It’s been five years since an atmospheric river dropped a month’s worth of rain on Princeton, British Columbia, in a matter of days. But even with a herculean recovery and rebuilding effort, the impacts of those 2021 floods still mar the landscape. 

Hills are scarred by landslides, and buildings are abandoned. Sun-bleached logs sit far from the river as a reminder of how far the water spread. Then, there’s the old train bridge. 

Part of the Kettle Valley Rail Trail, a 500-kilometre abandoned rail line turned multi-use trail between Hope and Midway, B.C., the bridge was one of more than 60 locations where the 2021 floods washed out the trail. About 20 metres of steel, concrete and timber on its eastern end were swept away by the surging waters. Today, the Tulameen River flows beneath the gap between Princeton and what’s left, with a faded, graffiti-covered “trail closed” sign standing on the shore. 

For years, many Princeton locals were hopeful the bridge and trail would be rebuilt. But in early February, they learned the province was planning to not only scrap the bridge, but to decommission the entire 67-kilometre stretch of trail connecting Princeton to the Coquihalla Highway. 

In an announcement, the province said repairing that segment “would cost an estimated $60 million,” while “the cost of decommissioning the damaged Princeton section is estimated at $20 million.”

“The decision to decommission a section of the Kettle Valley Rail Trail near Princeton exemplifies the harsh realities of climate-impacted management,” the Ministry of Environment and Parks explained. 

It’s a decision that’s left locals and outsiders who care about the Trans Canada Trail reeling. 

At more than 29,000 kilometres, the Trans Canada Trail is the longest multi-use trail network on the planet. In 2017, it was officially “connected” across the entire country, making it possible to traverse Canada by a combination of foot and paddling trails. The decommissioning of the Kettle Valley segment will be the first permanent break in that connection. That’s a big part of why Stacey Dakin, the Trans Canada Trail’s chief program officer, thinks there has been concern about this decision outside of Princeton.

“With the Trans Canada Trail, there’s a sense of national pride and unity,” Dakin says. “We’ve heard more and more that people are connecting to each other just because they’re on the trail.

To Dakin, the Kettle Valley decision was “shocking.” But it reflects the growing risk that climate change poses to trails across the country, as jurisdictions must weigh the cost of repairs against the likelihood of future disasters.

More than just a trail

For Princeton mayor Spencer Coyne, the town at the confluence of the Tulameen and Similkameen rivers has always been home. A member of the Upper Similkameen Indian Band, he remembers when trains still ran on the Kettle Valley line.

“There was a dirt bike and bicycle trail beside the tracks,” he says. “We would ride our bikes out to Tulameen and go swimming in the summer. It’s just a part of who we are.”

Coyne, who was first elected in 2018, decided to run for mayor after a massive 2017 wildfire opened his eyes to just how vulnerable Princeton was to climate change.

“We’ve been in a state of emergency every single year since,” Coyne explains. “The trail is kind of a microcosm.”

The decommissioning decision stunned Coyne. Especially given all of the work the community was doing to rebuild and recover after the 2021 floods.

“[I was] super disappointed in the way that unrolled … It took a bunch of people by surprise.”

One of those people is Todd Davidson, manager of the Princeton Museum.

“When the news about decommissioning the Kettle Valley Rail Trail first came out, we were all kind of surprised and shocked,” he says.

He describes the trail as a tourist draw, with visitors using it for day trips and multi-day expeditions. In winter, he says, locals relied on it as a snowmobile route to get supplies from town. He also thinks the trail should be preserved for historical reasons, as the remnants of a rail line that moved minerals, timber and people between the coast and the Interior for nearly a century.

It’s a history that still lives in people like Tom Reichert. He worked on the line for the decade before it was shut down in 1989. Today, he and his wife, Kelly, own Reichert Sales & Service, an off-road vehicle shop in Tulameen. “The closure has definitely had an impact on our business,” he says. “It’s impacted both sales and service.”

They’ve also shut down an off-road vehicle rental program they estimate brought in around $30,000 a year before the floods. 

But beyond the business impact, the Reicherts worry what losing the trail will mean for the community. They remember when the trail was busy with hikers, cyclists and all-terrain vehicle users. It’s a big part of why they’ve gotten involved in efforts to oppose decommissioning. Now, there’s a large sign on the front door of Reichert Sales & Service promoting a “Save the KVR” Facebook group and a petition that, as of writing, has more than 12,000 signatures.

The Reicherts, Coyne and Davidson all point out that many of those petition signers have never even been to Princeton, but care because the Kettle Valley is part of the Trans Canada Trail.

Managed retreat

Most of the time, the Vedder River is a calm, azure blue ribbon that flows from Chilliwack into the Fraser River. But when it rises, it transforms into a raging torrent, a pale brown rush of water that inundates the forest and ravages the trails that run along its banks.

“We had three 50-year storms within four months, back to back to back,” Drew Pilling says. “Which really took a toll on our system.”

Pilling, the senior parks and trails operations technician for the City of Chilliwack, is talking about three atmospheric rivers that hit Chilliwack between December 2025 and March 2026, with each one damaging the same stretch of the Vedder Rotary Loop Trail.

“It’s quite a cost,” says Pilling. “It’s a lot of gravel that comes back in, it’s a lot of machine time, a lot of man-hours.” 

This wasn’t the first time this trail had washed away. The same 2021 storm that ripped through the Kettle Valley trail also ravaged the Vedder Rotary Loop Trail. And although Chilliwack has so far been willing to bear the cost of repairs, Pilling thinks there may come a point where, year after year, flooding and trail repair become an issue.

“That’s for sure gonna be a topic of conversation with the council and the mayor,” he says. “Depending on their decisions, it might change the nature of the trails.” 

This changing nature is top of mind for Thomas Schoen. The chief executive officer of First Journey Trails, Schoen has been building trails across British Columbia since 1998. But it wasn’t until 2017, when a cross-country mountain bike trail he helped build connecting Williams Lake First Nation to the local trail network burned in a wildfire, that the situation really hit him.

“It was a multi-year project,” Schoen says. “We started by training Indigenous trail builders and trail maintenance crews. It was a really successful project.” 

For a few years, the trail’s popularity grew, with both locals and visitors from further afield. Then it was engulfed by a wildfire that Schoen says “absolutely destroyed that trail.” 

He and others tried to rebuild it, but the landscape was fundamentally different.

“You had tens of thousands of burnt, standing dead trees along this open trail corridor,” he explains. “The amount of tree falls on this trail was, and still is, so significant that it’s almost impossible with volunteer efforts to keep this trail open.”

Losing that trail was “extremely emotional” for Schoen, and changed the way he thinks about trails and climate change. 

“Some trails can’t be revived,” he says. “Some trails, we just don’t have the manpower or the financial power to rebuild them or open them back up again.”

Climate policy experts might categorize Schoen’s comments and the province’s decision to abandon the Kettle Valley trail as “managed retreat.” 

It’s a strategy for dealing with climate change impacts that a provincial planning document describes as the “strategic relocation of people and structures out of harm’s way, often accompanied by ecological restoration and a permanent change in land use.”

But when done properly, it’s a strategy developed with communities, not for them. 

“These decisions cannot just be made by the government or by one ministry,” Schoen says. “[They] need to be made in partnerships between many different groups … First Nations at the table with trail user clubs.” 

Hundreds of thousands of kilometres of trails

For Ryan Stuart, community engagement lead with the Outdoor Recreation Council of BC, the biggest issue with the Kettle Valley trail decision was the voices that were left out. 

“Where was the conversation beforehand?” he asks. Conversations that he argues are even more important given the growing challenge of maintaining trails in a changing climate. 

And the province has a lot of trails to maintain. According to the province’s 2013 trail strategy, the province has at least 30,000 kilometres of formally recognized trails and “hundreds of thousands of kilometres” of informal trails.

And while the strategy didn’t discuss climate change, a 2020 progress report on it listed an “increase in climate-related events such as wildfires and flooding, which can damage the trail systems,” as a top challenge. It’s a sentiment echoed by another 2025 report by Climate Data Canada exploring how climate change impacts trails across the country. 

