This is a true story.

New Years Day was the beginning of an odyssey that would change my life and that of my wife Stephanie forever. No, it was not a New Years resolution to change behavior. It was the day I walked through snow and ice and fell into the den of a wild white Kermode spirit bear, while walking my property. This is the first part of the story.

Each winter, Steph and I had the great pleasure of walking the realm or circumference of our ten-acre property line. Located north of Terrace, BC, in a small mountain village called Rosswood. The temperature at this time of year was twenty-seven degrees below zero. At minus twenty, it doesn’t really matter if it’s Fahrenheit or Celsius. It is still very cold. At minus forty, they are both the same anyway.

This particular winter, the arthritis in my hip was causing me so much pain that I wasn’t sure I would be able to do the usual two-hour walk along the property grounds. She didn’t want to disappoint Steph, knowing how much she enjoyed the annual outing. Although he doubted if he could do it.

If you don’t know what an area is, it is the measure or the outline of your terrain. At one point, a king could own and rule as much land as he was willing to walk around the property line once a year. If he couldn’t complete the walk, he had no right to possess or rule the subjects within it. This made the kings healthy.

Anyway, back to the story. In general, I have a certain disdain for people who drink alcohol during the day. Myself included. However, on this beautiful sunny but icy day, I had a double shot of rum as I walked out the door in an attempt to nullify the pain in my hip and make sure I could make the hike with my adventurous wife.

Our property line is usually disguised on one side by some swamp and marsh for most of the year, and is impassable to navigate. The boggy thorns will tear you apart if the mosquitoes don’t. So we always appreciated our annual ten acre tour. It also allowed us to see the forty behind so to speak. There was a nice group of spruce and birch trees back there where a house could sit quite nicely.

At the end of our hike, we were approaching an area between our property and my neighbor and brother-in-law Paul’s house, the next ten more acres. An undeveloped piece of marshy land. Also a great place to photograph bears that loved to relax and sleep amongst the tall grasses. As long as we were downwind, they never knew we were there. Especially when the wind blew. The wind was like a great white noise machine that made the sound of your footsteps disappear completely. Allowing us to photograph those great forest dogs with ease.

As I was walking, at that moment, heading home, I approached a small mound of snow. Instead of circling it, which was a bit longer than walking on it, and due to my hip pain, I decided to walk on it.

When I reached the top of the mound, the snow suddenly gave way under my feet and I found myself falling through the snow into a cavity in the ground. At first a little dazed. It took me a second or so to readjust my eyes to the darker environment around me. It smelled damp and earthy. Like mushrooms and mud.

Not sure where it was, I looked up at what at first I thought was some weird kind of mushroom. So I reached out my hand, felt it, and rubbed it from side to side. Trying to figure out what it was. It was then that I realized that it was not mushroom at all. It was skin! It’s amazing how thoughts can rush with adrenaline when you suddenly realize that you are in a dangerous situation.

By the time my hand was lightly pressed into the bear’s skin and gently into the body, no seconds passed before a bear’s head lifted up from the other darker end of the cave and looked directly at me. It was then that I realized that I was feeling the rump of a bear. The second time he raised his head and looked at me it was all the information I needed to instantly leap out of the lair at full speed to save me.

My fear was that the bear would come for me and I would become dinner. After all, at twenty below zero, if it’s not frozen, it’s someone’s dinner. I didn’t know at the time, that when bears hibernate, they can wake up in a silly dream and protect themselves if necessary. If there is no danger, they will simply go back to sleep. All I knew was that I had to get out of that den and get to safety.

I caught up with Steph, who was unaware of what had just happened to me as she walked in the lead. I described what had just happened and what I had seen. I described the bear as a light brown variegated color. She knew in that moment that something was wrong. I have a certain degree of color blindness that made her wonder if it really was a grizzly bear.

About two weeks later, Steph decided she wanted to take a photo of the bear, so we headed to the back forty to take some photos. Steph is not afraid when it comes to bears. More on that in the next part of the story. When Steph approached the den for the second time, to our great surprise, the head of Kermode’s big and beautiful spirit bear poked out.

The Bear Spirit is a bear of almost mythological proportions. Moxgmol as the native Indians would call it. Most people in the region have never seen a spirit bear, much less had one hibernate in a winter den on their property. Even my mother-in-law, who had lived in the area for forty years, hadn’t seen one.

We had been seeing this white bear around our property since we moved there and a mother spirit bear left it when it was a cub. We would enjoy your sightings for years to come.

Steph got her photos and everything was fine. Thinking that the best thing we could do for him was to leave him alone to end his hibernation cycle. So it wasn’t until a few weeks later that we borrowed our friend Ann’s video camera and went out to take some more photos and a prized first movie.

This ends the first winter of our experience with the spirit bear and our story thus far. We decided to call him Apollo, where he would become a powerful figure at the 2010 Winter Olympics in British Columbia, and around the world. The footage we use from Apollo is the rarest of all.

Go back for part 2. Thank you Harreson Waymen