Photo: Frances Backhouse

British Columbia Magazine , Spring 2008

For a full half-hour we sit in the rain. Eleven people in a small inflatable boat, floating in a quiet backchannel of a coastal estuary. The clouds hunker ever lower. Steady drizzle turns to earnest downpour. Fat raindrops bounce off the water. But no one complains. We’re entranced by the scene before us: a female grizzly and two yearling cubs placidly stuffing themselves with fresh spring greens. We’re so close we can see bits of leaves and dirt clinging to their thick damp fur, and hear them tearing the grass-like sedges with their teeth.

One of the cubs makes a low crooning sound as it sidles up to its mother. Finding the target, the youngster stands and suckles, still humming, until its mother gently steps away and resumes grazing.

From the bow of our Zodiac, passenger Pam Casey of Stouffville, Ontario, beams me a smile that mirrors my own. Since arriving by floatplane from Prince Rupert the previous morning, our group of bear watchers has seen a dozen different grizzlies in the provincial Khutzeymateen/K’tzim-a-Deen Grizzly Bear Sanctuary. We spotted the first less than an hour after boarding the Ocean Light II, the 22-metre ketch that is our home base for this four-day exploration of remote Khutzeymateen Inlet. Each new sighting renews the thrill of this remarkable wildlife-viewing experience.

“I had no idea we’d get so near to them,” Casey later confides. “I didn’t even notice the rain.”

Our boatload of camera-clicking humans elicits little more than periodic glances from the mother grizzly. Any time her gaze lingers, guide Chris Tulloch murmurs soothingly, “You’re good, Mama. You’re ok.” His reassurances seem to convince her.

But her demeanour changes abruptly when another bear appears on the sedge meadows. She sniffs the air repeatedly and rises on her hind legs to stare across the channel at the intruder. One cub follows her example, thrusting its petite nose toward the sky each time its mother tests the wind. Finally, prudence prevails over hunger and the mother steers her cubs into the forest.

“Smart move,” I think as we motor away slowly in search of our next bear.

I first travelled to the Khutzeymateen 18 years ago, in April 1990. I’d been hired by the provincial government to contribute to an in-depth grizzly-bear study being carried out between 1989 and 1991.

For five months I worked with two other biologists, Grant MacHutchon and Stefan Himmer, radio-collaring and tracking bears and documenting their daily lives. We recorded where they foraged and what they ate, where they bedded down, and where they left messages for each other by rubbing against special mark trees. We filled a freezer with baggies of scat for analysis of the bears’ diet, and spent our evenings hunched over maps and data forms, building a picture of what it meant to be a Khutzeymateen grizzly. It was exhausting, all-consuming work and the best job I’ve ever had.

Among the first bears I saw that spring was a female that had been radio-collared the previous fall. GF 34—we called her “White,” for her collar colour—had entered her den in 1989 with three cubs but emerged with two. A den check later that summer revealed that the third had died during hibernation of unknown causes.

The survivors were healthy and robust. I delighted in watching the pair as they wrestled and played together or quietly grazed beside White on the lush sedge meadows of the Mouse Creek estuary, just west of the current sanctuary’s boundary. At 16 months old, they could look forward to nearly 12 more months with their mother before she would wean them and send them on their way.

In mid May, a large male grizzly arrived to disrupt the trio’s idyll on the estuary. Mother grizzlies are extremely wary of amorous males because they may try to kill her cubs in order to alter her breeding schedule and make her receptive to mating.

We lost sight of the family for the next few weeks and our radio signals indicated they had moved away from Mouse Creek. When finally we saw them again, on June 13, White had a pronounced limp. Four days later, her collar’s activity sensor reported no movement. We found her body, and MacHutchon’s autopsy suggested she had been killed by an adult grizzly. Most likely she died defending her cubs. As for their fate, that would remain a mystery to me for many years.

The study I worked on in 1990 was aimed at settling long-standing uncertainty about the future the Khutzeymateen Valley. While timber interests wanted access to the valley’s extensive stands of old-growth western hemlock, Sitka spruce, and western redcedar, biologists and conservationists felt it was imperative to protect the habitat of one of the largest concentrations of grizzlies on B.C.’s coast.

