Churchill

When I first started researching the polar bear trip, I googled “eye to eye with polar bears.” This led me to the Seal River Heritage Lodge. Along with its sister lodge, also on the Canadian tundra, it seems to be the only place in the world where you can safely photograph bears at eye level while on foot. The vast majority of polar bear trips are from large “tundra buggy” vehicles where you’re 20 feet up, or from a ship, also looking down from a great height (not a very good angle at all for photography). You stay on the ship or on the tundra buggy the whole time you’re viewing the bears. We hiked with the bears. Sometimes getting extremely close. For safety, we stayed together, all 15 or so of us. If the bear moved toward us, the first line of defense was for the guide to throw rocks. Bears hate to be touched and the rocks really seemed to freak them out. When that didn’t work — and it didn’t a few times — the guide would use a little gun to shoot what was essentially a fire cracker at the bear. This did the trick the few times the bears came too close. The third line of defense is a shotgun, but the guide said that thankfully he’s never had to resort to that. The experience really was incredible to be able to get that close to bears in the wild, and from the ground. One of the guys in our group had done a tundra buggy tour five years earlier and said that the two experiences don’t even come close. For this photo, I was laying face down on the ice, camera on the ground, about 40 feet away. The bear kept a watchful eye on us as he settled in for a nap.