| 1 | Bear Cave Mountain |
Home to an incredibly rare species of bear – the ice bear! In fact, the heavily advertised ice bears are simply grizzlies which live so far north that their fur is tipped with whiteness.
Bear Cave Mountain is located in Ni’iinlii Njik Territorial Park, a 2500 square mile ecological reserve in Canada’s northern Yukon province. The name comes from its massive popularity among hibernating bears – year in, year out, there’s at least 25 in winter sleep mode at once. This is partly due to the nearby Fishing Branch River, one of Canada’s most famous salmon fishing spots. This river is the Yukon equivalent of Brooks Falls in Alaska, minus the webcam and millions of internet users watching from their bedrooms. There’s so much salmon here that 30-50 bears can converge at once, with Bear Cave Mountain looming majestically in the background.
What makes Fishing Branch particularly perfect is its underground thermal springs, which keep the river nice and warm, and improve the conditions for salmon spawning. It’s a prime egg laying site, and the grizzly bears know it. The sleeping ones are effectively reserving their place for summer.
In winter, Bear Cave Mountain is a barren wasteland, but in May, when the bears finally exit hibernation, it becomes a luscious green mountain with dandelions springing up everywhere. Tourist trips are now operational, but this bear hub is so remote that visitors are forced to fly to the campsite by helicopter.
| 2 | Knight Inlet |
Another popular tourist spot. Knight Inlet is a 100km long fjord in British Columbia, which exits into the ocean near Vancouver Island. The main bear hotspot here is a luxurious body of water called Glendale Cove, which feeds the Knight’s Inlet and is surrounded on all sides by towering green mountains. The cove was formerly the site of a canning factory, and a mysterious, extinct village of natives, but these days, it’s an isolated wilderness where 50 hungry bears can converge on the waters all at once.
The reason is a familiar one: up to 300,000 pink salmon which arrive in its waters in June. Unlike other rivers, the salmon here stop at the lake, waiting for the early summer snowmelt. Their goal is to ride the rising waters and swim upstream to their mountainous spawning grounds, but that’s without the grizzly bears having their say.
In turn, this isolated cove is an irresistible spot for tourists, with the main attraction being the comfortable Knight Inlet Lodge. The lodge’s Instagram account consists almost entirely of grizzly bear pictures, and let’s face it, that’s all they need to drum up business! The tourists can watch the bears from boats on the cove, or they can venture out to the thick, twisting former logging roads to get more up close and personal. There are no roads to Knight Inlet – a float plane is the only method of transport.
| 3 | Dempster highway |
If you drive the full length, your chances of seeing a grizzly on this 800km highway are approximately 99.9%. The Dempster highway is the only main road in Canada to cross the Arctic circle, beginning 25 miles east of Dawson (population 1250) and ending at the Inuit settlement of Inuvik (3243). The whole road is like a Canadian wild west equivalent, an extreme wilderness with snowcapped mountains and forests stretching far off into the distance. Moose can be seen playing in nearby waters, and giant herds of peaceful caribou often block the roads. The only staging posts are tiny, forgotten towns like Tsiigehtchic and Fort McPherson, each scraping together no more 1000 citizens.
If the Earth really was flat, then this highway would surely be the edge. It’s a poorly paved road, very difficult to travel – particularly when a paw the size of a dustbin lid crashes down on your windscreen. The Dempster highway is famous for its grizzly bears, so famous that wildlife enthusiasts commonly drive down the road just for the thrill of it. Sometimes you’ll see the bears climbing distant mountains, while other times they’ll by standing by the roadside as though saying hello.
Back in 2017, an incident happened on this highway when a grizzly approached a motorcyclist “with intent”, forcing him to reverse his bike by a whole kilometre. A New Zealand cyclist had been charged just earlier, and both incidents happened between 230km and 270km down the highway. Authorities concluded that it was the same bear.
| 4 | Stewart, British Columbia |
Stewart, Canada is a classic kind of town where humans believe they’re running the show, but it’s actually grizzlies who are letting them live in peace. Stewart is only one mile away from Alaska, and effectively operates as a single community with Hyder just over the border. In a weird anomaly, Hyder has the only useable route to the Canadian town of Premier, meaning that its residents have to drive through another country to get home.
