KENAI FJORDS NATIONAL PARK, Alaska - After a day of drizzle, the morning sun felt good as it warmed the gray pebble beach where I sat watching three black bears amble in their never-ending search for morsels.

The bears were roaming on the other side of a fast-flowing inlet that lets the tidewaters in and out of a lagoon at the base of Pedersen Glacier, a tongue of blue-tinged ice that curves down between the jagged peaks of the Kenai Mountains.

While gulls swirled and screeched overhead, a dozen harbor seals coasted through the inlet, diving for cover when they spotted a human. Cautious but curious, solitary seals poked up their heads, like a marine version of the whack-a-mole arcade game.

Across the lagoon, three kayaks headed out from Kenai Fjords Glacier Lodge, which opened this summer and is the only lodging within Kenai Fjords National Park. Before, most visitors saw the 600,000-acre park's calving glaciers, ice-capped peaks and rocky coasts by boat and by plane. The hardier backpacked or kayaked in for longer visits. Only Exit Glacier, near Seward, is accessible by highway and hiking trail.

The Port Graham Corp., an American Indian group, owns 1,700 acres below the Pedersen Glacier and operates the site as a private wildlife sanctuary within the national park. When the corporation sought a developer to build a lodge, it turned to Kirk Hoessle, whose Alaska Wildland Adventures operates two lodges on the Kenai Peninsula in south-central Alaska. The company's Kenai Backcountry Lodge has earned praise within the ecotourism industry for its light imprint in a setting within a million acres of designated wilderness.

The National Park Service had some concerns that a private developer had been sold a 25-year lease on 10 acres to build the Kenai Fjords lodge. During my three-night stay, the paying guests included Jeff Mow, superintendent of the national park, and his family. He came away impressed.

"This is certainly a park that has minimal development. Amongst park staff, there were some questions," Mow said. "But I have known Kirk for 15 years or longer, working on tourism issues in Alaska. The lodge is as I expected from an Alaska Wildland Adventures development.

"It's state of the art in terms of an ecolodge, minimizing impact. It's as if the cabins had always been here. Kayaking back through Pedersen Lagoon today, you really had to have the right angle to even see the lodge. It opens up what would have been considered the back country to visitors who normally wouldn't have come."

Hoessle, 54, comes naturally to his love of wilderness and wildlife. Also visiting the lodge for the first time during my stay was Kirk's dad, Charlie Hoessle, a former long-time director of the St. Louis Zoo. The four Hoessle kids grew up in a home that they shared with snakes, a coyote, a skunk, an armadillo and, until it began raiding the refrigerator, a baby wolf.

Kirk Hoessle came to Alaska at the age of 20 and has been here full-time since 1989. He visited the area below the Pedersen Glacier about 25 years ago.

"I was here on a kayaking trip; we got dropped off by a float plane," he said. "The glacier was a lot closer. It's receded quite a bit."

He was approached by Port Graham Corp. in 2003, after giving a talk on ecotourism at a conference, and he was well aware of the prospects for the site. "The Pedersen Glacier is right in front of you with easy access," he said. "It's a sheltered lagoon, and you can almost always go kayaking on it. You paddle up this lagoon, among these icebergs, going in with the incoming current and out with the outgoing tide."

Construction of the $2.6 million project started in the spring of 2008. Eight feet of snow met the first crews, who set up tent camps and began a peaceful coexistence with the local residents.

"We kept a very clean camp, all food in bear containers," Hoessle said. "In early construction, we had a couple curious bears break into tents, kind of swatted things around inside. They only came after the people had been away a few days. There are plenty of them out there. But they've been pretty darn well-behaved. At least so far."

Getting to the lodge is half the fun. At Seward, we boarded the Weather or Knot, an enclosed aluminum catamaran that holds 23 passengers and has a bow that lowers hydraulically to allow easy beach access.

"It's about a four-hour ride to the lodge," Hoessle said. "You can do it in less than that, but we take our time, looking for wildlife, and have lunch in front of a glacier."

We saw two humpback whales, seals sleeping on ice floes, and scads of clown-faced puffins, and listened, from a safe distance, to the snap, crackle and pop of Aialik Glacier as it calved chunks of ice into the water.

The only sign of development as we approached the lodge from the Aialik Bay side was a road of gray pebbles that led through a meadow into the spruce and alder forest. A meticulous job was done to protect the forest floor of mosses and ferns during construction.

A 10-minute walk through the woods brought us to the lodge, with 10 cabins on one side and six on the other, each with two double beds, bathrooms and glacier views. All were connected by pebble paths and boardwalks, including a walkway that ended in a stunning view of the glacier reflected in the lagoon. The log lodge and cabins are simple yet sturdy, built to withstand the snow that piles on the roofs each winter.

The lodge is open June 1 through Sept. 10 and costs about $500 a person a night, a portion of which goes to Port Graham. The price includes meals (beer and wine are sold at the bar), the boat ride from Seward and back, and activities, all of which are guided because of the remote location and ever-present wildlife. You can walk on your own to the beach but must sign in and out. Pepper spray is available.