Wildlife Mad Travellers' 100 Bears Challenge

In 2018 we celebrated 10 years of sharing our wildlife travel images and stories via our website. To mark this anniversary we decided to set ourselves a challenge. Bears are one of our most favourite animals and if you are a regular reader of our trip reports you will know setting a target of seeing 10 wild bears in one trip wouldn't be much of a challenge… so we went big and challenged ourselves to see 100 bears in the wild in one trip.

To give ourselves a fighting chance of meeting this challenge we returned to some spots we stood a good chance of seeing bears and visited a few new places too. We did some guided trips and some on our own ‘chance bear’ viewing, all during one trip in September, visiting places in Canada & Alaska.

• Any bear, American black & brown bears, count
• The bears must be real (wooden bears don’t count!)
• The bears must be living in the wild (no captive bears allowed)
• As some bears look very similar, sightings of bears on different days count towards the 100 total, but they can only be counted once per day.

Ideally we wanted a photo of each bear sighting… we say ideally, sometimes it wasn't possible to grab images of roadside bears to protect the safety of the bear and/or other road users.

• Vancouver Island
• Knight Inlet – staying at Knight Inlet Lodge (20)
• Bute Inlet – day trip with Adventure Quest Tours from Campbell River (18)
• Knight Inlet – day trip with Sea Wolf Adventures from Port McNeill (6)
• Yellowhead Highway

• Hyder - Fish Creek (2)

• Stewart-Cassier Highway (3)
• Alaska Highway (1)
• South Klondike Highway
• Dyea, near Skagway
• Haines, Lutak Inlet (38)
• Highway 118 Road (1)
• Atnarko River – float trip with Kynoch Adventures, Bella Coola (5 on the mini-bus drive to & from boat launch and 1 on the float)
• Tweedsmuir Provincial Park/Bella Coola Valley (10)