Grizzly Getaway 2005

So how do I describe 4 days of amazement in a single page, well I've done longer before so here goes...

It all started with a harmless looking present from Norine, about the size of a comic book.
A milestone birthday of epic proportions... the big four oh no...
A weekend getaway, to a place rarely heard of, home of the wild Grizzlies in British Columbia.


The only reason we knew about it was an A&E special a few years back... A&E's Top Ten Most Exotic vacations... Knight Inlet Lodge came in 5th. We were both saying, oh my god, that's amazing, where is that, only to find out it was just up the west coast from us here in B.C..

 

We took the 40 minute flight in a 12 seater to Campbell River on Thursday, and stayed in a great place called Ripple Rock Retreat, a B&B overlooking the Johnstone strait. Amazing dinner and evening on the deck for us and another couple from England, and we watched the cruiseships go by as we exchanged stories and looked at the stars. The next morning they pack us up early and take us to the seaplane, I get to be the co-pilot and this little flight will have us at Knight Inlet 30 minutes later. You can't get there by car, the only roads anywhere are a couple old logging roads only accessable by barges.

 

Within 20 minutes of landing they have us on a boat heading up the estuary to look for Grizzly bears. 6 people in a small boat, and as we float up two Grizzlies are on the shore foraging in the grass. As part of their rules to make the bears feel safe and undisturbed, the boat sits off the shore about 50 feet from the bears, and if the bears want to come closer, that is fine, it is their choice... they came closer!
After a while the two bears are in the water, swimming around 20-30 feet from us, and they get all playful and start having a Grizzly-Bear wrestling match, right there in front of us. 2 hours went by very fast, and they take us back to the lodge for lunch.

 

 

After lunch we head back up into the river and estuary area, which is only 5 minutes by boat, and as the tide has come up we wander our way up the river in our little aluminum boat of 6 people, we watch the salmon leaping all over, and the bald eagles as they watch the salmon leaping all over. We discover some great Bear pawprints in the shore, and a currently vacated Otter den. Apparently at high tide the Grizzlies take a break as it's too hard to fish in the deeper water, so we work our way back to the lodge for a short break and to settle in to our room.

 

The last excursion of the day takes us up the Inlet in a larger boat to see the amazing canyons, rainforests and waters of the inlet, capped off by a couple trips right through a waterfall.

 

Appetizers at 6:30, Dinner at 7:00... and what a meal... Crab Legs and Salmon Sushi rolls for Appys, and an amazing feast for dinner. Dessert is rudely interrupted when one of the guides tells everyone there is 2 Black Bears behind the lodge... I think it's a ploy so they can clear the tables and do the dishes.

 

Right there about 25 feet away on the shore (the lodge is on a floating platform) is a huge black bear crunching down on the seaweed and Mussels exposed as the tide goes out again. Shortly after he wanders away we get a slide show about Cougars, I'm sure just to keep us with that nervous edge about the dangers of the forest. By 9:30 we are exhausted, and go to bed for an early start to our second day.

Each night before dinner the guides come and ask what you want to do the next day, we chose a marine tour. 5 of us go out on a high powered boat for 45 minutes through the thickest of fog to the Robson Bite area, famous for it's Orca playground, a beach and round pebble area that the Killer Whales love to rub and roll on. Before we are more than 15 minutes out we have stopped to see 2 black bears on the shore, and then 2 more black bears each with their cubs as they forage on the shoreline. After blindly driving full speed through the fog we come out to the Johnstone strait... the channel that runs between Vancouver Island and the Mainland coast of BC. After passing a few Dall's porpoises we start hoping we are actually going to see some whales.

 

Not 5 minutes later we are greeted by the <pwewh> sound of an Orcas breathe as it surfaces, and we are quickly seeing large black fins all around us. Our guide has an amazing ability of going to a spot, shutting the motor off, and letting the Orcas come to us. A huge male Orca comes straight at our boat, turns on his side and we watch his Black and White body glide by within a few feet of our boat. Incredible. We seemed to be in the midst of the famous A30 pod, a family unit including a number of Males and Females and a small young whale, and spent the better part of the morning watching them surface around us, and surface within 10-15 feet of a group of Kayakers.
Many a joke about "peeing in pants" were made.

