You Can Be a Bear Guide, Too—If You Can Handle the Heat

My travel companions and I had spent nearly a week in Alaska’s Katmai National Park surrounded by wild coastal grizzlies with nary an issue. But on our last day in Hallo Bay, a popular bear-viewing area in the park, something was amiss. Our guide Brad Josephs, an employee of outfitter Natural Habitat Adventures, caught sight of an older bear, partially hidden in the tall sedgegrass, staring intently at our group. Josephs calmly ordered us to bunch together. He stood at the front, between us and the bear, while the other guide, Teresa Whipple, kept watch from behind. It was highly unlikely that the bear would become aggressive—attacks are extremely rare and only two people have been killed by grizzly bears in the park’s history—but by grouping together, we’d look more imposing. Thankfully, it soon ambled off without issue.

I’ve loved bears for much of my life, but it wasn’t until this five-day group trip in June 2018 that I became truly obsessed. During my time there, I was fascinated by the bears grazing, playing, and interacting with one another. We watched cubs playfully wrestle with their siblings, and saw a fully-grown pair battle each other—the ordeal looked like an episode of Wild Kingdom. Because Katmai’s coastal grizzlies have never been hunted, they have no fear of humans. Food is in such abundance that we’re not prey, but rather harmless curiosities, which allows them to drop their guard (at least as much as a bear can in a wild environment). Of course, they’re still wild animals, and in the case of that grizzled grizzly, it was better to be safe than sorry.

The bears consumed my attention, but I also found our guides, Josephs and Whipple, fascinating. Each day, they told us where to go and what to do, both to keep us safe and give us the best opportunities for photographs. Throughout our time in the field, they softly narrated the entire experience as it happened; it was like having your own personal David Attenborough whispering in your ear. I was struck by how knowledgeable they were, and by how they seemingly knew what to do in any circumstance. It seemed that being a guide was as much about intuition as it was about training and classroom knowledge.

While I’m sure Josephs could read context cues from the old grizzly’s body language, it was almost like he had a sixth sense when it came to the bears, the kind that only comes from years in the field. In the four years since, I’ve had multiple other grizzly encounters, but none as special as that first trip. Meeting other bear guides—like my friend, National Geographic photographer Jad Davenport—made me wonder what makes a great guide. What possesses a person to become a bear guide in the first place? What training goes into it? Did I have what it takes to become one?

With that last question in mind, I reached out to the Commercial Bear Viewing Association of British Columbia (CBVA),  a group promoting safe and sustainable bear viewing on the western edges of Canada, and signed up for their level-one guide certification class, which would involve a week of classroom training and a final examination in the field. To achieve the level-two status, guides need to spend 150 more hours in the field, with level-three guides logging an additional 200 hours on top of that. A few weeks later, I was on a Zoom call with about a dozen other wannabe guides, learning about bear behavior and safety techniques.

If you met my instructor Daryl Dancer on the street, you’d never guess that the petite 65-year-old is a bear guide and general badass. Dancer is an 11-year veteran of marine search and rescue, and she has been guiding trips along the coast of British Columbia for 16 years. Still, she admits that teaching bear safety has been a learning process. Even after taking her first CBVA course, she was deathly afraid of grizzlies, a fact she kept hidden from her bosses at the guiding service at the time.

“Bears scared me because I really didn’t know anything about them,” Dancer said. “I became a guide because it sounded fascinating; it brought all my skill sets together – boats, outdoor education, and my nature knowledge. It was such a great opportunity, I didn’t want a little anxiety to get in my way.”

It wasn’t long before Dancer had to face her fear while on a tracking tour with two clients to the Great Bear Rainforest in 2008. Before this trip, Dancer had only guided from the water, but now she was venturing onto land.

“The goal was to find evidence of the bear, not the bear itself,” Dancer said. “I heard a loud crack nearby, and I immediately knew it was a bear. I said ‘Hey bear,’ and saw it stand up behind a huckleberry bush. It looked at me, and I looked at it, and it just shrugged and walked (a little further) away. We observed it for a while until it walked off. I managed to keep it together at the time and didn’t let the clients see me sweat, but when I got back to the lodge, I had a mini breakdown.”

Dancer realized after the encounter just how unprepared she was. So she devoured every book she could find about bears. The more she learned, the more she understood and admired the animals. She gained so much knowledge and experience over the years, CBVA asked her to become an instructor.

While the fear may be mostly gone, Dancer, who primarily guides along the coasts of Vancouver Island spends a lot of time and energy avoiding close encounters with bears—she has never even had to deploy her bear spray. With a little patience and a lot of attentiveness, she has developed an understanding, she believes, with the bears. She’s familiar with many of the individual bears in the areas she frequents and has learned their behavioral patterns. However, she’s wise enough to know that these are wild animals, and could be unpredictable.

“Bears are super tolerant,” Dancer says. “It’s amazing that there aren’t more negative encounters. But sometimes you can follow all the rules and do everything correctly, and things still go horribly wrong.”

Dancer drilled this concept into us during our Zoom training sessions. Much of the early instruction was fairly basic, like how to tell the difference between brown—grizzly—and black bears and how to avoid startling a grizzly, which is what leads to most attacks. I was surprised to learn that predatory black bears are more prevalent in the wild than predatory grizzlies. After that, we moved on to hypothetical situations, with Dancer challenging us to make split-second decisions that could save our lives and the lives of potential clients in the field. We discussed actual real-life bear encounters others had experienced, breaking down what they’d done right and wrong, and discussing it all in detail.