Stuart worries that the cost and effort issues are particularly challenging due to long-standing issues with trail funding in the province.  

Among applications to the Outdoor Recreation Fund of BC, a $10-million, multi-year grant to support trail building and maintenance overseen by the Outdoor Recreation Council, he says “lots of the funding requests are for rehabilitation of damaged infrastructure from fires or floods.” 

And the fund just isn’t big enough to support everything. Earlier this year, the council described the fund as “heavily oversubscribed” and able to “support only about 15 per cent of grant requests.” 

And it’s not like the province isn’t aware of the challenges.

“Many of British Columbia’s provincial parks, recreation sites and trails are experiencing a climate-driven transformation,” the Ministry of Environment and Parks wrote in a statement to The Narwhal.“As extreme weather events like the 2021 and 2024 atmospheric rivers become more frequent, the province is navigating a difficult balance between preserving historic recreation opportunities and ensuring long-term environmental and fiscal sustainability.”

Stuart understands “the provincial government is in tough financial shape and needs to look at everything,” but thinks there still needs to be more transparency in how decisions are being made. He points out that the government spent millions rebuilding both the Berg Lake Trail in Mount Robson Provincial Park and the Juan de Fuca Trail on Vancouver Island, while abandoning the Kettle Valley.  

“I’ve heard members of the Outdoor Recreation Council ask, ‘How was that decision made?’ ” he says.

The ministry didn’t directly answer questions about those decisions. Instead, they called Berg Lake “a blueprint for ‘building back better.’ ”

“Following catastrophic weather damage, the trail’s multi-phase reopening has a climate resilience focus,” the ministry statement explained. That focus involved moving trails out of vulnerable flood-plains, relocating bridges to places better able to “withstand heavy flow,” and hardening tent pads. 

They also said the Juan de Fuca trail would need some of “these same resilient engineering strategies.”

‘No new trails’

How the Kettle Valley decision was made also frustrates people in Princeton.

“What they want to do here is just throw in the towel,” Todd Davidson says. “We feel really quite ignored.” 

It’s a sentiment that Coyne understands all too well.

“The fact that the three … main municipalities that were impacted in 2021 didn’t get a lick of funding from the province or from the [federal government] speaks volumes,” he says, referring to Abbotsford and Merritt, which like Princeton were denied support from the federal Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund.

He sees the Kettle Valley decision as a “mirror image of what we’re trying to deal with” around broader flood recovery and climate adaptation. And while he understands the idea of managed retreat, he questions how it’s being applied.

“Ultimately, would we like to look at putting the river back to a more natural state? Of course, but nobody wants to pay for it,” he says. In 2022, Coyne applied for $55 million in federal funding to support a new diking plan for the town. Two years later, that application was rejected.

“Nobody’s coming to help us with that,” he says.

That lack of funding also worries Pilling. While Chilliwack was able to access some funding to rebuild after 2021, he’s not sure this latest round of trail work will qualify. 

“A lot of that funding is for infrastructure that is deemed necessary,” he says. And while trail advocates will argue that trails are necessary, providing benefits for physical and mental health, serving as travel corridors and, in some cases, being used for wildfire resilience, Pilling thinks most of the costs of trail repairs will “end up on the city’s bill.” 

For Coyne, this comes with an added sting. While he’s been fighting to try to reverse the decommissioning decision, he’s also been in meetings about marketing Princeton’s outdoor recreation. 

“We have a branch of the province actively marketing this entire trail network, and we have other departments that are cutting the funding and cutting the feet out from under them,” he says.

The province released its Tourism Sector Action Plan in March. The plan promised to grow B.C.’s outdoor recreation economy, which it claimed “generates approximately $17 billion annually in participation-based revenue, contributing $4.8 billion to provincial GDP.”But the strategy didn’t include any new funding for trails or recreation infrastructure. That’s a problem not just because of the new challenges posed by climate change, but also because of the province’s long-standing maintenance backlog.

In 2015, BC Parks estimated they had “approximately $700 million of investment in infrastructure that requires maintenance.” The province hasn’t updated this number since it was released, but the ministry did say they have further invested “approximately $200 million in campground expansions, accessibility upgrades and improvements to trails, parking and facilities since 2017.”

For Schoen, this calls for a radical rethink of how we approach trail building.“My philosophy is no new trails, period,” he says. “It’s unbelievable how much money we need for trail maintenance, and that money simply isn’t there.”

An uncertain future for the Kettle Valley

When it comes to the future of the Kettle Valley trail, Coyne is torn. He understands the threat that climate change poses to the region, but he also knows how important the trail is to his community. That’s why he keeps fighting for it, and after multiple meetings with the province, he’s starting to see a path forward.

“We’re not going to get everything we’re asking for, we’re not going to get a total rebuild of the trail,” he says.

But in early April, the Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen passed a motion supporting a new regional trails strategy. 

What the province will say is yet to be seen, but Coyne feels clear on one thing: if the community wants to keep the trail, the onus will be on them to make it happen.

“At the end of the day, if local government or regional government isn’t willing to shoulder this burden, then your trail is probably going to go away,” he says. 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Early in the afternoon of Oct. 10, 2015, John Ashley Pryce noticed something strange in his yard. A garbage bag was torn open, and trash was “strewn about the property” in Eastgate, B.C., a small community just east of E.C. Manning Provincial Park.

Pryce took in the scene, his eyes passing over yellowing leaves and dried grass before coming to rest on a massive creature sniffing the detritus. Its fur was mottled with shocks of brown, blonde and black. His eyes traced a prominent hump behind its shoulders and a round, dish-shaped face, both hallmark characteristics of a grizzly bear. 

Pryce grabbed his camera. The shutter snapped as he took a photo. The bear looked up at him for a few seconds before tearing off down the hill and disappearing.

Pryce couldn’t have known it at the time, but this would be the last confirmed grizzly sighting recorded in the North Cascades. A range of mountains, glaciers, rivers and forests stretching from Lytton, B.C., to just east of Seattle, Wash., it is one of the wildest transboundary ecosystems anywhere along the Canada-U.S. border. It is also home to one of the most endangered grizzly bear populations on the continent. 

Scientists estimate that, at most, six grizzly bears still live in the North Cascades. It’s not clear how many bears were once there, but according to Hudson’s Bay Company records, some 3,788 grizzly pelts were shipped from forts in the region between 1827 and 1859. Later records from miners, surveyors and settlers make note of dozens of grizzlies killed throughout the region. 

Today, many experts call the North Cascades grizzly an extirpated species, meaning locally extinct. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has “red-listed” the bears, labelling them “critically endangered.”

Since the bears were listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 1975, efforts have been made on both sides of the border to recover the population. Most recently, in 2024, the U.S. National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced they would begin reintroducing bears into North Cascades National Park — an effort derailed after Trump’s return to office led to funding and staffing cuts for both agencies. 

But an Indigenous-led project called the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative has continued to move forward. Led by the Okanagan Nation Alliance, the project is a collaboration with First Nations throughout the region, including the S’ólh Téméxw Stewardship Alliance, the Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council, the Lillooet Tribal Council, the Upper Similkameen Indian Band, Simpcw First Nation and the St’át’imc and Sekw’el’was. Together, they’re hoping to begin reintroducing grizzlies to the North Cascades in 2026. 

Cross-border grizzly efforts hindered by false starts and government cuts

The mountaintops in Manning Park were still dusted with snow when Joe Scott arrived in early June 2024. He had travelled from his home in Washington for the first in-person gathering of the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative. For Scott, the trip was decades in the making. He started working at Conservation Northwest, a transboundary conservation group based in Washington that was then called the Northwest Ecosystems Alliance, in 1998. At the time, he explains, “It was the only group that was advocating for grizzly bear recovery. Nobody else would touch it.”

When the Joint Nations gathering began, it had been only a few months since U.S. agencies announced their reintroduction plan. Grizzly advocates felt that they were closer than ever to bringing bears back to the North Cascades. But Scott had seen recovery efforts fail before. 