To resolve the issue, the provincial government assigned researchers to investigate the potential impact on the grizzly population if logging were to proceed in the watershed. In June 1992, a government news release announced the conclusion: the forests would be left to the bears.

Over the next two years, the government consulted with the Gitsi’is, the Tsimshian people whose traditional territory encompasses this part of the coast. Khutzeymateen is an Anglicized version of “K’tzim-a-Deen,” a Tsimshian word that roughly translates as “deep valley at the end of an inlet.” In 1994, the 449-square-kilometre Khutzeymateen/K’tzim-a-Deen Grizzly Bear Sanctuary became Canada’s first (and still the country’s only) area set aside specifically to protect grizzlies and their habitat. A 3,850-square-kilometre grizzly no-hunting zone surrounding the sanctuary provides additional security for the bears.

This trip aboard the Ocean Light II is my first time back to the Khutzeymateen in nearly two decades. It is not so different from my stint here as a biologist, with each day following a similar routine—though this itinerary is much more relaxing. After a hearty onboard breakfast prepared by crew member Jenn Broom, we clamber into the Zodiac with skipper Chris Tulloch and go looking for grizzlies. The bear-viewing rules are clear and simple: speak quietly, don’t use camera flashes, don’t make any sudden moves, and if Tulloch says to be still, obey instantly and absolutely.

“My job is to keep you safe and the bears safe,” Tulloch explains.

Our first day’s foray takes us along the Khutzeymateen Inlet’s south shore. Under a cloudless sky, the glassy ocean reflects the adjacent forested slopes and lingering high-elevation snow patches. A pair of marbled murrelets nicks the mirror as they dive and surface, and a loon calls across the water.

At the mouth of Cedar Creek, the exposed mudflats steam in the sun, releasing a tangy perfume of muck and decaying intertidal life. As we approach, a small, chocolate-coloured grizzly emerges from the forest and ambles across the mud with a loose-limbed, flat-footed gait. She stops, sniffs the ground, and digs until her huge paw disappears with each scoop. She pokes her muzzle deep into the hollow and extracts a soft-shell clam, which she crunches briefly and swallows. Then she takes a few steps forward and repeats the performance, excavating hole after hole at a leisurely but purposeful pace—until a second bear comes around the corner and scares her off.

Some mornings we venture out in kayaks to explore. In the afternoons, when the tide is rising, invariably we take the inflatable to the sanctuary’s premier bear-viewing site—the Khutzeymateen estuary at the head of the inlet. More than a kilometre across at its widest point, the river’s mouth is filled with sedimentary islands separated by a maze of channels that can be navigated only at high tide. Above the tide line, sedge meadows blanket the islands.

Large estuaries like this are first-class foraging grounds for coastal grizzlies in spring, when each may consume 22 to 45 kilograms of sedges a day. As we putter through the winding waterways, we are never far from one bear or another, all intent on satisfying their hunger after a long winter’s sleep. They stand and graze. They sit on their haunches and graze. They swim from one landmass to another, climb ashore, shake the water from their coats, and resume grazing. This is not bear-viewing as an adrenaline sport. It’s more like meditation led by an ursine guru.

On one occasion, that mediation is interrupted by the surprise appearance of a lone wolf on the estuary. It wanders out of the trees, climbs a ridge of hard snow at the base of an avalanche chute, and flops down. The blond female grizzly we’ve been watching reacts to the newcomer by scampering a few hundred metres up the same frozen cascade and curling up on the dirty snow. Both animals seem motivated by a desire to beat the heat on this sunny June afternoon. The wolf lolls on its frigid bed, yawns, licks the snow, and contemplates us with its intense yellow eyes. After about 20 minutes, it rises and saunters away. The bear appears to have fallen asleep.

Eventually, we head back to the boat for dinner, followed by more distant grizzly viewing from the deck. I give out before either the bears or the twilight and crawl into my bunk feeling deeply satisfied. Fellow passenger Rick Lynch of Fort McMurry, Alberta, the keenest photographer in our group, remains awake, downloading several thousand images from the day onto his laptop.

Looking back about eight years ago, when Jamie Hahn was put in charge of the Khutzeymateen as North Coast Area Supervisor for BC Parks, he found the idea of officially sanctioned grizzly viewing perplexing.

