Into the lair of the white bear
By Deborah Campbell
We left no trace of our group’s passage through the world’s largest intact coastal temperate rain forest
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MIST HANGS OVER MOSS-SHROUDED old growth where
eagles perch, their enormous nests strewn with bones like
ogres’ dens. Shiny harbour seals bob up from the water, staring
curiously at us, their faces like Labrador pups. Dead salmon, having
recently spawned, are draped over rocks like silver stoles,
slung from river-nudging branches like laundry or floating
belly-up downstream, their mission accomplished.
“Sex and death,” says the first mate on the Maple Leaf,
the 92-foot schooner that has taken me and eight other passengers on
a nine-day journey into one of the last great wildernesses, a
remote expanse of British Columbia coastline that stretches all
the way to Alaska. “Better than HBO.”
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It is spawning season in the Great Bear Rainforest, an archipelago
of thousands of islands and webbed fiords roughly the
size of Lake Ontario. Known only, in the poetry of industrial discourse,
as the Mid-Coast Timber Supply Area until environmentalists
brought it to international attention in the 1990s, the Great
Bear is the world’s largest intact coastal temperate rain forest,
one of the last inhabitable regions of the planet that, on satellite
images, still turns black at night.
Our journey had begun in the coastal First Nations fishing
village of Bella Bella. The sun had just broken through the roiling
clouds when Kevin Smith, the red-bearded owner of Maple
Leaf Adventures and captain of the Maple Leaf — British Columbia’s
oldest tall ship — greeted us on the dock. The
Gore-Tex-clad passengers who clambered up and over the
mahogany railing were all adventurous professionals, Canadian
and American, nearly unanimous in their mission: to glimpse
the most famous resident of this rain forest — the white kermode,
or spirit bear. “It’s the rarest bear on the planet,” said
Smith, a former park ranger and geographer — rarer than
China’s panda bears. And it’s famously elusive.
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