Meeting Boo the Beloved Grizzly of Golden, B.C.
Published October 31st, 2024
Photography by Jennifer Bain
At an unusual ski resort in British Columbia that boasts North America’s largest enclosed and protected grizzly bear habitat, Cat Cowan is doing her best to fatten up the resident apex predator for his winter slumber.
Today that means the Kicking Horse Grizzly Bear Refuge manager is tossing scoops of high protein nut mix near Boo in the grass at the southeast corner of his 20-acre enclosure and then scattering vegetables and fruit along the eastern boundary.
Boo has just weighed in at 837 pounds, but with just weeks to go before he enters torpor — a period of mild hibernation that’s more correctly called a winter dormancy — this orphaned bear needs every calorie he can get before retiring to his mountainside den.
“The number one thing about bears is they work smarter not harder — it’s all about energy input versus energy output,” explains Cowan as Boo eyeballs our approaching truck from a hilltop. “So for Boo, especially this time of year, he’s looking at `Do I need to walk down there? Do I need to waste the energy or are you going to drive up here?’ Whereas in the summertime, or even a few weeks ago, he would have walked right down to the corner, but right now he’s conserving as much energy as he possibly can.”
It's late October at Kicking Horse Mountain Resort in Golden, a mountain town that sits smack in between Mount Revelstoke, Glacier, Yoho, Kootenay and Banff national parks.
Public tours of the bear refuge have just ended for the season so I’m tagging along on Cowan’s work day. Luckily, Boo doesn’t mind. He has lived here for more than two decades and knows the drill, although he’s oblivious to the fact his Instagram has 15,000 followers.
Boo’s backstory begins in January or February 2002 when he and two siblings were born hundreds of kilometres away in the Cariboo Mountains. Life was good until June 4 of that year when the family was foraging along the Barkerville Highway near Quesnel and a poacher drove up and shot Boo’s mother. The hunter fled but was spotted by concerned citizens and eventually convicted of two B.C. Wildlife Act violations and fined $9,000.
As for the cubs, one fled into the woods and disappeared. The other two climbed a tree until wildlife officers lured them down by placing their mom’s body on the ground.
Named Cari and Boo after the mountain range in which they were found, these 12-pound brothers could have been euthanized or shipped to a zoo but were instead sent to the Grouse Mountain Refuge for Endangered Wildlife in North Vancouver to live with two fellow grizzly orphans named Grinder and Coola.
In 2003, Kicking Horse Mountain Resort — which at the time had the same owners as the Grouse Mountain ski resort — set aside 50 acres for Cari and Boo. During his first winter dormancy, Cari died of a spontaneous twist of his intestines and Boo has soldiered on alone ever since (give or take a 2006 escape to hang out with a lady friend before voluntarily returning).
Well, alone except for all the other wildlife that pass through his enclosure, and the thousands of humans that pay to visit him between May and October each year.
“This is the best time of year really to see Boo,” Cowan tells me. “It’s not hot. He’s super active. He’s almost at his prime weight before he goes into the den. And it’s just gorgeous with the fall colours and a little bit of snow on the mountaintops.”
Though grizzlies aren’t meant to live in captivity and are a blue-listed species in B.C. because they’re considered sensitive or vulnerable, Boo is a well-known conservation ambassador.
Daily observations of Boo’s foraging, play, sleep, social skills and activities have contributed to grizzly bear research. His log den, fitted with a motion-activated camera, has shown that grizzlies engage in limited activity during the winter, unlike true hibernators. Their body temperature dips, their heart rate slows and they may lose up to 30 per cent of their body mass, but they may wake, move around, stretch and even walk while in their torpor.
Boo — who soon turns 23 — will live out his life here but has shown that other orphaned cubs can be raised and released. He has proven that cubs can learn essential life skills without guidance from their mothers if the habitat, space and opportunities are right.
The refuge’s primary mission is public education about grizzlies. Unscripted interpretive tours focus on bear behaviour and natural history.
“Boo is really cool but his enclosure is pretty phenomenal,” says Cowan, who dreamed of becoming a vet while growing up in Ontario and first encountered grizzlies while guiding in the Rockies. “We are halfway up a mountain in a wildlife corridor right across the Dogtooth Range. There are 11 micro ecosystems from montane to subalpine. He even has his own wetland.”
