Embark on a Canadian Safari

Boutique Nature Expeditions in Alaska and B.C.

The Serengeti may have a lock on our collective imagination when it comes to safaris, but there are other places where you can come face-to-face with wildlife in its natural habitat, and you don’t have to look further than Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest. Its 6.4 million hectares of ords, rainforest and islands have become a global beacon for ethical and sustainable nature travel. One of the companies responsible for that reputation is BC’S Maple Leaf Adventures, which developed its yacht-based safaris here in the early 1990s. The company o ers several itineraries this summer and fall.

A Di erent Kind of Safari

Like all great safaris, these trips are designed to highlight and work in harmony with the place. And what is the place like? Once guests board the yacht, and the crew unties the lines that tether it to the end of the road, they’ve left behind the humdrum of modern urban life. As the bow points down the channel, into the maze of coastal islands, mountains rise up to hide that road and soon the pathways are made of water and all one can see, and hear, and smell is nature. It’s a world where time is measured in the rise and fall of the tide, or the millennia it took a river to erode a mountain and spill mud at its mouth where a meadow now grows. Indicators of change are the yellowing of meadow sedges, the muscular pulse of salmon into the creeks, and the return of bears to the meadows in August to sh. Because the region’s ords and archipelagos have no roads, guests move between locations and live and dine aboard one of Maple Leaf’s three expedition yachts. They go ashore multiple times a day for guided wildlife viewing, beach explorations, rainforest walks or other activities.