In the 1990s, budget constraints forced then-U.S. grizzly bear recovery coordinator Chris Servheen to choose between recovering bears in Montana or in the North Cascades. In what Servheen called a “command decision” he picked Montana, arguing that the Montana project seemed more likely to succeed.British Columbia came close a few years later. In 2001, they were on the verge of moving bears from Wells Gray Provincial Park in the B.C. Interior to Manning Park. But when the BC Liberal Party swept to power, it cut wildlife and conservation programs, prematurely ending that effort. Since then, according to Scott, North Cascades grizzly recovery has been a series of “lurching fits and starts.”

At the June 2024 meeting, conversations among the more than 70 Indigenous leaders, community members, researchers and conservationists connected Western and Indigenous science. Participants spoke about preparing for grizzlies’ return to the landscape, discussed challenges in public education and coexistence strategies. They outlined plans to mitigate human-bear conflict and shared ways to manage garbage and other attractants. 

Matt Manuel, natural resource coordinator for the Lillooet Tribal Council, described it as looking for “solutions within a common habitat that needs to be shared between the grizzly bear and those that are occupying or using the land” in a video produced at the gathering.

Much of the conversation at the Manning Park gathering focused on the North Cascades National Park Grizzly Restoration Plan, which would have relocated three or five bears per year on the American side of the border. At that rate, attendees expected it would take decades to establish a healthy population in the park, and even longer for the bears to move into surrounding lands or up into Canada. Still, the gathering closed with palpable excitement. 

But something nagged at Scott. He was “sitting there on pins and needles with full awareness that the [2024 presidential] election is going to make all the difference in whether this gets done.”

When President Donald Trump was re-elected and unleashed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency on federal agencies, the worst-case scenario followed: more than a thousand national park rangers, scientists and other staff were laid off in February 2025. Facing an uncertain future, many others resigned. According to the National Parks Conservation Association, the Park Service had lost 24 per cent of its permanent workforce by the summer. The impact on grizzly reintroduction was devastating. 

“Park Service loses staff, Fish and Wildlife loses staff,” Scott explains. “They’re already behind the eight ball with a lack of capacity, and then at this point, they just said, ‘We don’t have the people to do this,’ so it just died.”

The collapse of the plan was a blow, but there was still hope. At the Manning Park gathering, the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative had not only been preparing for the U.S. plan to bring bears back into North Cascades National Park. They were also developing their own plan, a comprehensive strategy that included habitat conservation, community engagement, public education and, eventually, restoring grizzlies on this side of the border.

First Nations-led effort rooted in Indigenous knowledge of the region

Mackenzie Clarke had never seen a grizzly before she packed up her life and moved from Saskatchewan to the Kootenays to work on a grizzly research project with Garth Mowat, the B.C. government’s large carnivore specialist. Soon, she was hooked. 

Eventually, working on grizzlies brought her to the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative, where she works as the tmixʷ (wildlife) program lead on the project.

Clarke’s role is unique in wildlife conservation. Rather than a nonprofit or government agency, she works for the Okanagan Nation Alliance, a First Nations government. As someone with settler roots, she thinks it’s an important shift in how wildlife conservation happens. “There wasn’t a lot of Indigenous involvement or consultation” in previous North Cascades grizzly recovery efforts, she explains.

Despite this, Indigenous knowledge has long been key to understanding the history of North Cascades grizzlies. After grizzlies were listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, researchers began looking for at-risk populations. When researchers began studying North Cascades grizzlies, they struggled to find bears. Researchers found evidence of bears, including tracks, scat, digs and bear dens. They set up fur-snagging traps, lengths of barbed wire hung near scented lures and used the gathered fur samples in genetic testing that confirmed the presence of bears. Despite all the evidence of grizzlies, no live bear has ever been captured or collared in the region. 

In the late 1980s, some scientists and politicians argued that researchers’ struggles to capture a bear were evidence against a historic grizzly presence in the North Cascades. So researchers turned to Indigenous knowledge to prove their case. 

“There’s a lot of historical knowledge from the communities on where the bears used to be,” Clarke says. 

Early efforts relied on anthropological research from the first half of the 20th century, which included accounts from Indigenous people of grizzlies near the Chilliwack and Fraser rivers and among high-elevation berry patches. According to late archaeologist William Duff, the Stó:lō knew grizzlies to be “particular frequenters of the high country.”

But by the late 1990s, First Nations were leading their own studies. In 2001, the Stó:lō published a Traditional Knowledge study as part of the B.C. recovery effort. They interviewed more than a dozen community members, recording decades of grizzly bear sightings throughout their territory. 

Both this study and the anthropological records included stories about the unique nature of grizzly bear harvests before settlers arrived in these lands. Grizzlies were not seen as a major food source. They would be eaten if killed, but the nature of the harvest suggested a deeper connection between people and bears. 

Grizzly bear hunters would track the animals while carrying a sharpened bone about the length of their forearm. When they found the grizzly, the hunter would attempt to jam the bone into the bear’s open mouth with the sharp end pointed up. When the bear slammed its mighty jaws, the bone would strike a killing blow into the grizzly’s brain. The stories noted that many grizzly bear hunters ended up one-handed.

In 2014, the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s Chief Executive Council passed a resolution declaring grizzly bears “at-risk and protected within Syilx Territory.” They directed staff to work with scientists and communities to support “immediate action to assist [grizzlies] from disappearing due to low numbers and habitat isolation.”

By 2018, the resolution was starting to bear fruit. They launched field surveys and began writing their own recovery plan. They also started meeting with other First Nations interested in North Cascades grizzlies.

“The governments of all the nations mobilized,” Scott explains, who at the time helped to funnel conservation funding to the efforts. “The intent was to move the recovery process along by identifying the needs and filling the various gaps.” 

That February, the Okanagan Nation Alliance, alongside the Stó:lō, St’ati’mc, Nlaka’pamux and Secwepemc launched a “multi-nation approach for grizzly bear recovery efforts” that would help launch the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative in 2021. 

Restoring grizzlies benefits the environment — but also cultures and communities 

Jordan Coble was in university when the first pieces that would become the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative were being put in place. But now, serving as both a councillor with the Westbank First Nation and as the chair of the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s Natural Resource Committee, he’s grateful for “the courage of those that come forward and say, ‘We should do this, and we must do this, and we must do it together.’ ” 

To Coble, the extirpation of grizzly bears from the landscape echoes what happened to Indigenous Peoples. 

“Where we’re at today is rebuilding from 150 years of colonization, of separation and forced removal and isolation from our land itself,” he says. In this context, he sees restoring grizzly bears as a way to restore not just a creature but also landscapes, communities and relationships. 

“Guiding the path forward has been interesting because colonization was quite effective in separating our communities from one another [and] separating our communities from the land itself,” he explains. “Now that we’re turning back to those practices where we’re reminding ourselves that we have interconnections beyond our communities, beyond our nations.”  

This relational approach extends to the natural world as well. For Coble, North Cascades grizzly bear recovery is just one piece of a bigger project. 

“The nation started returning salmon back to the Okanagan, and then saw the success from that built out into forestry and other aspects,” he says. “That interconnection of all those living species, right from salmon to the tops of the mountains where the grizzly bears live, is really important. It’s kind of nice to think about it that way, that we kind of worked our way up into the mountains.”

North Cascades region can sustain grizzlies, expert says

In late July 2025, a little more than a year after the gathering in Manning Park, Michelle McLellan was back in the North Cascades. McLellan, an expert in the relationship between grizzlies and the landscapes where they live, had been at the 2024 meeting. She had also been hired by the Joint Nations team to evaluate North Cascades habitats for potential reintroduction.

Using studies from the Coast Range, which extends from Yukon to the Fraser River, and other regions where researchers had tracked grizzlies with radio collars, she correlated bear movements with habitat factors such as landscape, climate and plant cover, and used the data to build a model of the potential grizzly bear habitat in the North Cascades.

