Canada's wild side: the Great Bear Rainforest

Lonely Planet has produced this article for Nikon. All editorial views are those of Lonely Planet alone and reflect our policy of editorial independence and impartiality. Video content supplied by the BBC.

For wildlife spotters, it's the score of a lifetime: a creamy white kermode bear roaming its home in the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia. Not a polar bear, but an offshoot of the black bear, there are only about 400 kermodes (which can stand up to six feet tall) in the wild; and only one in 10 have the gene which gives them a coat the color of frothy cappuccino foam.

Kermode bears are but one of dozens of wildlife species found in this vast coastal forest in BC. One of the last remaining places like it on Earth, the Great Bear Rainforest is a wild and remote region of islands, fjords and towering peaks, stretching south from Alaska along the BC coast, past Haida Gwaii to roughly Campbell River on Vancouver Island (which isn't part of the forest). Covering 32,000 sq km, this is the last major tract of coastal temperate rainforest left anywhere.

 

The valley and surroundsWitnessing the grandeur of the Great Bear defines adventure. You can get right to the heart of the forest in the Bella Coola Valley. This glacier-lined cleave in the landscape stretches from the dry expanses of BC's Chilcotin for some 53km to the shores of the North Bentinck Arm, a deep, glacier-fed fjord that runs 40km inland from the Pacific Ocean.