Stewart is a former mining town, and the buildings have a charming resemblance to the flimsy wild west sets of old, but the only lone ranger walking into town here is an 800 pound grizzly bear. On the Alaskan side, there’s a river called Fish Creek which is swarming with salmon, and this river attracts bears from far and wide, who inevitably wander past Stewart on their punishing journey from the mountains. Only Hyder in Alaska has a proper bear viewing platform, but to residents of Stewart, grizzly sightings are a normal occurrence.
Like the Demspter highway, wildlife maniacs commonly drive down the 4 hour wilderness highway to Stewart (the Yellowhead Highway) solely to get a look at them. The nearby forested roads saw one of the greatest bear encounters of 2019, when Cari McGillivray filmed two grizzlies wrestling for around one minute. They started in the grass and crossed the whole road and back on their hind legs before one of them gave up, with even a wolf stopping to watch.
| 5 | Bow Valley |
At 700 grizzly bears, Alberta is less of a grizzly hotspot than British Columbia (15,000) or Yukon (7000), but within Alberta, Bow Valley is undoubtedly the best spot to see them. The valley is located just west of Calgary and includes the luxurious ski resort of Banff, which boasts around 65 grizzlies itself. They’re attracted by the lush summer foliage of the mountain slopes such as dandelions, and the bare ski slopes are particularly popular. One of the winter cable cars is even converted into a bear viewing lift in the summer.
The Bow Valley has enough bears that they’ve been assigned names, such as 144 Split Lib, and 122 The Boss. The latter is notorious for scaring off rival males and once being hit by a train and surviving.
There’s some epic family history here – horrified rangers discovered in May 2020 that Split Lip had killed and eaten the cub of a popular mama bear called 142. It was nature, they argued, and there was nothing they could do. 142’s mother was the matriarchal bear 72, who lived to 22 years old before plummeting off a cliff and dying during icy conditions. But 142’s brother still roams the park – he’s bear number 143, and a more cautious character. Bear 142 has a mischievous personality herself, punching holes in the tent of a Bow Valley backpacker one day after sniffing out some tasty oats, before being scared off by campers. The most heart-stopping moment came in 2017, when Split Lip tried to cross the pedestrian bridge at Banff’s entrance.
| 6 | Bute Inlet |
Bute Inlet isn’t far from Knight Inlet, only 32 miles further southeast, but it’s distant enough to become an entirely new region, with a distinct culture offered by the First Nation Homalco people, who lived there for thousands of years and still control the valley’s bear tourism.
There’s no roads to this remote bear spot: all tourist journeys start by boat from the small town of Campbell River. During bad weather, the waters can become a violent hellscape of boat-sinking currents and inescapable whirlpools, which make even reaching the sanctuary an epic task. On calmer days, you can witness orcas and humpback whales poking their heads up.
Once you disembark on the opposite shore, a minibus run by the Homalca tribespeople will pick you up and drive deeper into the inlet. Then you’ll be in grizzly country proper, as marked by a colourful wooden sign saying “Caution! Bear in Area!”. The Orford river within is packed with spawning salmon, and like any other salmon river, the bears here often congregate all at once, for better or worse. The Bute Inlet has special bear viewing platforms, and an estimated 40 grizzly bears live there overall. The salmon species here are Chum and Coho, not matching the “all 5 species” gimmick of Tweedsmuir, but more than enough for ravenous grizzlies packing on the pounds for hibernation. Like Khutzeymateen, Bute Inlet falls into the category of green, luscious mountains rather than the sub-arctic steppe of Kluane.
| 7 | Kluane National Park (Yukon) |
Supposedly, this national park in southwest Yukon has the most genetically diverse grizzly bears anywhere in the world. 250 grizzly bears roam this mountainous landscape, alongside several animal friends: moose, elk, coyotes, and Arctic ground squirrels.
This park has the highest peak in Canada, the 5959 metre Mount Logan. It’s a mountainous place, but rather than tightly forested Alpine valleys, Kluane has the bleak, epic vistas and wide U-shaped valleys of the subarctic. It’s the kind of place where distant mountains are constantly visible for miles around. The Alaska highway runs through the eastern edge of the park, and the best way to witness bears is stopping next to the gigantic Kluane Lake, accessible only by a 5 day drive, or more simply, a helicopter flight – preferably one which hasn’t crashlanded into a grizzly bear’s den. The Sheep’s Creek Trail is also famous for grizzlies, as is the Congdon Creek Campground, a popular overnight spot for exhausted drivers. Your average Kluane Park trail is guarded by rigid metallic fences, and yellow signs emblazed with “warning – bear frequenting area”.