It was a good start, but McLellan “felt it was important to go to the landscape and see what that looks like.” She and a group of researchers, park rangers and conservationists spent the better part of a week ground-truthing the maps. They bushwhacked through overgrown forests, taking note of the horsetail ferns and sedges that bears like to eat in the spring. They climbed into the alpine, looking for whitebark pines with cones that make a calorie-dense grizzly snack. They counted blueberry and huckleberry bushes, snacking on sweet purple huckleberries as they moved through the landscape, considering the locations of roads, campgrounds and other human pressures that could impact bears or bring them into conflict with people. 

“There’s definitely sufficient food to sustain a population there,” McLellan says, though not as high-quality as the grizzly habitat of the Coast Range or the Rocky Mountains. “In general, we did find some good patches that were far from people … the kind of remote valleys you couldn’t just walk into.”

The habitat evaluation was a big step, but it is only one piece of a complex puzzle that reflects the long history of challenges with recovering bears in the North Cascades. 

One of the more notable chapters in that history was the story of a grizzly bear named Winston. In 1992, Winston was captured near Pemberton, B.C. He had already been relocated once but had returned and was getting into trouble with local farmers. 

Winston was released in eastern Manning Park later that year. He travelled south, crossing into the Pasayten Wilderness, Wash., on the eastern edge of the North Cascades. From there, he headed northwest, through Manning Park and into the Chilliwack River Valley, where hunters picked up his trail and chased him north. 

On Dec. 30, 1992, his radio collar pinged near Bridal Falls, B.C., a small community just east of Chilliwack. Researchers lost track of Winston through the winter, but in April they picked up his trail again and headed north along the banks of Harrison Lake. Whether he had swum across the Fraser River or used a bridge is anyone’s guess. 

By that June, he was back in the Lillooet River Valley close to Pemberton. His radio collar fell off sometime that summer, and for a few years, no one knew what happened to Winston. Then, in 1999 bear with similar markings to Winston was captured again in the Pemberton Valley. This time, the bear had been going after chickens on a local farm. It was relocated to the Anderson River Valley near the town of Boston Bar, where it destroyed its radio collar and was never seen again.

It’s still a topic of some debate whether that last bear was truly Winston. And while North Cascades grizzly researchers like to tell this story, they use it mainly to point out the myriad ways bear relocation has improved since then. For one, male grizzlies, which require massive habitat ranges and have strong homing instincts, aren’t typically used for relocation programs meant to recover grizzly populations. Successful programs in other regions have taught scientists that sub-adult females have the highest success rate. They have also learned to source bears from ecosystems with food profiles similar to those of the recovery area and have developed rigorous evaluation criteria to identify the best candidates for relocation. 

It’s also why grizzly bear augmentation is a slow and meticulous process, expected to take decades to restore populations to a level where they might begin to interact with people. 

For McLellan, success might look like moving 20 bears in the next 10 years. 

Coble takes an even longer view of it.“I feel like we’re not going to know until 20 to 50 years down the road if there’s grizzly bears back in the North Cascades in a sustainable manner,” he says. 

Opposition and concern over grizzly reintroduction lingers, but support is widespread.

Still, when McLellan talks about the project in public, she hears a lot of people worried that “all of a sudden, there’ll be grizzly bears all over the landscape.” 

This isn’t a new concern. Scott describes North Cascades grizzly recovery as “a relatively simple body of work that has been made really complex by people who don’t want to see it happen.” 

Opposition to grizzly bear reintroduction has been loudest on the eastern side of the North Cascades, where livestock operations raised concerns about depredation. In 1993, government representatives at a public meeting about reintroduction held in Okanogan, Wash., faced death threats. In 2001, B.C.’s reintroduction efforts faced opposition from cattle ranchers in the Nicola Valley, including one who told the Vancouver Sun he was “hoping this whole friggin’ program will go away.”

Over the years, many of the concerns of those opposed to reintroduction have been addressed by government agencies and conservation groups. Today, opposition to reintroduction is a small minority. According to polling released by the National Parks Conservation Association in 2023, 85 per cent of Washington residents support the reintroduction of grizzly bears in the North Cascades. There isn’t specific polling on the North Cascades in B.C., but a majority of the public regularly supports efforts to protect grizzly bears across the province. 

Still, the Joint Nations project isn’t taking any chances. When reintroduction seemed imminent in 2024, they began ramping up public education, stakeholder engagement and community efforts. 

“We’ve been trying to make sure that nobody’s going to be surprised that bears are going to be coming back to the landscape,” Clarke says. 

She sees education, habitat restoration and conflict management as critical to the long-term viability of the North Cascades grizzly recovery. Building up support for grizzly recovery in communities is also essential.

“It’s okay to take this community by community, but also, step by step,” Coble explains. “Building that awareness, building the understanding that, more than anything, it’s important that the grizzly bears are here.” 

For Clarke, this community work also means increasing the sense of agency that people throughout the region feel about coexisting with bears. She points out that some of this work is already underway in communities where black bears live. But she also points to a range of other ways for communities to get involved, such as conducting community bear-hazard assessments, developing attractant management plans and engaging Indigenous Guardian programs in bear management.They’re also working to spread the word in non-Indigenous communities. Groups like Conservation Northwest and Coast to Cascades, an organization that aims to restore connectivity among bears in the Cascade and Coast mountain ranges, have long been partners. In B.C., the Joint Nations Grizzly Bear Initiative is increasingly working with the Hope Mountain Center for Outdoor Learning, an outdoor education non-profit based in Hope, B.C. that runs a phone line for reporting North Cascades grizzly sightings. 

Clarke admits it’s an ambitious project with many moving parts. But she is also optimistic about recovering bears and about being ready to support both bears and communities once that happens. 

“There’s not really that many bears,” she says, “so you can set things out properly before, and hopefully, have all the resources in place.” 

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In January, Todd Stone, the president and chief executive officer of the Association for Mineral Exploration British Columbia, told the crowd assembled for the association’s conference about a lobby meeting he had with Premier David Eby. Stone joked that he opened by congratulating the premier on his “success on 30-by-30.” 

The crowd began to chuckle as he continued his story about provincial and national targets for protecting 30 per cent of land and water by 2030.

“You’ve actually accomplished 47 by 2025,” he recalled telling the premier. He then recounted asking: “Can we start having a conversation about pulling some land back?”

That figure comes from a policy paper published in December 2025 by the association, arguing “up to 46.99 per cent” of British Columbia was protected land. That’s far more than the federal government’s figure of 19.9 per cent, and would surpass the province’s 30-by-30 pledge. 

According to Stone, a former minister under the B.C. Liberals, the comments led to the premier directing “the staff at the [Water, Lands and Resource Stewardship Ministry] to go back and look at all their numbers and sit down with us.”

According to public records, the association lobbied at least a dozen members of B.C.’s NDP government in late 2025 to press their argument. Those include the speaker, the minister of forests, the minister of labour, the minister of energy and climate solutions, the minister of mining and critical minerals and Randene Neill, the minister of water, lands and resource stewardship.

On Dec. 2, 2025, Minister Neill poured cold water on the lobbying effort.

“It is inaccurate to suggest these areas are currently fully protected when they are not,” she said. A section of the statement attributed to the ministry went on to add that many of the so-called protected areas cited in the association’s policy paper “do not restrict all resource activities that can negatively affect biodiversity.”

Torrance Coste, associate director at the Wilderness Committee, remembers seeing Minister Neill’s statement shared on an email list used by the province’s conservation groups. He described it as “encouraging” at the time. But Stone’s comments, and more recent statements by the ministry, have him worried.

According to a statement emailed to The Narwhal, the Ministry of Water, Lands, and Resource Stewardship said it is “developing an updated approach” to tracking the province’s progress towards the 30-by-30 conservation goal and appreciated the association’s “feedback as we proceed through this work.”

“This work includes a review of all existing areas within B.C. that have conservation measures in place or have restrictions on resource activity,” the ministry explained. 

To complete that review, they added they are working with “other resource sector ministries, including Forests, Mining and Critical Minerals, and Energy and Climate Solutions” as well as “industry and environmental non-governmental organizations.”

