Woman’s World Editor-in-Chief Dishes on Her Breathtaking British Columbia Bear Safari

My husband, Steve, and I are armchair naturalists, the kind of adventure travelers and experience ­seekers who prefer to check off our large-mammal sightings from the safety of a Land Rover or Zodiac.

In June, we added a 9-day Maple Leaf Adventures cruise through Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest (a temperate rainforest the size of Ireland) to our bucket list of trips.

Grizzly bears chomping on sedge with their newborn cubs at their heels. Humpback whales slapping the water with their tales. A pod of porpoises catching a ride in the wake of The Swell, the 118-year-old renovated tugboat upon which we slept and showered, wined and dined with a dozen guests.

One day, breakfast brought seals and sea otters whose heads popped up, whac-a-mole style, in the glass-like water of morning. Another, sunset offered a rainbow, thanks to the daily mist in these 15.8 million acres that represent fully 25% of the world’s remaining coastal temperate rainforest.

Every day, we’d leave the main ship and descend into smaller inflatable boats to explore the glacial arches and mighty fjords that slice through mountains, soaring 700 to 800 feet high and plunging right into the water beside us.

We learned to tell the difference between the old-growth red cedar, Sitka spruce and hemlock trees (most over 800 years old, some 1,800 years, which means they were saplings during the Roman Empire) and the younger ones (a different, faster-growing variety).

If we weren’t learning about the fauna and flora around us, the naturalists would share history and stories about the First Nations people who populated this land—and worked so hard to conserve it.

One afternoon, we docked and did some forest bathing during an afternoon walk on shore. The rainforest begins mere steps beyond the rocky beach. The ecosystem transforms. Ten feet in and we’re ducking under branches dripping with moss, passing a pile of fresh bear poop (the color of the outside is the same as the inside) and encountering the west coast banana slug, about the size and color of a plantain.

Punctuating our voyage, Maple Leaf Adventures naturalists Marlo Shaw and Phil Stone dole out stories about the people who cherished and conserved this part of the world. A list that includes First Nations leaders, U.S. presidents, even a Time magazine photographer.

On our next-to-final day, we arrive at The Cathedral, the lake at the end of the watershed that Xenaksiala Elder, advocate and educator Cecil Paul famously brought to the attention of the world and saved. (Because it requires a certain amount of spring snow melt to fill the estuaries, we’d had a dicey day or two where we didn’t know if we’d get through to behold it.) My eyes filled with tears as we washed our faces and ears with the water of Kitlope River as Cecil had suggested.

We booked this trip for the bears, and I certainly came to care about the trees. In the end, thanks to an immersive experience and careful storytelling, I left the Great Bear Rainforest feeling equally connected to the people of the land. The story of Cecil made me care more deeply about the place.