Brown Bear Directory

[brotherbear]

~~Fortress of the Grizzlies by Dan Wakeman and Wendy Shymanski:The Khutzeymateen is North America's first officially designated grizzly sanctuary, and it is the result of a worldwide effort to save the remaining large bears on our planet. Despite this sanctuary and the refuge that bears find at parks such as Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary in Alaska, these nomatic animals are becoming more rare as humans invade their habitat to log, mine, hunt, and build. Sanctuaries like the Khutzeymateen cannot save the species, but as anyone who meets the inhabitants of this wild valley will tell you, they remind us of why the great bears must be saved.  - Dan Wakeman.Mountains guard the entrance to the fortress. Their cliffs rise up from the waters of 14-mile-long Khutzeymateen Inlet toward peaks over 6,500 feet high. Beyond these ramparts, at the point where the inlet meets the mud, silt, and fresh water of a large estuary, lies a valley of sedge fields, larch woods, and ancient spruce forests - the protected land of the Khutzeymateen Grizzly Bear Sanctuary.Sunlight glistens on Larch Creek, a side-valley tributary that tumbles over reddish rock into the Khutzeymateen estuary. Snow avalanches have cleared away patches of trees on the mountainsides, opening up meadows for cow parsnips, huckleberries, and fireweed. This is temperate rain forest country on the wild north coast of British Columbia, Canada, where the battles and burdens of human civilization, our yardsticks and ticking clocks, mean nothing. The people of the Tsimshian nation, who have known this valley for many generations, call it "K'tzim-a-deen." They suggest a variety of translations, including "a deep valley at the end of an inlet" and "the place where bears meet seals." To the grizzlies, it's a place of safety and survival. Reply