Coste thinks this could be a sign that the ministry is considering adopting some of the Association for Mineral Exploration’s definitions for protected lands. Something he describes “a naked attempt to lobby against the expansion of protected areas committed to by the governments of B.C. and Canada through the 30-by-30 commitment.”

“The Association for Mineral Exploration’s proposal has absolutely nothing to do with conservation,” he said. “The fact [that] the BC NDP government is even looking at the association’s nonsense is a huge scandal”. 

The Narwhal reached out to the Association for Mineral Exploration British Columbia regarding the meeting Stone described between himself and Eby, but did not receive a response by publication time. The premier’s office directed questions about the comments to the Ministry of Lands, Water, and Resource Stewardship, which sent the statement cited above. 

Conservation groups say the math doesn’t add up 

Despite the ministry’s statement that both “industry and environmental non-governmental organizations” are involved in the process of reviewing conservation measures and goals, Coste says the ministry has not contacted the Wilderness Committee.

The Narwhal did learn that the British Columbia office of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society had been engaged in conversations about how the province calculates protected lands. But those conversations began prior to the Association for Mineral Exploration’s recent lobbying, according to Coste and others The Narwhal interviewed for this story.

Coste says that if the province reaches out to him, his first move would be sharing “photos from this year of massive clear cuts in critical caribou habitat.”

These photos, he explains, are from areas designated as ungulate winter range. A land designation under the Forest and Range Practices Act, it’s meant to protect critical winter habitat for species such as mountain goats, elk, bighorn sheep, deer, moose and caribou. It also accounts for 17.7 per cent of the province’s land mass — land the Association for Mineral Exploration says is closed to mining. 

Back in December 2025, the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship disagreed with that assessment. In the same statement where Minister Neill rebuffed the Association for Mineral Exploration, the ministry argued ungulate winter range didn’t meet the 30-by-30 conservation criteria.

“There are two types of ungulate winter ranges: no harvest and conditional harvest,” the statement read. The former “are subject to restrictions on forestry activities, but do not restrict mineral development and exploration activities.” A conditional harvest zone, meanwhile, may not have stringent enough restrictions on forestry to satisfy international conservation requirements, according to the statement.

In other words, ungulate winter range isn’t fully closed to development. It’s a conclusion the Association for Mineral Exploration shared in a 2016 report, describing it as land “where new mineral claims may be acquired and access for mineral exploration and development may be permitted.”

Coste points to other land designations that the Association for Mineral Exploration calls protected that don’t fit the 30-by-30 criteria. Among them are special management zones and wildlife management areas. Both restrict some, but not all, mining and logging. Like ungulate winter range, the Association for Mineral Exploration’s 2016 report said these areas could be open to mining. 

In special management zones, the report stated that “resource development and extraction opportunities exist.” While in wildlife management zones, “resource extraction like mining may be allowed.”

To Adrienne Berchtold, the director of mining reform and habitat protection at SkeenaWild Conservation Trust, it’s more evidence that the Association for Mineral Exploration’s policy paper is using faulty figures.

“We’ve done some early fact-checking and found that around 27 per cent of operating mines, proposed mines and exploration projects in the province are located in areas [the Association for Mineral Exploration] is telling the government should count as protected areas,” she says. “These numbers show that not only is mining activity possible in these areas, it is actively occurring in significant quantities.”

The problem with ‘other effective conservation measures’

For Coste, one of the most egregious land designations included in the Association for Mineral Exploration’s policy proposal are old growth management areas. According to a 2024 report from the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society B.C., less than one-third of old growth management areas are protected old-growth forests. Most of them, the report found, were young forests, and at least 27,300 hectares were active cutblocks. 

“They’re not protected areas,” Coste says. 

But the provincial government includes old growth management areas in the province’s 30-by-30 calculations.

Of the 20 per cent of land and water the province has logged in the Canadian Protected and Conserved Areas Database, 15.9 per cent is parks and protected areas. The other 4.1 per cent are listed under the heading of “other effective area-based conservation measures.”

A vague designation, other effective area-based conservation measures are not parks, conservation lands or other clearly defined, government-recognized protected areas. Their inclusion in 30-by-30 stems from the definition of protected areas developed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, an organization headquartered in Switzerland, which counts Canadian government and non-government entities among its members.

It defines a protected area as “a clearly defined geographical space, recognized, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values.”

The “legal” side of this is straightforward: think provincial and federal conservation areas, ecological reserves and parks. “Other effective means” is where things get complicated. 

The province considers old growth management areas protected enough to include in their 30-by-30 calculations. The Association for Mineral Exploration agrees, adding ungulate winter range, special management zones, wildlife management areas and a few other designations they believe should also be included. 

But Coste disagrees, arguing that these designations “clearly don’t meet the International Union for the Conservation of Nature guidelines.” 

He describes the push to include them as government and extractive industries seeking “loopholes” to avoid real conservation. And yet, Coste said there are other means to meeting the 30-by-30 targets.

He points to Indigenous-led conservation areas as an example. These areas can fall into a legal grey zone, declared by nations but not recognized by the provincial or federal government. 

“If it’s Indigenous-declared, they’re probably going to need resources to do management plans and to get Guardians on the ground,” Coste says. “If it’s not a recognized protected area, that funding is not going to flow.”

He says that recognizing these areas as other effective area-based conservation measures could change that. It’s what happened, for example, in the Northwest Territories with Thaidene Nëné. 

An Indigenous protected area located on the northeastern arm of Great Slave Lake, it was designated by the Łutsël K’é Dene First Nation in 2019. Parts of the area were recognized by the territorial government as a territorial protected area and a wildlife conservation area. The rest was recognized by the federal government in 2025, forming the 26,000-square-kilometre Thaidene Nëné National Park Reserve. Earlier this year, the project received a major funding boost when the territorial government dispersed $21.6 million to support Indigenous-led conservation. 

Without these other pathways to establish protected areas, Matthew Mitchell, a professor and researcher at the University of British Columbia’s faculties of land and food systems and forestry and environmental stewardship, isn’t sure that B.C. or Canada can meet the 30-by-30 targets. 

“We can’t always do conservation the way we traditionally think about it,” he says.

In 2021, Mitchell served on an expert panel convened by Environment and Climate Change Canada to explore pathways to meet Canada’s conservation goals. Along with other researchers, he concluded meeting the 30-by-30 target would require innovative solutions. 

He advocates for approaches such as Indigenous protected areas, urban parks and biosphere reserves that include working landscapes.

“There are lots of good examples of working landscape conservation, agricultural areas where we’re adding in buffer strips and hedgerows,” he says. “Things that can actually have big benefits to a variety of wildlife and agricultural production.”

These are the kinds of other effective area-based conservation measures that he thinks are useful. But he also acknowledges there are pitfalls, and that opening the door to interpretations like the Association for Mineral Exploration’s isn’t helpful. 

“How you define these things and how effective they are actually really matters,” he says. “Putting them all into one bin and saying that we’ve hit our 30 per cent target is not a good way to go.”

A proposed Indigenous protected area in the crosshairs 

At roughly 40,000 square kilometres, the Dene Kʼéh Kusān Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area would be among the largest tracts of protected land in British Columbia. Located at the heart of the Kaska Dena nation’s traditional territory, it’s four times the size of Tweedsmuir Provincial Park, the largest park in the province.

“As Kaska, we’ve been stewards of our territory, so in our mind, it’s about thoughtful land use planning that will protect one of the most intact ecosystems in North America,” Michelle Miller, director of culture and land stewardship at the Dena Kayeh Institute, says.

When it’s recognized, she adds, the Kaska will be able to promote sustainable economic growth and protect land, water and critical habitat. It would also contribute to the province’s conservation goals. 

“Dene Kʼéh Kusān is four per cent of the province,” Miller explains. “Protecting it would go a long way to helping B.C. achieve its 30-by-30 goals.”

That has led projects like Dene Kʼéh Kusān to land in the Association for Mineral Exploration’s crosshairs. In their December 2025 policy proposal, the association called for a stop to “Northwest Land Use Plans, which are expected to add … significant new conservation areas to the province.” Conservation areas like Dene Kʼéh Kusān.

