Canadian Rockies Wildlife: Tonquin Grizzly Bear

Gavriel and I were working on compositions with two students among these large boulders when I noticed this young grizzly boar shuffling nearby.  He was up wind so he had not caught our scent and we were grouped on the far side of a house-sized rock so he hadn’t seen us yet.  I climbed higher on the rock and had a great view of the bear. 

He didn’t come too much closer before he noticed us.  Some people still think bears don’t see well but they are wrong – this fellow caught sight of me from a couple of hundred meters away. 

Our group of six photographers watched (and photographed) as he turned towards the shoreline and then walked parallel to our group along the isthmus dividing the two sections of Amethyst Lake.  We walked to higher ground for a better vantage point and found him loping towards the river. 

He dove in and swam across to the foot of The Ramparts where he walked along the far shoreline away from us.  In the image below he is just clear of the water and looking back in our direction.  I kept an eye out for him for the next couple of days that we were in the valley but did not come across him again.  A beautiful bear, I hope he’s able to fatten up in the next month before the snow starts to stick on the ground again.