After passing our written tests, Dancer declared us ready to go looking for actual grizzlies. Less than two weeks later, I boarded a plane in my hometown of Indianapolis, heading to British Columbia. Five of us met in the Canyon Creek Road Trailhead parking lot, less than ten miles outside the town of Golden. It was late April, and although pockets of snow could still be found at lower elevation, the mosquitoes were already out in full force, biting through my thick black hoodie. We headed up the trail for our final test and a nervous anticipation surged through the group.

As we hiked, we took in the steep slate canyon walls and the snow-capped Dogtooth mountains further in the distance. I mentally calculated the odds we’d encounter a bear. At the onset of the hike, Dancer told us the likelihood was fairly low at this time of year, but we persisted, hoping for an experience that would cement our new credentials. Visitors had spotted a grizzly in the area two days prior, and I crossed my fingers we’d come across it—from a safe distance, of course.

We looked for signs that it and other local bears had awakened from their winter hibernation—scat, paw prints, or bits of fur snagged on tree bark—but to no avail. We did find some non-grizzly scat among some grouse feathers just off the trail, which led to an impromptu ten-minute lecture about different types of animal poop from Fabien Stocco, another of the prospective guides. I was chuckling about how excited we all were to chat about feces when we heard a loud rustling about 60 yards deeper in the woods. The crashing got louder as we glimpsed a blur of brown fur racing down a pine tree. Would this be our moment? But the commotion wasn’t caused by a grizzly, merely two pine martens chasing each other through the forest.

Everyone in the group had a different reason for wanting to be a bear guide. Some wanted to take clients out searching for grizzlies, while others were more focused on other outdoor pursuits and just wanted to keep themselves and potential clients out of harm’s way. For example, Stocco had spent a dozen years as a wilderness guide and photographer in his native France before immigrating to Canada five years ago. He wants to guide again, with a focus on bringing at-risk kids into nature to teach them about wildlife and the surrounding ecosystems.

Tracey Osterland, a paramedic who has worked in Alberta provincial and federal parks, recalled her most hair-raising bear encounter. She was working in one of the parks and noticed a grizzly several hundred yards up a hill. Although she felt safe at that distance, she pulled out her bear spray, just in case. Suddenly, the bear bolted downhill, closing nearly the entire distance between them in just a few seconds. As she reached for her bear spray, she fumbled it. As the bear closed in, she mentally prepared herself for the worst.

“At that exact moment, the grizzly came to a complete stop,” Osterand says. “It stood up, looked towards me, sniffed the air, then dropped back to all fours and relaxed. It then ignored me once again to continue grazing. It was so unconcerned about my presence, it turned its back to me so that it could nosh on some dandelions.”

Osterland resolved to be better prepared for future encounters. She took the class not only for her benefit, but to share her knowledge with others, especially park visitors who may have been given wrong or even dangerous information over the years. She hopes to eventually become a bear guide during the summers, while continuing to work for the parks and as a paramedic in the off season.

The final member of our quintet, Val Pleym, wasn’t even interested in bears particularly; she just felt that, as a sea kayak guide, she wanted to be prepared in case she and her clients came across one along the coast.

Although my fascination with bears runs deep, if I’m being completely honest, I was taking the bear-guiding course partially out of personal shame. In 2022, I spotted two black bear cubs in Yellowstone National Park, and stopped to take photos along with a handful of other tourists. A park ranger ambled up beside me and asked, “Do you know why those cubs are up there? They’re scared. They’re terrified of you and all the other people out here.” During guide training, I kept returning to that vivid memory. Perhaps the biggest role of a guide in the field isn’t necessarily to protect people from bears, but to protect bears from people.

We completed the hike in Alberta without seeing a grizzly. But a few days later, I finally saw one. Boo, a 700-pound male brown bear, lives at a sanctuary at Kicking Horse Resort just west of Golden. With winter winding down, the sanctuary was still closed to visitors, but Boo’s caretaker agreed to take Dancer and I up for our own private visit.

Boo paid us no mind for the most part, preferring to gnaw on a semi-frozen chicken carcass near the fenceline. And while I enjoyed watching Boo wiggle his back against a rub tree, I have to admit the only real charge I felt came from the electric fence surrounding his enclosure. Compared to other grizzly encounters I’ve had elsewhere, this felt all too tame. Josephs, who has led bear tours around the world for nearly two decades, perfectly described why.

“When people say, ‘That’s grizzly country,’ it evokes a sense of wilderness that’s missing throughout most of North America,” Josephs says. Seeing a bear in a zoo or through fence wires just evoke the same thrill of seeing a grizzly in the wild.

So do I have what it takes to be a bear guide? I passed my certification with flying colors, and Dancer thinks I’d make a great guide. But I wasn’t sure until I recently returned to Alaska to photograph coastal grizzlies, this time in Lake Clark National Park. Watching them interact in the meadow, I found myself able to anticipate their reactions and interpret their behavior. My instincts on when the group should bunch together on the beach or step off the trail were borne out by the actual guides. It felt as if I’d passed a self-imposed extra-credit exam.

I still have a lot to learn, of course, but that can only come from in-field experience. A friend at a guide company told me they were struggling to fill openings after COVID, as many experienced guides left the industry. While I won’t be able to spend an entire summer in bear-filled meadows—as much as I love bears, I love my wife even more—I hope to fill in for other guides a few weeks here and there in conjunction with my writing assignments. Being an outdoor journalist is a great gig, but adding bear guide to my resume would be even cooler.