 

After a lovely floating lunch of self-assembled sandwiches and the worlds best Chocolate Chip Cookies, we were interrupted by another pod of Killer Whales, the A7 pod. This time they brought friends with them, about 30 or so Pacific White Sided Dolphins. You see the silver-grey-blue dolphins coming in a row, splashing, arching and jumping through the water, apparently they are a mischievous lot. They are heading straight for one of the Orcas, and proceed to leap and jump all round him, they are chasing, pestering, playing, making fun of his lack of colour... you take your pick. When the Orca has had enough he dives deep, and the dolphins scatter as they try to figure out where he went. They spot another Orca further up and make a beeline for that one... this gets repeated again and again, as we follow along, zoom ahead, and wait for them to come to us for most of the afternoon.

At one point we end up with the Dolphins slightly behind us, and to demonstrate their playful nature, our guide guns the engines and we cruise along for 15 minutes with the dolphins racing along in our wake, leaping, spinning, and zooming around. We can clearly see them not more than 2-3 feet behind the boat just under the surface of the water, they are amazing creatures...
we decide to give another boat a turn and let the dolphins go ride their wake, and watch the last few orcas as they leave the area through a channel... watching the seals and seabirds we make our way back to the lodge, with a lot of pictures and videotape to remember this amazing experience.

Once again it's appetizers at 6:30 and dinner at 7:00...
we start to learn from all the guides and staff that we are what they refer to as "the rare Canadian tourist", apparently we are only the 3rd Canadians to come to Knight Inlet this year. Most of the other 2 dozen guests are from England , Australia , or Switzerland . Part of that is intentional as they don't advertise in Canada to avoid random pleasure boaters coming to the area and spoiling the relationship they have established with the bears and the remote feel of the area. Once again we are interrupted by the dinner bear during dessert. Tonight's slide show is about the predator-prey relationship, including looking at skulls (teeth intact) of a deer, cougar, black bear, and grizzly bear. We learn a lot about the nature of the black bear that was exploring our back yard earlier in the year.

The next day is by far the most interesting...
not by sheer numbers of the bears that we see, but by the events that occur. This morning we are going to the tree-stand, basically a tree fort about 20 feet off the ground overlooking a key salmon run area that the Grizzlies like to frequent.

You take a small boat across the inlet, where an old bus is sitting, and you drive down, what some may call a road, to an area where you take an even smaller boat across the river to the tree-hide. The smaller boat can only take 3 people at a time, so we will split our group of six into two trips across... this becomes a very important part of the story later.

When we arrive a group that came up early for their last glimpse at Grizzlies before they have to go home are all secured in their bus, as two large male grizzlies are having a little turf war in front of the bus. The largest grizzly, "Big Bastard", is well known in these parts, but apparently he is not quite as hungry or aggressive as "Van Gogh", another big male named after the Ear that he has lost in a previous battle. After a short while they head in opposite directions and we have our window to get across to the tree-hide.

 

Once we are up in the tree, we can see Van Gogh as he stands in the low area of the river, waiting for the salmon to make their desperate run to the deeper part of the river. He waits patiently, and catches a big salmon about every 15 minutes. After about 45 minutes we start to wonder if we'll see any other bears that morning, when another big male comes down and sits in the river right underneath us. He wanders around, fishing a bit, then moves back up river about 20 feet, when what should come out of the trees but a mother bear and her two little cubs.

 

She goes into the river and catches fish after fish while the 2 cubs watch from the shore. It seems to be part of the training for the cubs as she won't give them any salmon unless they swim out to her... they don't like it, and vocally let her know they aren't happy about it. They grab a piece of salmon and quickly swim back to shore. We watch this family climbing around logs, balancing and scratching, and feeding on salmon about 30 feet from us for what seems like forever, until 2 more grizzlies come down river, they are a pair of younger siblings known as Mischief and Mayhem, mom gives them a number of huffs to let them know to keep their distance from the cubs, and they proceed cautiously past Van Gogh to go fishing.

