700 miles solo in Canadian wilderness

Jonathan Klein spent more than 30 years working in wilderness and wilderness management during his career with the Forest Service.

In all those years, there were plenty of black bear encounters — every time he just gave a shout and the bear took off running.

That’s the conventional wisdom in Montana — black bears run if you yell and holler enough.

But on this day, Klein was standing on the edge of the Churchill River yelling his lungs out at a black bear that had all the intentions of not going anywhere until it had thoroughly and completely consumed Klein.

“Getting killed by a wild animal in a wild place is the quintessential wilderness experience,” Klein said during a recent talk hosted by the Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation and the Montana Wilderness Association.

The bear encounter came on a 700-mile solo journey canoe trip that Klein embarked on shortly after he retired from the Forest Service working in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in 2012.

Klein had become a bit disillusioned with wilderness in the Lower 48. Even in the wilderness, the farthest away a person could get from a road was a tad over 30 miles. In less than 160 years since Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had first gone West, white men had tamed the place — building roads, slaughtering 35 million buffalo and displacing native peoples to reservations.

Klein wanted a true wilderness experience. So he chose the Churchill River in Canada. He did a little research, but not much.

“I had the maps, but that was about it,” he said.

One day in June, his wife dropped him off at the river in Stanley Mission, Saskatchewan, with his Kevlar canoe and 450 pounds of gear and off he went, destination Hudson Bay.

The problem with the first 500 miles of the Churchill River was that it wasn’t always a river — it was a waterway of lakes sewn together by a river. His guide was a GPS unit, which kept him on course — he didn’t abandon all the amenities of modern exploration, and the GPS unit proved to be a godsend.

But other than that, the journey was grueling. He packed too much stuff, and his pace was slow. Far too often, wilderness experiences are too easy. A person gets tired, they simply hike out to civilization. Klein wanted a challenge.

“I wanted to find some suffering. Good suffering is hard to find,” Klein said.

The river fit the bill.

Still it was beautiful and he was mostly alone — the region is not designated wilderness, but few people live there, and the landscape is harsh, even for a resourceful critter like a black bear.

Klein recalled talking to a native woman who said most people slept on small islands to avoid the black bears. Klein thought that was odd at the time. He would learn why later.

He encountered the predatory black bear on Aug. 3, near the end of his journey.

He had left his canoe to scout out a rapid to see if he needed to portage around it or if he could safely run it. Portages were common practice, he made dozens of them earlier in his river journey.

Klein climbed a steep cliffy slope about 8 feet high and had entered the woods when he saw the black bear — a tall but thin creature.

The bear came out of the woods and started following him. Klein had packed a can of bear spray and a shotgun, mostly for polar bear safety. The shotgun had two pepper spray shells and was backed up by slugs and buckshot.

But it wasn’t much good stuffed in the canoe.

The bear approached him and Klein ran toward it yelling, thinking the bear would run off like the dozens of black bears had done in all those years before.

But this bear just kept coming closer until it was right in front of him. Klein hit it in the head with his fists a few times without much effect.

“I’m a peace lover,” Klein said. “Not a fighter.”

He kicked the bear and it stood up.

Klein pulled out his kayak knife and yelled at the bear, “I have a knife!”

The bear was unconcerned.

Klein backed up to the edge of the river and promptly fell over the bank with the bear after him. Just like a B horror movie, the bear kept coming at him.

Fortunately, Klein just happened to land near a baseball-sized rock.

He stood up and threw it at the bear’s head, hitting the bruin right between the ears. It wasn’t until then that the bear ran off.

“I really should have been killed,” Klein said.

A few days later Klein made it to Hudson Bay and the journey ended. He’s working on a book about the adventure and is planning more in the future.

He encouraged the audience to get out and create their own adventure.

“It’s not that hard to do stuff,” he said. “It’s not even that expensive.