Celebrating All Things Bears in Canada

British Columbia's Great Bear Rainforest on the Pacific Coast is a mysterious wilderness of fjords and estuaries, dotted with islands covered with lush, temperate coastal forest consisting of 90-metre-high Sitka spruce, and 1,000-year-old red cedar. This vast area which covers a staggering 70,000 square kilometres stretches from the Discovery Islands in the south, all the way to the Alaskan border. It's home to ancient cultures, and is alive with coastal wolves, bald eagles, ravens, and salmon – but there are also significant populations of brown (or grizzly) and black bears here too.

Lying some 60 kilometres inland, along the largest fjord, and tucked into Glendale Cove, is the fabulous Knight Inlet Lodge, a warm, friendly lodge with a knowledgeable team of wildlife experts. This is our floating home-from-home for our highly successful Festival of Bears. For 2024 we have once again taken over this wonderful lodge for 5-nights of intensive bear watching at a time when the grizzlies will be patrolling the beaches and fattening themselves up in preparation for their winter hibernation.

We'll venture out every day in search of bears, sometimes travelling by boat to explore the hidden coves of the inlet to view bears at eye level as they congregate at the estuary to feed on salmon returning upriver to spawn. We'll also cross the cove by boat to reach the salmon spawning channels, where we could see up to 15 bears on the river at any one time, from Knight Inlet Lodge's well-positioned raised viewing platforms.

But our wildlife viewing is not just confined to the bears. We will also take to the water and head out of the fjord in search of humpback whales which are a common sight at this time of the year. In addition to a resident population of orcas, we could see Bigg's, and offshore orcas as well, and possibly a super-pod of acrobatic Pacific white-sided dolphins.

Getting to the lodge is an adventure in itself and involves an overnight stop in Campbell River on the east coast of Vancouver Island. After breakfast, we make our way to Campbell River's floatplane dock for the hour-long (80-kilometre) hop north, across the Johnstone Strait, and over mist-shrouded mountains before landing on the water in Glendale Cove just outside the lodge. The Festival of Bears promises to be a wildlife-filled, fun-packed trip, and I'm very much looking forward to returning.

Optional extensions are available for whale watching in the Salish Sea or to look for spirit bears in the heart of the Great Bear Rainforest. These leucistic black bears are only found in limited numbers in the wilderness and will surely be the most rewarding finale to our Festival of Bears.

Join us on our Festival of Bears! To find out more or to book your place, contact our team of wildlife experts.