But Miller questions the association’s framing. 

“The idea of pitting conservation against economy, and against job creation, I think it’s an outdated argument,” she says. Dene Kʼéh Kusān is “not about opposing mining, it’s about where that can occur in other areas throughout the territory.” 

For Miller, that balance is at the heart of a “modern conservation economy” where “Indigenous stewardship, healthy ecosystems and economic opportunity can all move forward together.”

It’s a view she hopes won’t be lost if the government works with mining interests to change how they approach conservation and the 30-by-30 target. 

“The whole conversation around how you get to 30-by-30, I think we can recognize there’s some creative math going on there,” she says. “But we’re not here to debate that. We’re just here to say that Dene Kʼéh Kusān is worth protecting.”

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On Nov. 20, the small Central Coast community of Bella Coola, B.C. was rocked by a grizzly bear attack that sent four people, including three children, to the hospital with serious injuries. A few weeks earlier, a hunter was mauled by a grizzly bear near Cochrane, Alta., a town west of Calgary. And a few weeks before that, another hunter near Cranbrook, B.C., survived a grizzly attack, only to later die as a result of his injuries. 

These incidents have raised concerns about the risks posed by grizzly bears when they cross paths with humans. So far, the loudest voices have been those connecting these recent attacks to the decision to end grizzly bear hunting in Alberta in 2006 and B.C. in 2017.

“When hunting pressure is removed, the number of problem grizzlies increases,” the B.C. Wildlife Federation said in a press release following the Bella Coola attack. 

That argument has gotten some traction. Todd Loewen, Alberta’s Minister of Forestry and Parks, announced in early November that “all options are on the table,” including re-opening the Alberta grizzly bear hunt. 

But there isn’t much scientific evidence to support the idea that grizzly bear hunting reduces conflicts, and some experts worry that the focus on hunting ignores more reliable, proven strategies.

Research finds hunting doesn’t curtail conflict — but threats to species survival might

In 2016, Kyle Artelle, a biologist who splits his time between field work on B.C.’s Central Coast and teaching at the State University of New York, published a study exploring human-grizzly bear conflict. When he examined the impact of hunting on conflict, the results spoke for themselves.

“Years where more bears were hunted: there was no change in conflict in subsequent years related to that,” Artelle explains. “In years when there was less hunting, there was no change in conflict related to that.

Another more recent study, this one led by researchers at the University of Victoria and posted for pre-publication review in 2024, reached a similar conclusion about black bears.

“We find little evidence that lethal control interventions lead to significant long-run reductions in future human-black bear conflict,” reads the report.

Jesse Zeman, executive director of the B.C. Wildlife Federation, argues that the studies that haven’t found a link between hunting and conflict reduction are looking in the wrong place.

“We don’t actually study individual bears,” he explains. “Some of it is learned behaviour. We know in some cases where we have conflict bears, there’s a lineage there. So if you have a bold bear, a sow, she teaches her offspring, and you kind of end up in this cycle where you know you have problem bears because they’re taught bad behaviour.” 

The way that Zeman sees it, hunting would kill off these problem bears and break the chain of learned conflict behaviour. But Michelle McLellan, a grizzly bear researcher based in the Kootenays, isn’t convinced. 

“I don’t know that anyone knows that it’s hunting that reduces bold bears,” she says. “Nobody’s ever really tested that, as far as I can tell, so that’s a bit of a stretch.” 

McLellan points out that before 2017, the B.C. grizzly bear hunt wasn’t managed to reduce conflicts, but to keep the number of bears hunted below “a threshold that a population could sustain.” 

She explains that the hunt restricted which bears could be targeted, excluding mothers and cubs, and populations that couldn’t sustain hunting pressure. The places where the hunt that ended in 2017 took place, she adds, don’t necessarily align with areas reporting more recent increases in grizzly bear activity. Something that makes sense when you learn that grizzly bears are among the slowest-reproducing species in North America. 

McLellan also points to Alaska, where “they’re deliberately trying to reduce the number of bears via hunting and other methods.” So far, that program hasn’t been associated with any change in bear behaviour or conflict rates.

Even hunting advocates have struggled to connect those dots fully. In 2019, Steven Rinella, an American writer, hunting advocate and host of the TV show MeatEater, wrote a long piece exploring the question. He determined that the idea was in the “limbo of untested hypotheses.” The only way he saw to change that was to allow large-scale grizzly hunting and study the impacts. 

Montana’s Grizzly Bear Advisory Council, a group of hunters, ranchers, agriculture industry professionals and conservationists, pulled together in 2019 to advise the governor on grizzly bear management strategies, came to a similar conclusion. They couldn’t align on a recommendation, so they listed considerations for both supporting and opposing a grizzly bear hunt in the state. They explain that while grizzly hunting could play a role in population management, “it will not replace the need for conflict prevention.” They also concluded that, for a grizzly bear hunt to reduce human-bear conflict, the harvest numbers would have to be high enough to pose a risk to the species’ survival. 

“Put it this way: if you make them go extinct, there’s a zero per cent chance of an attack,” Artelle says.

Zeman says this isn’t what the B.C.Wildlife Federation is advocating for, but when asked about research supporting his claim that grizzly hunting reduces conflict, he cited a 2014 black bear study from the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. The study “found no significant correlations between harvest and subsequent human bear conflict” but hypothesized that conflict could be managed through harvests that “reduce [bear] populations to very low densities.” Still, Zeman argues that hunting should be one part of a much broader strategy. 

“There’s a whole bunch of things that we need to be doing, but we do think that hunting is a part of it,” he says. 

Changes to food and habitat have a major impact on bears

While scientists haven’t found links between grizzly hunting and conflict, they have found links between the bears’ food sources and their behaviour.

“When you look across the province, and you look in areas that have salmon, and years where there was low salmon availability, conflict goes up,” Artelle explains, describing findings from his 2016 study. “And the inverse, when you have good salmon availability, conflict goes down.”

During his study, he heard stories about a link between salmon returns and bear issues in the Bella Coola valley. 

“There was anecdotal evidence in Bella Coola that the worst year they had had previously for bear-human conflict was a year when the salmon failed.”

Artelle’s study suggested that issues with critical food sources had the highest correlation with increases in conflicts. It’s a conclusion shared by the 2024 black bear study.

“Conditions associated with low environmental food availability, such as cold spring weather, hot/dry fall weather, and low salmon abundance, increase human-black bear conflict,” the report explains. 

Both the Rocky Mountains and the Central Coast had issues with important grizzly foods this summer. Buffaloberries, a key food for Rocky Mountain grizzlies, fruited early.

“Bears are somewhat in a race to put on enough fat and reserves to survive the winter,” Dan Rafla, a Parks Canada resource management officer, told CBC this July as part of a warning about the early berry crop. 

In a 2019 study, researchers at the University of Alberta warned climate change was driving buffaloberry fruiting earlier, something that could “widen the gap between prime feeding season and hibernation.” Their study concluded that changes to the buffaloberry season would “alter the behaviour of the region’s grizzly bears.” 

On the Central Coast, Fisheries and Oceans Canada released salmon projections this summer which stated, “Bella Coola [Chinook] returns are expected to be below average.” Pacific Salmon Foundation’s 2025 State of Salmon report also suggested that numbers could be down across other salmon species.

“In 2024 there were virtually no conflicts,” Jason Moody, the Nuxalk Nation fisheries and wildlife planning coordinator told CBC. “We had over a million pink salmon in the area, but in 2025 that dropped by at least by at least 90 per cent.”

But McLellan cautions against linking any particular bear incident to broader environmental changes. 

“I feel like there are a lot of people looking for a reason for something that might just be bad luck,” she says. “People are looking for certainty where there’s just a little bit more nuance. It’s not black and white.” 

As McLellan explains, just getting an an accurate count on grizzly can be challenging. Estimates in Alberta range from around 700 to more than 1,000. In B.C., it’s somewhere around 15,000. While grizzly populations may be growing in some areas, they’re threatened in others. 

