I went cruising on an eco-safari along the Great Bear Rainforest, British Columbia’s wildest archipelago

It’s quiet here. Except for the distant cries of gulls, there’s a muffled silence as we huddle in a gauzy October mist beneath towering Sitka spruce dripping with morning rain. Then Marven Robinson, our Gitga’at bear guide whose ancestors have hunted and fished British Columbia’s coastal rainforest since the last ice age, motions us to shush.

“Bear,” he whispers, gazing across a lazy, copper-coloured river choked with spawning salmon. We hear the crackle of branches, followed by a dark figure emerging from the dense forest. “Oh, it’s just Strawberry,” he says of the familiar mature black bear who’s come to feast. “I’ve seen her eat up to 80 salmon a day. She’s a big girl.”

With seven of my shipmates, I’ve hiked a soggy trail for 15 minutes to a viewing platform on the banks of the Riordan River, which spills from Gribbell Island’s mountainous interior. In the heart of the Great Bear Rainforest, the remote, uninhabited isle is home to roughly 40 black bears. But it’s most famous for an evolutionary enigma exclusive to this rainforest: the white Kermode, or “spirit bear” of ancient lore.

To the Gitga’at people, the spirit bear, or moksgm’ol, is a sacred symbol that was never hunted. The white-furred bruin is actually a black bear whose parents both carry a mutated recessive gene unique to this region. Nobody knows the precise population of spirit bears, but it’s estimated there are 100 to 400 in this rainforest.

The bears were once regarded as mythical creatures by the outside world. The First Nations never mentioned their existence to early European fur traders. Even today, few people have ever seen a live spirit bear — they hibernate half the year and spend the rest alone in remote valleys foraging. But my trip coincides with a prime time to spot a spirit bear: during the salmon runs, from August through November, when they come down from the mountains for their annual feast.

“There might be only five spirit bears on this island, so sightings are very rare,” Robinson cautions. “Today might not be your day.” We cross our fingers but check our expectations.

Witnessing a spirit bear would be the culmination of our nine-day eco-safari in the 64,000-square-kilometre Great Bear Rainforest. But the revered rarity is only one of the reasons nature lovers come here.

After our charter flight from Vancouver to the gateway hamlet of Bella Bella, we boarded the 92-foot Maple Leaf wooden schooner operated by its namesake company, Maple Leaf Adventures, and motored due north into the liquid labyrinth.

The boutique expedition cruise is focused on nature — with a certified naturalist on board — and wildlife encounters are as spectacular as they are common throughout our nearly 650-kilometre journey. Wherever we looked, the rainforest’s pageantry permeated our senses with wonders, spirit bear or not.

The Great Bear Rainforest is the world’s largest tract of unspoiled temperate rainforest, coursing 400 kilometres along the B.C. coast from Vancouver Island to Alaska. It encompasses a maze of hundreds of islands, separated by inside passages and misty fiords, with abrupt granite cliffs and the glacier-capped Coast Mountains of the mainland.

Isolated valleys sprout 1,000-year-old western red cedar, 100-foot Sitka spruce, hemlock, alder and a landscape smothered by ferns, mosses and sedges, sustained by up to 22 feet of rain per year. There are grizzly, black and spirit bears, cougars, wolves and eagles. In the waters are several whale species, porpoises, sea lions, sea otters and a thriving tapestry of marine life that makes for what Jacques Cousteau proclaimed “the best temperate water diving in the world.”

During our transit in Whale Channel, we witnessed at least 50 humpbacks, all breaching and blowing plumes of spout spray that looked like iridescent geysers in the morning sun. We also spotted the distinctive hooked dorsal fins of two timid fin whales, a species thought to number only 100,000 worldwide.

As the days unfolded, we saw pristine inlets and estuaries, places with zero evidence that humans existed, from aboard our Polaris inflatable boats. In Khutze Inlet, we found a fog-shrouded estuary cloaked with moss-draped trees that resembled a surreal movie set. For two hours, we watched a female black bear and her two cubs climb trees in search of berries, while just 200 yards away a mother grizzly and her cub jostled for salmon in the shallows.

In both cases, the bears were aware of our presence, but since the area is now protected from logging and commercial bear hunting, they have grown unafraid of humans and are less skittish than in earlier years.

For decades, well into the ’60s, these types of nature-based experiences were of little interest to most here. Instead, a wide swath of coastal British Columbia was once known as the Mid Coast Timber Supply Area, where industrial logging denuded the landscape.

By the early ’90s, environmentalists were protesting logging practices by chaining themselves to trees. The tactics gained the attention of concerned citizen groups and lawmakers, and the B.C. government began to establish a new resource management system for the area, in an effort to prevent industrial logging and development while allowing traditional First Nations activities.

The plan went through multiple iterations, finally resulting in the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement in 2016; it permanently protects 85 per cent of the forest, which is predominantly old-growth, from industrial logging. On the heels of the agreement, in 2017 the government enacted a complete ban on grizzly hunting in the province.

“A main point that came out of the agreement and ban was the idea of building a conservation-based economy to replace one based on liquidating assets such as forests and wildlife,” explains Maureen Gordon, co-owner of Maple Leaf Adventures, among the first nature-based tourism companies to introduce travellers to the Great Bear Rainforest. “This is a switch from a hunting economy that produces limited revenue to an ecotourism economy that produces at least 12 times as much revenue, while also protecting animal populations,” she says. In essence, observational wildlife tourism has supplanted hunting in this rainforest.

Back at Gribbell Island, our guide Robinson decides it’s time to call it quits as darkness begins to envelop the primeval forest where we’ve waited quietly for six hours in hopes of seeing a spirit bear. Strawberry, the amiable black bear, also decides it’s time to dissolve into the night.

“Ten years ago, I met a film crew that was making a documentary about the mythical Kermode bear,” recounts Robinson. At the time he had never seen one but accompanied the crew to find the elusive creature — and they did. “The crew did their filming, and I began my guiding business. The spirit bear has been very good for me and our community.”

And for our group as well. Although we didn’t score a sighting, the possibility was always there, stoking our suspense. It’s been a dream journey if there ever was one. Thankfully there’s such a place as the Great Bear Rainforest, where myths still exist.