2022/09 Great Bear Rainforest - Planning |
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Dear All,
This is the journal of our September 2022 trip to British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest. Apart from a couple of road trips to Okotoks and Minnesota, our last trip to new places had been to Broken Hill in Australia, nearly three years ago. Since then COVID had happened and we’d both had other medical problems. Sandie had surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation to battle breast cancer, as well as a broken leg and a galloping pulse rate. I’d had prostate surgery and troubled breathing. Neither of us had had sufficient exercise.
We weren’t sure if we were fit enough for trips like those to Costa Rica and Panama. Could we walk all day and keep up with a group? For our first experiment we picked the Great Bear Rainforest as it’s sufficiently remote to be interesting but close enough to some form of clinic to get us fixed up and shipped home if necessary.
The Great Bear Rainforest stretches from BC’s Sunshine Coast to the Alaskan border, and is about the size of Ireland. It’s a mountain range with its valleys flooded by the sea. It has forest-clad mountains, great cliffs, and some stupendous waterfalls. It is most famous though for its abundant wildlife: bears, whales, seals, otters, and eagles. Amongst these are the elusive white spirit 
bears. These are a subspecies of the common black bear, ursus americanus.
According to Wiki, the white coat is the result of a recessive mutant gene carried by bears in some areas of the rainforest. In this respect it is rather like red hair in humans. This mutant gene is recessive, so bears with two copies of this mutant gene appear white, while bears with one copy or no copies appear black. Two black bears can mate and produce a white cub if both of these black bears are carrying one copy of the mutant gene, and both mutant genes are inherited by the cub
There are thought to be less than a hundred such white bears. They are known as spirit bears or Kermode bears, after one of the scientists who studied them.
Having picked our destination all we had to do was get there. However, unspoiled wildernesses tend to be hard to get to. If you look at my front page map it shows that there is no road that follows the BC coast. The only road that goes towards the rainforest is the Chilcotin Highway, notorious for the extremely steep and dangerous part known as “the hill”. The locals in Bella Coola, on the coast, grew tired of waiting for the government to build a road over the mountains and two of them armed with dynamite and bulldozers built their own road. We drove the highway back in 1999 and know that it ends where the river flows into a large fjord. If we drove the 500 miles to Bella Coola from Hope, we’d still have to travel another 80 miles by air or boat.
Instead we started looking for fishing and hunting lodges in the area as they’d have had to solve the transportation problem. We found the Spirit Bear Lodge at the little village of Klemtu, in the heart of the Rainforest. Even better, their specialty was viewing wildlife, not shooting it.
Their prices are higher than we’re used to but we were only staying for four nights. To get there we would have to drive to Vancouver, fly to Bella Bella, and be picked up by a tour boat and taken to Klemtu.
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