Emails

Dear Friends and Guests,

We've had some problems with our emails over the last week or so. We've now fixed them but if you've had emails you've sent to us bounce, please try again. We should get them all now. Thank you.

Julius + Kristin.

Season '07

Dear Guests

The snow may still be blanketing everything we own, but we are already planning for the warm months ahead.

Doors at the ranch open June 18th this year and we expect a full season running through until the end of October.

Much of bear season - from mid September until the end of October - is already booked up, but we do still have a few vacancies. In July and August we still have a fair amount of space too.

So please, whether you are a returning guest or a first-timer, drop us a line. We'll be more than happy to put something a little bit special together for you.

Julius + Kristin

For our second year

Dear friends, guests, future guests and supporters!

Just a quick note to update you all on news at Grizzly Bear Ranch.

We've been working on new packages, activities and a revamped website for 2007 which finally went live today.

We've raised our prices a little, we had to really. Another change is that we are no longer taking guests looking only for accommodation.

Instead we’ve tried to put together some short breaks and holidays that offer the best of the Selkirk mountains and the beautiful river valley we live in.

We've reinvented our grizzly bear viewing, upgraded our mountain tours and added rafting and nature-viewing, a day trip to see our 1,000 year old cedar groves and other local wonders.

Next year we will still be offering fly fishing with Jim, our excellent fishing guide, and we've teamed up with a local kayaking company to offer kayaking on Kootenay Lake.

On the more mundane front, I've reinvented myself this week as a carpenter. (Last week I was a logger, of sorts).

Working with Sonny, a neighbour, who really is a carpenter, we're doing a complete makeover of one of our cabins and adding a bathroom, pine walls and huge windows that look out onto the river. In the spring there will be a new sundeck too.

After a gorgeous summer and autumn, the weather has finally turned miserable. Snow and rain, rain and snow. Today we finally finished fitting the new snow plough, a huge yellow affair with a winch.

The Grizzly Bear Fund, a modest effort to bring over one frazzled war correspondent a year to give them a chance to unwind amid all this natural beauty, is off to a good start.

We collected $470 this year, about half of what we need to pay someone's air fare. By next winter we hope to have our first guest arriving on this scheme. Thank you very much all of you who made contributions this year. (Click here for more details on the fund.)

That's the news for now. Check out our new website at http://www.grizzlybearranch.ca. If you find any mistakes or anything unclear please let us know and we'll correct it or improve it.

Meanwhile we wish you all a good winter and hopefully Kristin and I will see at least some of you in 2007. Looking forward to it!

Very Best Wishes

Julius

Grizzlies on the river

It's been a good season for grizzlies. In the last two weeks alone we've probably seen a couple of dozen bears in and around the ranch including this young man who has just scored a monster lunch.

John Marriott and Jakob Dulisse, a couple of Canadian wildlife photographers, have been with us off and on for a while. (Jakob took the photo above.) But most of our guests have also been lucky. Last night Liz and Pat from England watched a a healthy female as she fished her way along the river in the late afternoon.

Watching a grizzly bear go fishing

For half an hour or more we watched this male grizzly making his way up the Lardeau River yesterday. It was an overcast day with periods of rain and he took advantage of the cool weather to catch some of the spawning Kokanee salmon.

He seemed little interested in us and at one point passed under a bridge we were standing on only a few feet away. For our two guests it was the first time they had seen a grizzly.

If this had been Banff or Jasper we would have been surrounded by crowds but here in the Lardeau valley we were left to our own devices - not a single person came along to join us.

For more pictures of this beautiful bear see our website.

The bears arrive

After a few days with no bears to be seen, they are back with a vengeance. Yesterday our guests saw two bears - a black and a huge grizzly - just a few miles north of the ranch and this morning our two-year-old grizzlies returned after a week to play on the other side of our river. For some of our guests this was their first bear sighting and they were thrilled. Late this afternoon the young grizzlies were back again, this time closely tracked by a large black bear. The river is full of Kokanee salmon and it seems that bear season is now properly underway.

Grizzlies on the way

The Kokanee salmon are in the river and the grizzlies are beginning to arrive. It's still early - the real grizzly season starts in the last week of September - but a couple of nights ago, just before dark, we saw these two come scampering along the river shore at the edge of our property. We watched for a while and tried to snap a few shots in the diminishing light. Our guests were thrilled - none had ever seen a grizzly before. If last year is anything to go by, within a couple of weeks or so this will become an everyday sight.