There's something about a wood fire. Perhaps it's the crackle and spit of the logs as they begin to take. The awesome fury of the main burn. The orange glow of the embers as the chemistry of the fire takes its course. Or maybe it's the pleasing...
It was one of those wilderness moments I live for. I felt my heart rate shoot up with exhilaration. And there was just the slightest tinge of fear that seems to come with all the best types of excitement. Ten yards ahead of me Katya, our 18-month-old...
I'd been looking forward to a weekend away for a while. I love my home in British Columbia and our valley is a place of overwhelming beauty, but the prospect of a couple of days in a small, hip mountain town in the US with a...
It may not look like much fun. A damp garden on a rain-splattered day. But for Kristin and I this morning was a time to do a little jig of excitement. The Weather Gods, even if they had not exactly smiled on us, were at least...
It's never going to be all good news living in the wilderness - and this is one of those weeks we would rather forget. Last Monday, just after we had wrapped up a great spring season with some close-up and personal viewing of wild bears, I...
Even before we bought the 80 acre strip of land across from the ranch a few years back we used to worry about the structure that provides for its only access. An old Bailey bridge designed for getting British tanks across middle European rivers, it had...
It's been more than eleven years since I set out one early spring day, only weeks after we first arrived at the ranch, to try and find a couple of dogs with whom to share our little wilderness paradise. Three hours later, following up on an...
So we have had our 15 minutes of fame. One quiet middle-of-the-week night last month the story of how Kristin and I first came to Wild Bear Lodge (then Grizzly Bear Ranch), turned it into a struggling eco-business, and our on-going efforts to end the grizzly...
I have an overdue confession to make. And it's nothing to do with bear-viewing. On 1st Sept 2012 I crashed my new airplane. I kept fairly quiet about it at the time, though some of you - especially those who have been at the ranch in...
In all the long years I worked as a journalist, I never really worked with television. Once in a while I might be caught on the margins of a wide pan at a well-covered newsy event, and one time my Mum claims (possibly falsely) to have...