Spirit Bear Park & The Kitasoo People

In 2006, following more than 10 years of dispute, the government of British Columbia along with representatives from environmental and indigenous groups agreed to the creation of a massive new wilderness preserve, Kitasoo Spirit Bear Conservancy. The pact banned logging and limited mining of the preserve’s 6,785 square miles of land, almost double the size of Yellowstone National Park. Loggers are allowed to sustainably fell trees throughout the rest of the region.

Spirit Bear Park adds a “crown jewel” to the existing contiguous wilderness system composed of several of British Columbia’s most impressive parks, including Tweedsmuir, Kitlope, Chilcotin, and Fjordland. Over one million hectares of British Columbia’s pristine wilderness stretches from the drier interior mountains to the barrier islands off the central coast. The park overlays two of BC’s distinctive biological zones—the Kitimat Ranges and Hecate Lowlands—protecting areas where an enormous variety of life exists.

The Spirit Bear Park protects far more than an amazing wilderness. It also secures the ancestral homeland and traditional hunting grounds of the Kitasoo people and, to a lesser extent, the Hartley Bay people—native cultures that have lived in the area for thousands of years.

Kitasoo legend says that the Creator, Raven, made a pact with Bear, the keeper of memory, to turn one out of every ten bears white. This served as a reminder of the harsh times when the lands were blanketed in white, during the great Ice Age.

Know Before You Go