The only decent salmon source here is the Kokanee salmon, a unique landlocked population of several thousand fish swimming in the isolated Kathleen lake. Consequently, the bears here are quite small, only two thirds the size of coastal grizzlies.
Since its opening in 1972, and with 300,000 visitors over the years, only one person has been killed by a Kluane Park bear, a hiker called Christine Courtney in 1996.
| 8 | Vancouver Island |
For years, there was a cast iron rule about Vancouver Island: that black bears were plentiful, but grizzly bears could never be found. It’s believed that brown bears never existed on Vancouver Island (located in Canada’s far west) even before the arrival of mankind.
As of 2016, things may be changing, as wildlife officials spotted a pair of large grizzlies swimming in the island’s northern portion near Port McNeil. They were believed to be passing through, but British Columbia has 115,000 grizzlies, and grizzlies are easily capable of swimming 20 miles in one session. Are brown bears getting more ambitious? The bear question resurfaced in July 2019, when a grizzly was spotted chewing happily on the long grass by a logging road. At one point, 9 cars stopped to get a good look, and the road was completely clogged.
In May 2020, the mayor of Sayward in the island’s north reported 7 sightings. The forest commission then declared that Vancouver island had 2 grizzly bears at most, but the cold, hard fact is that Vancouver Island lies only 1-2 miles from the mainland. Some theorise that global warming is killing the salmon, forcing the bears to search for berries further afield. Apparently, brown bears have been spotted standing right next to the island’s black bears. What could they be planning?
For now, the official position is that grizzly bears don’t live on Vancouver Island, but swim over every summer in their ravenous search for food. Pray that they’re correct, otherwise Vancouver Island may soon be named Bear Island.
| 9 | Khutzeymateen |
In native Tsimshian speak, Khutzeymateen translates to “place of bear and salmon” and that’s exactly what it is. In August 1994, Khutzeymateen was the first Canadian grizzly sanctuary to be established and as of 2020, it’s home to 50 to 60 grizzly bears. It’s located 28 miles northeast of Prince Rupert in Canada’s bear-tastic BC region, and is a bonafide animal paradise: the grizzly’s neighbours include black bears, wolves, wolverine, porcupines, mountain goats, harbour seals, beavers, otters, humpback whales, killer whales, and 100 species of birds.
Visitors are discouraged to Khuzteymateen. It’s the bear’s home, not the people’s, but limited amounts of bear fanatics can board a boat on the nearby Cow Bell, controlled by the First Nations natives. The boat then sails down the massive Chatham Sound, which only has a slight shoreline on either side before the steep, towering mountains rise up, mountains which are far lusher and greener than the subarctic peaks of Kluane National Park. The guide deliberately stays quiet; it’s up to the tourists to spot the bears, equipped with their own binoculars. That said, sightings are nearly guaranteed in the peak season of July, whether it’s a mother with cubs or a lone male.
There are no permanent settlements, roads or camps inside Khutzeymateen. Its lush forests are why it was originally designated as sanctuary, as rates of logging accelerated rapidly in the 1970s, after a 50s and 60s golden age when only two small areas of forests were slashed down.
| 10 | Tweedsmuir Provincial Park |
BC doesn’t stand for bear country, but it might as well, as British Columbia is the most heavily populated grizzly region in Canada. Tweedsmuir Provincial Park stands out within BC as a true bear paradise, with grizzlies and black bears alike. It’s the largest protected park in BC, located on the northern fringes of the great bear rainforest.
The bears in Tweedsmuir are mountain grizzlies, leaving their hibernation caves in early May. Being further inland, the salmon’s ultimate destination as it swims upstream, the bear fishing season is later here compared to Brooks Falls in Alaska, from mid-August to mid-October. Instead, the grizzlies spend early summer foraging for vegetation in distant low-lying valleys. When they do arrive, they arrive in style, particularly congregating on the Bella Coola river, a bear buffet that contains all 5 species of North American salmon.
The chalet-style Tweedsmuir Park Lodge, the main tourist hub, even boasts of grizzly bears running across its grounds. The Belarko bear viewing platform is one attraction, opening between 7am and 7pm in September. This is another realm of fresh mountain air and soaring glaciers in the distance.
Naturally, Tweedsmuir Park has strict bear-dodging instructions. As if it needed to be said: “all Park visitors are reminded that bears have the right-of-way“.
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