Driving: Bear Necessity

On the advice of a park ranger, the next morning we explored the Wokkpash Valley, hiking along a broad, rocky riverbank by following an old horse trail. On each side, mountains rose steeply from the banks, stilling the wind, and in that silence five velvet-gray caribou came rock-hopping across the river. After days of heavy rain, though, the river was on the rise; running out of dry bank, we had to turn back.

The next day we returned to Stone Mountain Provincial Park to hike across shallow creeks and sloping meadows covered in purple fireweed. The hiking was easy—and dry this time—and ahead of us, where we planned to have lunch, we could see a blue-green alpine lake shimmering in the sun. Lunch would have to wait. There, on the trail, perhaps 100 yards away, arose something large, furry, and brown—high, powerful haunches and swishing tail. Realizing we were staring at the rear two-thirds of a mountain lion, we watched, downwind, as it sneaked through the high brush along the edge of the lake. When the wind changed direction, so (hastily) did we.

Two hikes, two impassable roadblocks: now that we'd reached the wilderness, it wasn't yielding easily to our designs.

Back in the safe car, we hit the border of the Yukon Territory and turned south along the Stewart-Cassiar Highway. Built in 1972, the Cassiar was even emptier than the Alaska Highway. We drove for hours without passing any cars or human settlements, the road so foreshortened by all the hills that, rising to a crest, it looked to catapult us into thin air while the towering pines on each side carved the sky in a deep V. And as we drove into deeper and deeper country, past thick spruce forests and silent, aspen-lined lakes, our sightings accelerated: wolverine, red fox, marmot, eagles, owls, loons.

But there was still the matter of bears, which had remained out of sight, though never out of mind. It may be the case that, as all my pamphlets pointed out, bears generally avoid contact with humans and will move away if they hear you coming. But tell that to the hiker who has spent an afternoon up a tree, at a slightly higher elevation than the grizzly's slashing 12-inch claws. Tell that to the park ranger who has encountered a black bear, assumed the fetal position, and remained perfectly still for an hour while the bear licked and nibbled his ear. Tell that to me as I sat in Mae's Kitchen, trying to gulp down a breakfast of hash browns and bacon beneath a large color photo of two men standing over the bloody corpse of a grizzly, shot nearby in 1999: "825 lbs., 12 feet tall. This is the largest bear found this side of Yukon in many years," read the handwritten caption. "The older man was eight yards away when he had to shoot. The bear had been tracking him for three kilometers."