The evolution of bear tourism
Barrie Gilbert knows something about the dark side of grizzlies.
As an assistant professor at Utah State University in 1977, he surprised an adult female grizzly while crossing a remote, high-elevation ridge in Yellowstone National Park.
“She came unglued, ran me down, tore half my face off and put me in hospital for two months.”
Unfazed, Gilbert continued to research grizzly bears for 35 years, including the impacts of commercial bear viewing in B.C.
“I guess I didn’t get mauled enough,” he allows with a laugh.
Gilbert says uncontrolled bear viewing can displace bears, but he’s found no evidence that bears accustomed to people at viewing sites are more likely to pose a public nuisance away from those sites. Tweedsmuir Provincial Park has received approval for a new conservation specialist’s position to provide more information, in part, on the effects of human presence on the grizzlies.
To prevent conflicts, the Commercial Bear Viewing Association of B.C., with 19 member companies, has developed a guide-certification system, a set of best practices, and code of conduct for the industry. It’s more common sense than hard rules, but guides in boats are not to approach within 50 metres of a bear — although the bear may choose to approach more closely. No aerial viewing, such as from a helicopter, is permitted.
An audit of 16 of those bear-viewing companies released in 2016 showed total revenues of $13.1 million.
In 2010, the B.C. government established a viewing station on the Atnarko River to prevent tourists from wandering willy-nilly through dark forests heavy with bears. The station recorded 2,655 visits and 162 bear sightings this past September — down from 3,393 visits and 397 sightings in 2016.
The popular thinking is forest fires discouraged visitors and bumper salmon returns resulted in the bears being more widely dispersed.
A more troubling possibility is there are simply fewer bears.
B.C. Parks and the Nuxalk jointly operate the viewing station 12 hours a day during the height of the salmon spawning run in September. The annual cost is about $21,000.
There’s a 12-gauge shotgun on hand in case a grizzly decides to cleanse its palette with human protein, plus a cedar fence and electrified wires. So far, so good.
“We have bears walk only a couple of metres away,” says park ranger Steve Hodgson. “We’ve never had any negative encounters.”
Viewing is less organized at Fisheries Pool, where only “hard-shell camping” is allowed.
Further down the Bella Coola Valley, the tides of change have swept up an unlikely individual: Leonard Ellis, a former guide-outfitter, logger, commercial fisherman and taxidermist. (He is not related to Scott Ellis, executive-director of the Guide Outfitters Association of B.C., who refused to be interviewed for this story.)
He bought his first guide-outfitting business on B.C.’s central coast in Ocean Falls in 1980, a territory that included Mussel, Kynoch, Roscoe and Spiller inlets.
“I was awestruck — grizzlies bears, salmon,” he recalls. “Unbelievable. Fishing, hunting, the outdoors. I was living the dream. There was none of this environmental stuff going on. It wasn’t in anybody’s sights.”
A different era, indeed. Nuxalk grizzly hunter and guide Clayton Mack was closer to a celebrity then than a social pariah and became the subject of two popular non-fiction books, including Grizzlies & White Guys.
Ellis moved to Bella Coola in 1992 and expanded his guiding territories, including to Rivers Inlet, Smith Inlet, and South Bentinck Arm. But he says debt caught up with him when the provincial government started reducing his lucrative grizzly quotas, prompting him to sell his territory to the Raincoast Conservation Foundation out of desperation in 2005.
Today, he’s pumped his money into an ecotourism business, Bella Coola Grizzly Tours, which offers log cabin rentals, a minibus to drive tourists around the valley, and a jet boat to take them into more remote fiords.
Ellis guides tourists — among them, Chinese tourists, a new and unexpected revenue source — on walks through remnant stands of old-growth, to ancient Indigenous petroglyphs at Thorsen Creek, and to see grizzlies feeding along the Atnarko River.
It’s a volume-based business no longer propped up by a few wealthy trophy hunters.
When he walks through the forests these days he leaves his .375 H & H rifle at home and instead carries an axe and canister of pepper spray. “It’s better than nothing,” he says. At age 62, and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Ellis accepts his fate — the big-game hunter taken down by health and public opinion.
“This is a pretty nice retirement deal. We’re still hunting grizzly bears — just viewing them, taking pictures.”