03-05-2025
My bear-spotting adventure in Canada's version of the Amazon
'Grizzly, 11 o'clock,' whispers Rob Bryce of Northern BC Jet Boat Tours, handing me some camo-print binoculars. 'Near the trees, hunkered down in the sedge. He's well camouflaged but you can just about see his hump.'
I scan the treeline. At first I can't see anything much, just cedars, sedge grass, rivulets of water creeping in on the incoming tide. But then, like a magic eye picture resolving into focus, I spot him: two tufted ears, the classic hump, the distinctive, dish-shaped face. An adult grizzly — staring straight at me.
Judging by his light coat and patchy hindquarters, this one's recently out of hibernation, Bryce thinks. He steers the boat closer in to shore, deploying a nifty, near-silent electric outboard to avoid spooking the bear. 'They come down to eat the sedge,' he says. 'The salmon run hasn't started yet and it's a while till berry season. It takes a lot of grass to fill the belly of a full-grown grizzly.'
There's movement to the left: a second bear, eyeing us from the riverbank, sedge drooping from his jowls like spaghetti. Soon, another lumbers out from the trees. In the next hour we see four more, including a mother and two fuzzy, cinnamon-brown cubs. It's only my first morning in the Great Bear Rainforest but my grizzly count is already seven, not that Bryce is surprised. He reckons bear numbers are on the rise after the provincial hunting ban was introduced by British Columbia in 2017. There may be 50 in the Kemano Valley alone, including a dozen he recognises by sight.
After lunch we cruise down the misty Kemano River, passing under thousand-foot-high cliffs wreathed in cloud. It's two hours back to Kitimat but our safari isn't over. We watch bald eagles looping over the treetops, seals basking on the beaches and a juvenile fin whale, which bursts up beside the boat in an explosion of spray before slipping back into the deep. I'm beginning to understand why the Great Bear Rainforest has been called Canada's Amazon.
Vast doesn't do the Great Bear justice. Spanning most of British Columbia's north and central coastline, it covers 6.4 million hectares, an area roughly the size of Ireland. It's one of the largest, and oldest, temperate rainforests on earth. Striated by fjords, pocked by uninhabited islands and hatched by deep, steep-sided valleys — many of which are only accessible by boat or seaplane — it's perhaps North America's last truly wild frontier. As I've discovered, it's also a haven for wildlife. Not just grizzlies but sea otters, moose, elks, wolves, lynxes, black bears and, rarest of all, their white-coated cousins, Kermode or spirit bears.
The astonishing remoteness of the Great Bear Rainforest means that exploring it has always been difficult, not to mention expensive. There are a few luxury lodges dotted across the backcountry, including the indigenous-owned Knight Inlet Lodge and the celebrated Khutzeymateen Wilderness Lodge, where for a hefty price guests can fly in by floatplane, indulge in private bear-spotting tours and go fishing on the hallowed salmon runs of the Skeena and Fraser Rivers.
But thanks to independent operators such as Bryce, this great northern hinterland is gradually opening up to people who lack the privilege of bottomless pockets. Bryce is based in the small mountain town of Terrace, 450 miles northwest of Vancouver, whose tiny airport can be reached in about two hours by air — or a gruelling 15 hours by road. From here the northern reaches of the forest can be explored by boat, on foot or, thrillingly, by floatplane.
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'There are still lakes where no one's ever landed,' says the pilot Severine Oosterhoff, who's from Switzerland but has been flying planes in northern Canada for a decade. 'Every week I visit places I've never been. That's the fun part of my job, going somewhere really wild.' As we lift off the lake and clear the treeline, a canopy of green unfurls below us, spotted with lakes, threaded by rivers, riven by wooded canyons. Mountains spike the skyline. Out west, the Pacific glints like glass. In every other direction, the forest stretches out to the horizon. If I didn't know better, I could believe it went on for ever.