“I was reading management plans and going, ‘Wait a minute. It’s opposite to everything I’ve learned,’” he recalls. He was particularly confounded by the goal of having the bears become accustomed to visitors.

“When I first started that really confused me, why you’d want to habituate bears. Shouldn’t they be wild? Shouldn’t they run?”

But Hahn’s experience has taught him that such habituation provides “a much safer experience for both the bears and the people.” He was won over, in part, by a trip to Alaska’s McNeil River State Game Sanctuary, a grizzly preserve with a 35-year trouble-free history of controlled bear viewing.

“The success of that program is based on the familiarity of being there every day at the same time, using the same platform,” Hahn explains. “Over time the bears just understand: we don’t go on the platform and the people don’t bother us.”

The same applies to boat-based viewing. Once the bears grow accustomed to people, Hahn says, “They just don’t see that interaction with the boats along the shore as a threat.”

Each individual bear is unique and some Khutzeymateen grizzlies, mainly adult males, won’t tolerate close encounters. Hahn makes certain that anyone who brings groups into the sanctuary is experienced enough to understand and respect the various bears’ personalities.

“It’s really important that we work with the guides to make sure they’re doing it properly, they’re backing off when they need to back off and allowing guests to get a safe distance when it’s appropriate.”

To study the impact of wildlife recreation tourism on the Khutzeymateen bears, Sarah Elmeligi, then a master’s student at the University of Northern British Columbia, spent the summers of 2005 and 2006 observing bears and bear watchers in the sanctuary.

“We may be naïve to think that grizzly bear viewing tourism is a completely benign activity,” she says. “If it’s not properly and sustainably managed, it can become detrimental to the population.” On the other hand, she sees value in the public-education aspect of wildlife viewing.

“If people can understand that grizzly bears aren’t inherently violent, they may be more likely to support grizzly-bear conservation efforts.”

In the last year of the 1989 to 1991 study, researchers counted 51 grizzlies in the Khutzeymateen watershed. Though no systematic survey has been conducted since then, available figures indicate that, at the very least, there has been no decline. In 2006, researchers focusing on just the inlet and estuary portions of the sanctuary tallied 48 individually identifiable grizzlies. “And that’s just the ones we’re seeing,” says Hahn.

Although fewer than 1,000 people visit the Khutzeymateen sanctuary annually—most in May and June, the prime grizzly-viewing months—BC Parks stations two full-time rangers here from April 15 to October 1, to ensure the bears are not harassed by sightseers or killed by poachers. As Hahn points out, “There aren’t many wilderness parks that have somebody at the entrance every day of the week.”

Rangers Allen Maxwell and Neil Green Sr. are members of the Tsimshian Nation, which co-manages the sanctuary with BC Parks. It’s their job to man the floating ranger station and interpretive centre, monitor boat traffic, patrol the upper inlet and estuary, and chat with visitors about the grizzlies and about their own ancestral connection to the area.

On the final morning of our trip, we anchor across from Mouse Creek to await the floatplanes. Thick cloud has settled over the entire north coast, grounding all flights in and out of Prince Rupert. I pass the time watching a large, dark brown grizzly on the south shore and scanning the Mouse Creek estuary on the north side, remembering White and her cubs playing there 18 years ago.

At the outset of this trip, I learned of a happy addendum to their story. Not long after White’s death, apparently, a couple of regular Khutzeymateen guides spotted a solitary female yearling—a bear too young to be alone, normally—and recognized it as one of White’s offspring. The cub, which came to be known as “Lucy” or “the Mouse Creek bear,” was encountered frequently throughout the summer and seemed to delight in human attention. Not only did the orphan beat the odds and make it to adulthood, she went on to raise three families of her own.

Broom and Tulloch told me they had not seen Lucy so far this spring, a likely sign that she had produced a new litter over the winter and—like all mothers of first-year cubs—was staying well away from the estuaries during mating season.

I would have liked to have seen this bear whose life once briefly touched mine. For now, I am content knowing she and her offspring have had a secure home for all these years. Conservationists often talk about preserving wild places like the Khutzeymateen for our children and grandchildren. It’s important to remember that they are not the only future generations to consider.