Still, as Jesse Zeman of the B.C. Wildlife Federation says, it’s the number and types of stories he’s hearing from communities that have really changed. 

“There are people who coexisted with grizzly bears for decades who now are going, ‘You know, I can’t leave my house without taking dogs or bear spray or a gun’ and so that conversation is changing,” he explains.

One study, this one a peer-reviewed paper from Minnesota in 2020, did find that when the state increased the black bear hunting levels, the number of calls about problem black bears declined. The authors suggested the harvest played a role, but admitted that the state had undertaken public education and other co-existence programs at the same time.

The authors also explained that in communities experiencing a perceived increase in conflict, more hunting “is likely to be viewed positively by the affected public, and could reduce complaints even if damage is not significantly reduced.” 

That’s why McLellan thinks that the number of attacks can be a more useful number for understanding conflicts. Although calls to B.C. conservation officers have gone up since 2017, the same trend isn’t there when it comes to the number of attacks. This year, conservation officers have recorded eight attacks, which is the highest since 2012. Since the grizzly hunt ended in 2017 we’ve seen two years with seven attacks, which match the previous high set in 2015 — but also four years with the fewest attacks on record.

Proven strategies for co-existence

For McLellan, the perceived increase in grizzly bear conflict in Western Canada raises one critical question: What’s going on with people in grizzly country?

“If we want to really understand the dynamic, we need to count people better,” she explains.

At one point, grizzly bears ranged across most of what we now call North America. From Ungava Bay in Nunavut to the Sierra Madre in Mexico, grizzlies lived not just in mountains and forests, but on prairies and in the valleys where many people now live.

“I get the question all the time, are there more bears? Like, what’s going on?” says Kathy Murray, program support staff with WildSafeBC. “We have more people living, working, recreating and growing food in wildlife habitat, so the potential for conflict is going to keep increasing.” 

Murray has been working on reducing grizzly bear conflict for more than two decades. She started after her own close call with a grizzly.

“What are the chances of me having an encounter with a grizzly bear?” she remembers thinking as she headed out for an evening bike ride shortly after moving to the small Rocky Mountain town of Lake Louise, Alta. Before long, she was alone. Breathing in the crisp mountain air, she rounded a blind corner and came face to face with a mother grizzly and her cubs. 

“I surprised the grizzly bear at close range, and she bluff charged me,” Murray says. “I pretty much stopped in my tracks and froze.”

Murray remembers the encounter as both terrifying and formative. 

“I decided to take that fear and turn it into something positive,” she says. Today, her work with WildSafeBC involves a wide range of programs and projects proven to reduce human-bear conflict.

“Having worked in the field with grizzly bear experts, I’ve always asked them, ‘What’s the best advice for people?’ ” she says. The answer, time and again, is to be loud, try to avoid surprising bears and “carry bear spray, and also know how to use it.” 

Both McLellan and Kyle Artelle echoed this point, arguing that coverage of the Bella Coola attack was misleading about the effectiveness of bear spray in that instance.

“If they didn’t have bear spray, that could have been much, much worse,” McLellan says. She points out that, of the 11 people treated on scene, some were for bear spray exposure — which, while unpleasant, is preferable to bear injuries.

Murray also works on larger projects, focusing on managing bear attractants such as garbage, residential fruit and livestock. These projects include everything from cost-sharing programs to putting up electric fences around livestock areas to promoting and supporting the adoption of bear-resistant garbage bins. 

“There is no one silver bullet,” she says. “It’s a multi-layered, ongoing process.”

The most ambitious program is called Bear Smart, in which municipalities undergo a bear-hazard assessment and then implement widespread changes to manage conflict. 

“It’s an excellent community initiative, but it’s a very rigorous process,” Murray explains. “It requires a lot of commitment, and it requires buy-in from the community, from the residents, from council staff, and sometimes there just isn’t the time or the resources.” 

According to WildSafeBC’s website, only 12 towns in the province have met the criteria to be designated Bear Smart communities. In Alberta, there are five active programs.

For now, the B.C. government doesn’t seem to be considering bringing back the grizzly bear hunt. When asked about restoring a hunt in the province, Environment Minister Tamara Davidson poured cold water on the idea.

“When the hunt was open, bears were not typically hunted in the same areas where conflicts were occurring,” she told the legislature on Nov. 25, 2025. “Any time there’s a conflict with a bear, it’s a reminder that we share the outdoors with these wild animals.”

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For Kim Reeves, director of the Four Wheel Drive Association of British Columbia, the backcountry is more than just a place to play; it’s fundamental to life in the province. He’s spent countless days camping and exploring Crown lands, the provincially managed lands that cover 94 per cent of B.C. But he is increasingly worried that B.C.’s Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA) could limit his access to those lands.

“We used to have a map,” he says. “We knew we could access that territory and how to access [it], but metaphorically, the map is changing, and we don’t know where it’s going.” 

Since the implementation of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act in 2019, B.C. First Nations are increasingly exercising their rights and working collaboratively with the province on co-management of issues in their territories — a shift that has prompted backlash from some non-Indigenous British Columbians concerned that their rights will be sidelined and their democratic voice undermined. The Haida Title Act in 2024, which recognized Haida territorial rights, has been framed by some critics as a threat to private property ownership. On the Sunshine Coast, a dock management plan has been developed by the provincial government in consultation with the shíshálh Nation, which has alarmed some Pender Harbour residents. Temporary closures of provincial parks for First Nations harvesting and cultural activities has also sparked concern from some non-Indigenous visitors.

At the core of much of public concerns over the declaration act is the fate of Crown land. What we call Crown land is also First Nations land that, in most of B.C., was never ceded under treaties; as Indigenous Rights are recognized in these areas, some non-Indigenous British Columbians are grappling with uncertainty about what it all means for them.

“Does Crown land exist underneath Aboriginal Title? Or is it the other way around?” Reeves asks. 

Reeves isn’t the only one with these questions. According to an Angus Reid poll published in late August, 44 per cent of British Columbians believe that the declaration act “goes too far in limiting provincial authority over land and resources.” Thirty-nine per cent of people think the legislation is necessary, but opposition is growing.

Louise Pedersen, executive director of the Outdoor Recreation Council of BC, has seen this growth firsthand. For her, the key moment was the B.C. government’s 2024 proposed Land Act amendment, which would have given Indigenous communities a voice in Crown land use decisions. Many outdoor recreation groups learned about the planned amendment in a news story. They were worried about the implications of the changes and angry because they felt they hadn’t been adequately consulted.

“It was a case study in how not to communicate when you’re talking about complicated issues,” she says, lamenting both the government’s approach and a narrative that pitted reconciliation against outdoor recreation. “It’s a shame that the public debate is being framed around access versus Indigenous Rights.” 

Vocal proponents of ‘public land’ have deep ties to mining, resource extraction

During the Land Act debate, think tanks, politicians and commentators pushed the framing of conflict between the interests of First Nations and everyone else. Now, a new organization called the Public Land Use Society has taken up the mantle. 

The Public Land Use Society is focused on eight “public land conflicts,” all involving Indigenous land management. Among them are Joffre Lakes and a portion of Juan de Fuca Provincial Parks, the 2025 Squamish Nation Agreement, the shíshálh Foundation Agreement and the Haida Lands Agreement. 

Founded in the spring of 2025, the society claims to be fighting for public access to Crown lands, but not everyone is convinced. Torrance Coste, associate director at the Wilderness Committee, believes that groups like the Public Land Use Society are exploiting public concern. 

“There is a genuine public interest around land access,” he says. “But it’s being torqued and taken advantage of by industries like mining and logging.” 

One of the problems with groups like the Public Land Use Society, he explains, is they’re focused on restricted uses for First Nations rather than industries, which impact public land access on a much larger scale. Of 934 Crown land use applications currently listed on B.C.’s online database, only five are labelled as First Nations. There are 81 labelled as industrial and over 250 associated with agriculture, energy production and other commercial land uses. It’s something that Louise Pedersen also mentioned. 