At one point we have 7 grizzlies all within sight, and we watch as Mischief chase another bear, named Coco, with a salmon all the way back up stream, it would have been less energy to just catch his own, but that's part of the mischievous nature of this bear. We learn a lot about the different personalities and fishing styles of the bears in the couple of hours we get to spend with them. After they split up and spread up and down river our guide suggests this is the window we need to get back to the bus and leave, as mentioned before, the boat only holds 3 people at a time, so he takes the first 3 down, across the river and puts them in the bus, and comes back for the last 3, a British woman, Norine and I. This is when the fun really started...

 

Our guide Jamie says "Ok you can come down now"... The Brit is almost on the ground, and Norine is halfway down the ladder, when 50 feet upstream, the momma bear starts huffing out a warning, Jamie says "ummm, ok, you should go back up now". The 2 ladies start that odd hysterical giggling, and go back up the ladder about twice as fast as they were going down.

Our guide wades into the water taking the boat back to the other side as Mischief and Coco come back down and walk right under us along the bank of the river. Coco, the one that lost the salmon in the chase looks up and gives us a glare, gives Jamie a glare across the river and heads down to join Van Gogh fishing. They both get further down river, and Jamie encourages us to come back down and get in the small boat to cross the river.

We are just starting a cross when Mischief starts chasing a salmon up the river, straight towards us. He just doesn't care that we are there, and our guide in the water in hip waders is maneuvering our boat from one side of the river to the other trying to figure out where the Grizzly is going to go, obviously a little stressed about how to get his tourists to safety away from a bear that doesn't even seem to be aware that we are there... 10-15 feet in front of him, floating in a little aluminum skiff.

The 2 ladies are freaking a bit as this is going on, and I just keep taking pictures, I mean how often do you have an amazing golden grizzly bear swimming in a river in such a good photo opp? Jamie is getting prepared for phase one... make yourself big and yell at the bear... and is ready to jump to phase two... bear spray and bear bombs. One is a loud shotgun like blast, the other a non-toxic but temporarily painful spray in the eyes. But before he has to resort to phase one, Mischief follows another salmon away from us right under the tree stand and we are quickly whisked to shore and into the bus. Jamie says we need to buy him a drink as soon as we are back at the lodge... we all agree.

After a short break at the lodge for Jamie to calm down, and us to change our pants, we go back out on a boat and explore the shoreline, watching more Black Bears foraging on the shorelines, including poser bear (below), you float about 10 feet away off the shore and watch them crunch through shells and mussels, as long as our boat doesn't get any closer to shore they are fine, aware where we are at all times but fine.

 

The afternoon was a walk through the rainforest where we didn't encounter any wildlife other than birds, but we did see the strangest sight. Fisheries sends guys up the spawning rivers to count fish, they put on a wet/dry suit, mask and snorkel and ride down the river counting the salmon that they see as they go. The middle of a rapids in the middle of the rainforest, and out walks Jacques Cousteau/Steve Zizou... strangest thing to see, apparently there were 32 salmon in that river. Time to head back.

 

Appetizers at 6:30, dinner at 7:00...
No dinner bear tonight, but an amazing slideshow by one of the guides that does kayaking in Antarctica ... hmmmmm?

Our last morning before getting on the seaplane for the trip back to Vancouver and they take us back up to the estuary, the same place we went that first morning. A lone grizzly is roaring around the river chasing salmon as they dart across the low water and rocks. This bear is not a very good fisherman, he runs and splashes around like crazy, Van Gogh could teach him a thing or two about how to catch salmon. Another Grizzly wanders down to the water on the other side, and is joined shortly by a mother and her cub, 4 or 5 eagles, an osprey, and we watch them all for the last hour of our stay in this amazing place...

As the mother and cub wander away into the forest, we wander back to the seaplane in our final boat trip at Knight Inlet. As the plane takes off from the water in front of our lodge we watch the dinner bear as he is exploring the shore right behind the lodge where we stayed.

...and that is the story of my fortieth birthday.