The Great Bear Rainforest

Running roughly four hundred kilometres along the British Columbia coast, this is the largest surviving tract of coastal temperate rainforest anywhere, a landscape of fjords, islands and thousand-year-old cedars where the forest is fed by salmon carried inland by bears and left under the trees. Its emblem is the Kermode or spirit bear, a black bear carrying a recessive gene that makes roughly one in ten in some island populations white; they are not albino and they are found essentially nowhere else. An agreement finalised in 2016 protected most of the area from logging, with the Coastal First Nations central to the negotiation, and visitor access now runs largely through their own lodges and guides.

History

The temperate rainforests of the Central and North Coast were largely unknown to conservationists until 1990, when Peter McAllister chartered a three-masted ship and sailed north from Victoria to begin what became the Great Bear Rainforest Campaign; its voyages carried journalists, scientists and photographers, worked with the Heiltsuk First Nation at Bella Bella, and in 1991 saw the Koeye River watershed set aside from logging. In February 2016 the government of British Columbia announced an agreement permanently protecting 85% of the old-growth forest from industrial logging, and that September the forest was admitted to the Queen's Commonwealth Canopy (Wikipedia, Great Bear Rainforest).

What you'll find

• Spirit bears - white-coated black bears, watched from platforms in autumn.
• Grizzlies at the salmon rivers - concentrated in the estuaries in season.
• Thousand-year-old cedars - old growth running down to the shoreline.
• First Nations guiding - Kitasoo Xai'xais, Heiltsuk and Gitga'at operators.

When to go

August to October is bear season, when the salmon are running and the bears are on the rivers; September and early October are the best weeks for spirit bears. This is a rainforest and rain is constant, particularly in autumn. Lodges are small and book a year ahead.

Good to know

This is expensive: remote lodges reached by float plane or boat, with multi-day packages running into thousands, and no budget alternative. Viewing is from set platforms with strict rules and a guide, and sightings are never guaranteed; a week can pass without a spirit bear. Weather grounds flights. Independent travel here is impractical and, in places, not welcome.

Nearby

Bella Bella, Klemtu and Bella Coola are the gateways; Prince Rupert is north.

Key facts