“Historically, some of the biggest threats to outdoor recreation have been industrial development,” she explains. “It’s been large-scale logging, large-scale mining operations and urbanization.”

Three out of four of the society’s directors either currently or have previously worked in B.C.’s mining industry. 

Jonas Rigaux is a self-described “mineral exploration contractor and independent prospector.” His company, Tamarack Exploration, has worked on mining, oil and gas and construction projects across the province.

Adam Pankratz, who writes a regular column in the National Post, also serves on the board of Vancouver mining company Rokmaster Resources. Commenting on the Declaration Act back in January, he argued that Indigenous consultation on mining claims “could spell the end of [B.C.’s] mining sector.” There’s nothing in the article, or his other writing, about recreation. 

The society’s executive director, Warren Mirko, worked with Rokmaster from 2015 to 2023 according to his LinkedIn profile. A consultant “supporting diverse clients in media and public relations,” Mirko initially agreed to be interviewed for this story. He changed his mind after learning the piece was for The Narwhal.

“We’re letting our published articles and statements speak to our perspectives on these issues,” he wrote in an email.

For Coste, groups like the Public Land Use Society are a manufactured response to the real threat that recognition of First Nations rights — such as the right to free, prior and informed consent — presents to resource extraction in B.C.“[With the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People Act] lots of nations are going to continue to reach out to those industries and make deals that work better for them, as any community would,” he explains. “But some are going to say ‘No, this forest, this part of our territory, that’s not going to get logged, that’s not going to get mined,’ and that’s not in resource extraction companies’ interests.” 

That’s something that the Public Land Use Society’s fourth director, political commentator, Caroline Elliott, also has concerns about. In 2023, she wrote that the seasonal, temporary closures of Joffre Lakes Provincial Park could set a precedent that would create new hurdles for the natural resource sector.

“If this standard had been applied, for example, to the Site C project, it would never have been built,” she wrote. That piece doesn’t mention hikers, campers or backcountry users. 

Reeves, who met with the Public Land Use Society earlier this year, doesn’t see the close ties between the society and the mining industry as an issue. 

“I don’t need to agree with everything anybody does,” he says. “[They] are asking fundamental questions that I’ve been asking and not getting answers to, questions about where we’re going with Crown land.” 

Government believes Declaration Act offers alternative to court battles

For Spencer Chandra Herbert, B.C.’s Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, the Declaration Act offers a different path for answering those questions. 

“I’d rather work with local First Nations, local business, local sports and recreation groups, city councils and town councils together to get to an agreement where we can all identify our interests and needs, as opposed to going through the courts,” he explains. 

Chandra Herbert points to the Haida Lands Agreement as an example of this approach.“We made an agreement with the Haida around the protection of private property while also acknowledging their long-time title, occupation and use and enjoyment of Haida Gwaii,” he says. “Instead of the courts, we sat down together and hammered out a deal.”

Pedersen thinks the outdoor recreation community should also focus on collaboration.

“There’s already some great initiatives on the ground where recreation groups are forming relationships with First Nations in their area,” she says. 

For Thomas Schoen, such initiatives are his life’s work. The chief executive officer of First Journey Trails and director of trails and parks development with the Indigenous Youth Mountain Bike Program, Schoen disagrees with the idea that the Declaration Act represents a threat to outdoor recreation. 

“It is an absolute myth that the backcountry will be closed,” he says. “It’s not what we see happening in the province.” 

Schoen and his team at First Journey have collaborated with dozens of Indigenous communities across B.C. to develop trails and promote outdoor recreation. He points to examples like the Simpcw Mountain Bike trails project, which began as a collaboration between the Indigenous Youth Mountain Bike Program and the Simpcw Nation; First Journey lent support to the nation’s efforts to build 20 kilometres of trails in Chu Chua. The Simpcw Nation later expanded the project, and their trails now extend for over 300 kilometres across Simpcwúl̓ecw (Simpcw territory) from Barrière to McBride, just north of Kamloops.

“We’ve built a really thriving mountain bike–specific trail network that is now drawing riders from across B.C.,” he says. 

Schoen sees the Declaration Act as an opportunity for recreation and reconciliation. But, he adds, it requires recreation groups to do some work. 

“Whenever I talk to any recreational user group, I tell them, if you haven’t started developing a partnership with local Indigenous communities, you are already behind the eight ball,” he says. 

To Reeves, this is an imposing task — one he thinks the provincial government needs to help with.“It used to be that the recreation groups would work with our local recreation officer to facilitate conversations with First Nations; that’s been removed,” he explains, arguing that recreation officers have stopped playing this role.Instead, Reeves explains, “we’re told to build relationships with First Nations, but the government has 150 years of experience, and industry has the same amount. [I’m] Joe Public Advocate, a volunteer, and with 200 nations provincially, what chance do I have?” 

Schoen acknowledges the challenge. Indigenous communities and recreation groups can have different priorities. His experience has taught him that trails are nice-to-haves, while many Indigenous nations are dealing with more urgent and immediate needs. But he thinks that if recreation groups show up respectfully, they can discover shared values, something Pedersen agrees with. 

“Recreation people care very deeply about land, water and access; they want to make sure that all those things remain healthy for the future,” she says. “Indigenous nations share those same values.” 

Reeves agrees, saying for members of the Four Wheel Drive Association, “the feeling of being in the backcountry, it’s all spiritual words.”

“It’s grounding, it’s revitalizing, it’s refreshing to the spirit,” he says. That’s also why the stakes feel so high, and why he’s so frustrated with how the government has been moving the Declaration Act forward.

A lack of transparency breeds mistrust, according to outdoor recreation advocates

“There’s uncertainty with a lack of transparency,” Reeves says. “That breeds a lack of trust.” 

The most commonly cited example of this lack of transparency is what’s happening in Pender Harbour, a small community in the province’s Sunshine Coast region.

In 2018, B.C. signed a land management agreement with the shíshálh Nation. Among the topics covered were new dock management regulations. The Pender Harbour and Area Residents Association has argued that the changes were undemocratic for dock and boathouse owners, rallying support from community members. Earlier this year, the B.C. government rolled back some of the changes. But the Pender Harbour association hasn’t stopped there: they are going ahead with a B.C. Supreme Court challenge filed in September 2024, arguing the Declaration Act is unconstitutional.

The Pender Harbour and Area Residents Association, an “aligned group” with the Public Land Use Society, initially expressed interest in speaking to The Narwhal. They changed their minds two days after the society declined to be interviewed, explaining that they reviewed our questions with “directors and advisors” and determined “these topics have already been addressed publicly through previous media coverage and our own statements.”

Although Coste disagrees with Reeves and the Pender Harbour association when it comes to the Declaration Act, he does agree that the government is dropping the ball on transparency and public engagement. 

“The burden to get the non-Indigenous public comfortable with what reconciliation looks like from a land-use perspective falls squarely on government,” he says. “I absolutely would agree with the assessment that they’re failing.” 

While Chandra Herbert disagrees with this characterization, he acknowledges that “we can’t move forward unless we bring the public along with us, and I think we’ve got to do more work on that.” 

“We were very clear about our commitment to that with the Union of BC Municipalities, we signed an agreement that’s, you know, with the organization that represents all the town councils and regional districts and cities to ensure that we can bring people in earlier in the process, so that their interests are reflected in what agreements we make.”

As evidence that his government is doing that work, he pointed to a recent agreement signed with the Union of BC Municipalities for broad-based consultation in October, prompted by concerns over amending the Heritage Conservation Act to increase Indigenous involvement in archeological preservation.“We signed an agreement with the organization that represents all the town councils, regional districts and cities to ensure that we can bring people in earlier in the process,” he says.Reeves remains skeptical.

“I think the public feels like, not only have decisions been made, but the direction has already been set long before public consultation is managed,” he says. “It’s like we’re being managed rather than being consulted.”Updated on Oct 29. 2025 at 2:00 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to clarify the roles of First Journey Trails, Indigenous Youth Mountain Bike Program and the Simpcw Nation in building trails through Simpcwúl̓ecw.

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