In search of British Columbia's spirit bears

Sprawling along Canada's Pacific coast, from the northern tip of Vancouver Island to the Alaskan border, the Great Bear Rainforest is a protected wilderness area roughly twice the size of Belgium. It harbours all kinds of wondrous creatures, of which the most striking is surely the spirit bear, says Oliver Berry in the Financial Times.

Long thought to be cousins of the polar bear, these creamy-white animals are, in fact, Kermode bears (a subspecies of the black bear) that have pale coats owing to a genetic variant. They are found only in British Columbia, where estimates of their numbers vary between 100 and 500. Sightings are very rare, therefore – but I have long "dreamt" of seeing one, and last year I decided to try my luck.

From Vancouver, I flew to Bella Bella, then travelled for two hours by boat to the Spirit Bear Lodge, on Swindle Island, which supports a remote First Nations community. The lodge has good wildlife guides, who accompanied me each day on boat trips to nearby Princess Royal Island, which is as big as Herefordshire but entirely uninhabited, and is thought to be home to the densest population of spirit bears. Each morning, we ventured up rivers before striking out on walks ever deeper into the forest. We ducked under waterfalls, saw ancient rock paintings, and spent hours "hunkered in hides, waiting, watching".

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And we had so many spectacular wildlife encounters that I became "almost blasé" about them. We watched grizzly bears "pawing fish from the water" while their cubs played nearby. We spied bald eagles "arcing over the treetops" and sea otters "rafting in the shallows". Humpbacks cruised past our boat "like submarines", porpoises twirled through its wake, and a single wolf watched from the shore. The spirit bear remained "phantasmal", however, and in a way I was glad it did. "There are still wild things in this world", the forest seemed to be saying – "wild places where nature, not man, holds dominion".

Audley Travel (audleytravel.com) has a five-day trip from £4,310pp, excl. international flights.