hear it crunching the bones of a large salmon. I was lucky enough to join producer Adam Chapman and camera man Gavin Thurston for a few days as they recorded the bears fishing. But I am not here to brag. I am here to tell you how you can do the same.

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• Six feet away from a giant wild grizzly

Brown bears roam across the forests and mountains of North America, Europe and Russia. In Europe, where there are an estimated 14,000 left in various isolated populations they are hard to spot. The best bet is probably to head for the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania and join a guided tour.

Russia has more than half the world’s brown bears. But these 100,000 or so are also the most keenly hunted and dispersed over a vast landscape. The Kamchatka Peninsula in the far east has the biggest bears and there are local tours that will take you to viewing areas (explorekamchatka.com is a good starting point).

In the lower 48 states of the United States there are now only about 1400 grizzlies, with the vast majority in Montana and the greater Yellowstone area in Wyoming.

I once saw one through binoculars across a Yellowstone valley. In Glacier National Park in Montana I spent several frustrating days meeting fellow campers who had just seen grizzlies. One night one even passed through our camp. I didn’t wake up. Eventually, while driving in Waterton Lakes National Park, just across the border from Glacier in Canada, we saw what looked at first like a couple of large dogs grazing on berries at the side of the road. We stopped to take pictures and they scampered off into a thicket.

But such encounters are likely to be fleeting and, if you are on foot, potentially dangerous. If you are close enough to get a really good view of an inland grizzly you are too close for comfort.

Alaska, with more than 30,000 of North America’s 50,000 or so grizzlies (Canada has around 20,000), is the best place to see them. During my trip to Alaska I spent time with a bush pilot who had just taken a British family of four on an expedition into the interior in Super Cubs, the bush planes that are the only way to access vast tracts of the country. Every time they tried to land on a gravel bar in a river there seemed to be a grizzly on it.

But while this is a wonderfully authentic wildlife experience it is one fraught with danger. I was shown some photographs of what a grizzly did to a light aircraft that had not been properly cleaned up after a fishing trip. It had been peeled open like a can of pink salmon.

It is that very same salmon that allows humans to watch Alaskan brown bears up close. In the summer coastal bears are so focused on gorging on the salmon heading into rivers on their way to their spawning grounds, that they will, unless provoked, pretty much ignore us.

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