The 20-acre rectangular enclosure boasts two kilometres of electrified fence that smaller animals can cross through. Kicking Horse’s Golden Eagle Express gondola runs over Boo’s main habitat while he has a one-acre winter yard, with his den, in the northeast corner.
The diet of most interior grizzly bears is 80 percent vegetation and 20 percent protein. Boo hunts and eats small burrowing rodents including mice, voles and ground squirrels. He’ll devour grouse, snowshoe hare, marmots, ants, termites, insects and tadpoles. Once he killed and ate a juvenile moose that inadvertently got into his habitat. Sometimes he gets gifted roadkill, confiscated fish or meat scraps from hunters.
“Motion is lotion,” says Cowan as she makes Boo forage for peanuts in the shell, walnuts, almonds, pistachios, sunflowers and strawberries. “I want to scatter it so he’s really got to find it in this grass. It’s high value stuff for him.”
As Boo forages, Steller’s Jays (the provincial bird) swoop in to swipe some of the bounty. After Boo’s had his fill of nuts, he wanders north to find corn on the cob, red grapes and apples. “He’s a bougie guy,” Cowan confides, “so there’s certain foods where he’s going to be `I don’t care about that.’ He’s kind of over carrots.” Indeed, there are some carrots stuck to his rear end and more he has ignored and left on the ground.
Boo doesn’t usually make eye contact with strangers, but I swear he looks right at me a few times. I watch him try and fail to stand on his hind legs — because he’s “too fat right now” — rub his itchy body against a tree and sniff a pile of his own scat.
“He does a lot of olfactory communication with wild bears in the area because they do move through this area, right? So he’s probably smelling that poop making sure it’s still viable,” Cowan explains. “Bears are purposeful poopers so they’re going to make sure that that mark is there. This is a major wildlife corridor so he’s just letting everybody know he’s here.”
People often wonder if Kicking Horse is making a fortune off Boo. While self-guided, large public and smaller group or private tours cost between $39 and $89, the proceeds are plowed back into the refuge for things like food, staffing and upgrades.
Cowan directs me to the Grizzly Bear Foundation to learn more about its orphaned grizzly cub rewilding efforts, and to the Northern Lights Wildlife Society, the only wildlife shelter in North America that rescues, cares for and releases orphaned grizzly cubs. Both are in B.C. I am eager to buy a Boo plush toy, but the gift shop hasn’t opened for the season.
As for Boo, grizzlies can live into their 30s and Cowan is grateful for every day with him. “It’s going to be nine years in June for me spending almost every day with him and I’m still just always excited and amazed to see him,” she says. “It’s definitely a unique job. There’s nothing like this on the planet.”
While You’re in Golden
Fly: I flew to Calgary and rented a car for the three-hour drive west to Golden.
Sleep: On this trip I checked out the newly opened Edelweiss Village+Resort and stayed in one of six restored chalets built by the Canadian Pacific Railway in the early 1900s for Swiss mountaineering guides. Last year, I stayed downtown at family-owned Rooms at Riveredge, which has just five rooms.
Eat: My go-to spot for golden lattes, granola bowls and pastries is Ethos Café. Hidden on the top floor of Four Points Books is the lovely Bacchus Café, with buddha bowls, homemade soup, sandwiches and all-day avocado toast.
Do: Depending on the season, you might be skiing or snowboarding at Kicking Horse Mountain Resort or exploring all the nearby national parks. The Golden Skybridge, featuring Canada’s highest suspension bridge and the Railrider Mountain Coaster, is seasonal and reopens in May. In downtown Golden, stroll along the River Walk and over the Kicking Horse Pedestrian Bridge, the longest freestanding timber-frame bridge in Canada. Drive 26 kilometres south of Golden on Hwy. 95 to see the World’s Largest Paddle and then explore the nearby Columbia Wetlands Outpost.
Bonus fun!
Jay here, jumping in with a recommendation to safely drive on forest roads for amazing views and hikes in Golden. Video below, article here.
Jennifer Bain
After a career at daily newspapers, Jennifer began travelling the world in search of quirk in 2018. She goes wherever the story is, but has a soft spot for Canada and has been to all 10 provinces and all three territories. Jennifer has won multiple awards and written two cookbooks and three travel books. She lives in Toronto but has a vacation house on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, which some cheekily say is one of the four corners of the supposedly flat earth.