Astonishingly the Great Bear Rainforest has been protected for less than a decade. Large areas have been lost to logging and mining over the past 200 years but an estimated 85 per cent of the old growth still survives. And it is now safeguarded by a landmark 2016 agreement between the BC government and the First Nations who call the forest home.
Because for all its wildness, the Great Bear Rainforest is no wilderness. For thousands of years this land has been inhabited by indigenous people, from the coastal Metlakatla, Kitasoo and Gitga'at to the river-dwelling Kitselas, Kitsumkalum and Nisga'a, a patchwork of peoples bound by ties of trade, culture and familial bond but each with their own customs, art, laws and language. For them, every plant, shrub and tree in the forest has a use. Ladyfern and dogwood, spruce needles and lichens, cottonwood and devil's club are variously used to make medicines, teas, poultices, ointments and ceremonial salves. Most useful of all is the western red cedar, used for making everything from canoes, baskets and coffins to ceremonial masks and totem poles.
'We call the cedar the tree of life,' says Calvin McNeil, a carver for the Nisga'a Nation, whose territory lies north of the forest along the Skeena River. 'It's good to carve and resistant to rot so it lasts a long time — perfect for totems.'
Each pole tells the story of the person who commissioned it, he explains: family histories, important people, significant events. Traditionally they also marked boundaries between tribal territories. 'You can still find really old ones way out in the forest if you know where to look,' he says, chiselling away at a raven's beak. 'Some are hundreds of years old. The people who made them have passed but the totems are still there. That's what I like about being a carver. My work will live on long after I'm gone.'
Ninety miles west of Terrace, near the coast town of Prince Rupert, I hike into the backcountry to see the mighty cedars up close. The trees here are impressive, 100ft high, but they're striplings compared with the great cedars said to grow in the depths of the Great Bear: 300ft high, 15ft across, 1,000 years old or more. Many cedars still bear signs of bark stripping, an indigenous practice in which the tree's pliable outer skin was harvested without harming its inner layers.
'Growing up here, you take the forest for granted,' says the historian and author Blair Mirau as we walk down to Prince Rupert's harbour. 'We moan about the rain, how far we are from everywhere. It's only when you get older and wiser that you understand how precious, how unique this place is.'
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Mirau's day job is helping the local First Nations around Prince Rupert to develop business ideas and initiatives to do with indigenous tourism. He also runs his own guiding company, RIBTide Tours, and he suggests that I should see the forest from the sea, as First Nations people have done for millennia — albeit in cedar-sided canoes rather than his high-speed Rib.
We don survival suits, climb in and buzz out into the sound. As usual in the rainforest, it's drizzling. Fog drifts over the shoreline, snaking like smoke through the cedars, firs and pines. Chains of islands flash past. Pyramid-shaped mountains peep through the mist, their tops still frosted by snow. There are rumours of a grizzly scavenging on the beach for clams and crabs, says our pilot, Frank Blanchet. If we're lucky we might see coastal wolves prowling along the shoreline. We putter around for a while but there's no sign of them, so we content ourselves by watching cormorants dipping in the shallows, rhinoceros auklets squabbling on the rocks and fish eagles swooping down from the treeline for breakfast.
We pull a crab pot, crawling with Dungeness crab. We stop on a deserted beach and walk along the wooded shoreline, silent apart from the swash of sea on sand. As we scull back into the harbour, a pod of porpoises appears, racing through the boat's wake. Out of nowhere shafts of sunlight break through the cloud and a rainbow arches over the mouth of the bay.
'That's the best thing about living in a rainforest,' Mirau says with a smile. 'Sure, it rains a lot. But that just means more rainbows.'Oliver Berry was a guest of Travel Northern BC ( with tours provided by Northern BC Jetboat Tours ( RIBTide Tours ( and Alpine Lakes Air ( Canada As You Like It has a 14-night Northern BC Great Wilderness Tour starting from £2,320pp, including flights, car hire and accommodation (
