Meet Canada’s Ice Bears
In North Yukon’s Big Empty, the frost-cloaked grizzly is undisputed king of the tundra. And in early winter, a few intrepid travellers are allowed to get tantalisingly close, as Brian Jackman discovers…
The lodge is set on a bend of the river, a natural theatre-in-the-round whose backdrop is Bear Cave Mountain itself, bristling with spruce trees and limestone pinnacles. The woods behind us were still wrapped in darkness, concealing the cabins in which we’d passed the night. Now, with the world locked in a deep-frozen silence, the stage was set. The show was about to begin.
Even when no bears are in sight their spine-tingling presence is almost tangible, but we didn’t have long to wait. Smokey, curled up at our feet, suddenly sat up and gave a low growl. “Bear coming,” said Timpany; and he was right.
Out of the mist hanging over the river loomed a ghostly figure, wading slowly towards us in midstream. It was an ice bear, an 11-year-old grizzly known as Stanley. Hoar frost glittered on his back, and with icicles dangling from his ponderous flanks he was every inch the lord of the tundra, an apex predator in his prime.
Moments later and he was just a few paces away. It was an extraordinary feeling – like sitting in the middle of a BBC wildlife documentary. I found it hugely reassuring to remember an earlier conversation with Timpany in which he’d stated that, to his knowledge, there had never been a single bear-watching fatality anywhere in North America.
Besides, it soon became clear that Stanley had more important things on his mind. With barely a glance in our direction he strode on downstream. He was hunting for spawning salmon and had evolved an efficient way of catching them. Timpany called it snorkelling, which Stanley demonstrated by ambling along with his head underwater until he spotted his prey, then charging after it in a cloud of spray to emerge with a metre-long fish in his jaws.
The Big Empty
You can observe grizzlies at a dozen well-known sites in British Columbia, and even more in Alaska, where wildlife watching is a multi-billion dollar business. But none measure up to Bear Cave Mountain. Elsewhere in North America, bear watching often takes place from the safety and comfort of wooden stands, but not here. With Timpany as your guide you watch with your feet on the ground as the grizzlies shuffle past just a few paces away.
Bear fishing (Supplied: Bear Cave / Ron Daub)
The lodge lies just short of the Arctic Circle in Yukon’s largest territorial park, the Fishing Branch Protected Area, where the regional government has joined hands with the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation people – the land’s original inhabitants – to conserve 6,500 sq km of prime grizzly habitat.
North Yukon is Canada’s Big Empty and the park is unbelievably remote. To reach it I flew first from Vancouver to Whitehorse and then on to Dawson City, founded on the wealth of the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush. From here the only way to reach the lodge is by helicopter, an unforgettable low-level flight across 650km of pristine wilderness.
Even if you are a seasoned traveller nothing prepares you for the sheer vastness of the sub-Arctic landscape. For two hours we clattered across endless vistas of peaks and permafrost, hedgehopping between the razor-sharp pinnacles of the Tombstone Mountains to be confronted by a desolation of boreal forest and snow-covered tundra scribbled with iced-up creeks and caribou tracks running all the way north to the Beaufort Sea.
For the Vuntut Gwitchin – the ‘People of the Lakes’ – this is hallowed ground, which is why coming to Bear Cave Mountain is such a rare privilege. To them it has always been known as Ni’iinlii Njik – ‘where the fish spawn’; it is a land held sacred, where the survival of the salmon is all-important and visitor numbers are strictly limited to no more than four guests at any one time.
Don’t come expecting five-star accommodation. What you get is backwoods basic in simple twin-bedded log cabins. There are wood-fired stoves to keep you warm, and Timpany – who does all the household chores as well as guiding – conjures up sensational steaks and casseroles in the communal kitchen. But the real luxury is the best bear watching ever, closer than you ever dreamed of, getting to know the animals as individuals under the watchful eyes of the Yukon’s most charismatic guide.
A vision in white
While the rest of the Yukon is locked in winter’s icy grip, the Fishing Branch River still flows freely. The chums are also sometimes known as dogs because of the canine fangs the males acquire at spawning time. They grow to a length of about a metre – a perfect meal for a hungry grizzly – and it is when the fish swarm up the river with the onset of winter that the bears arrive to fatten on this annual feast.
Every day, as they wade into the river in the sub-zero temperatures, a dramatic transformation takes place. In minutes they become ice bears as the water freezes on their shaggy coats, creating a unique spectacle that attracts photographers and wildlife enthusiasts from around the world.
As many as 40 or more grizzlies come every year and regularly hang out around the lodge, leaving their broad footprints on the snow-clad boardwalk leading down to the river. Ranging in colour from creamy silver through salt-and-pepper to almost black, they all have the humped shoulders and low-slung necks that are the grizzly’s defining features. Most of them, including Stanley, are as familiar to Timpany as old friends.
