I Tried “Last-Chance Tourism” with a Polar Bear Safari. It Revealed as Much about People as it did about Bears.

I’d like to attribute my obsession with polar bears to a family tradition. My older cousins were given stuffed white Gund bears when they were born, and when I came out a decade later, the same polar bear was waiting for me in my crib. I named him Dee, and Dee came everywhere with me, so much so that he evolved into more of a noseless black bear over the years.

My love for the bears wasn’t just plush. A third grade science fair allowed me to spend every afternoon at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, using a miniature clipboard to record polar bears’ activity levels as the temperatures dropped. Every school animal report was about polar bears. In college, when I decided to get a dog, I picked a fluffy white Golden Retriever—the closest I could come to a domesticated polar bear.

So when I learned of polar bear safaris, which are pretty much what they sound like, I knew I had to go on one. Not just because I could see the long-time object of my adoration in its true home, but because I might not be able to forever. Climate change is ravaging the ecosystems that support polar bears. Largely thanks to declining levels of sea ice, which are central to polar bears' hunting and breeding strategies, scientists project that two-thirds of the world's population could be gone by midcentury, and that they could be locally extinct in many of the places that constitute their natural habitat today by 2100. If I wanted to make observations outside a zoo, a polar bear safari—soon—might be my only option.

There’s a name for this kind of trip: “Last Chance Tourism.” Tour operators have increasingly been putting together expeditions that allow people to experience endangered destinations, like diving the Great Barrier Reef before its corals die or seeing Venice before it floods. These trips are often expensive and exclusive—and controversial for the strain they put on already-precarious environments. But seeing endangered animals is a rarer proposition, and my beloved polar bears are at the forefront of the trend.

I decided to book a tour with a company called Natural Habitat Adventures. For seven days, I would travel with a group of 15 to the Canadian Arctic town of Churchill, Manitoba. While in some towns you have the weekly coyote on your block or the monthly bobcat in your alley, in Churchill you have the daily polar bear. They walk down main street like anyone else. If there was a better place to understand what Last-Chance Tourism might mean for animals, I couldn’t think of one: Of Churchill’s population of 1,500 souls, only 870 are human.

In October, I set off. I flew from New York City, to Toronto, to Winnipeg, culminating in an evening welcome orientation, equal parts icebreakers and bear safety. The next morning, my tour group and I boarded a charter flight to Churchill. After two hours in the air, we landed at the town’s barren airstrip and were shuffled from the charter plane directly onto a shuttle bus. With polar bears everywhere, it wasn’t safe to walk.

We passed by the town’s old grain port, where the Churchill River meets Hudson Bay, and drove down the one small strip that functions as the main street. We were told this is where we could walk during daylight hours when we had free time, perhaps to go to Dancing Bear Restaurant, Lazy Bear Cafe, or Bear Country Inn. The key was to give a wide berth to any corner we rounded and never to pull out our phones—even to check the time—so that we could be alert and ready for a bear encounter.

These precautions might have seemed like overkill, but everyone, even the locals, heeded these kinds of rules. Especially the locals. Churchill resident Kevin Burke, a one-time polar rover driver who worked as a bear guard, monitoring high-traffic locations for bears and alerting people to their presence, told me that locals know they “have to be ‘on.’” Any time of day, a bear could show up.

The persistent presence of bears makes it dangerous to walk in most of Churchill.

Which was of course what we were hoping for.

After lunch, a visit to Churchill’s antique museum, dinner at the Tundra Pub (and a round of “Polar Bear” peppermint schnapps shots), I finally sank into my bed at the Aurora Inn—exhausted. I drifted off to the sound of fireworks crackling outside my window.

The next morning, there was a buzz at the table of tourists eating breakfast. As I heard what everyone was so excited about, I pieced something together: Those fireworks had actually been the sharp noises the town’s patrol service uses to scare away bears. There had been a polar bear outside our hotel the night before—outside my window, actually, watching over me while I slept. Just like Dee.

I missed my first chance to see a bear, but luckily, I had a full day of alert polar bear viewing ahead. After breakfast we loaded onto shuttle buses and left Churchill’s main street behind, driving about 25 minutes outside of town to where our polar rovers awaited us. Also known as Tundra Buggies, they appeared to be the spawn of a monster truck and a coach bus, with an uncovered observation deck sticking out of its rear. We drove right up to the deck, and loaded directly onto its grate floors.

Everyone had a row of seats to themselves, and following a quick Buggy briefing, we set off onto the tundra in pursuit of bears. I couldn’t believe it, but it was not snowy. Churchill rests at the intersection of three different ecosystems: the subarctic tundra, the boreal forest, and the arctic marine of the Hudson Bay. Until its first snowfall, usually late autumn, the Churchill Wildlife Management Area is 2,097,314 acres of grassy plain, filled with dwarf shrubs, grasses, trees, and the occasional kelp on the rocks near the coast.

Elevated on the rover’s 5-foot tall monster truck wheels, we moved silently and studiously. We tracked every speck of blonde discoloration as far as our eyes could see. Yes, blonde, because polar bear fur is not white. Technically, it’s translucent, composed of transparent, hollow fibers that scatter the light so that it appears white. But the only blonde we were seeing was Arctic foxes and hares, some flighty ptarmigans.

Then, finally, a polar bear.

The bear we saw was curled up on her emotional support rock, and her coat stood out against the muted, barren surroundings. You’re not supposed to name the bears you encounter, but we named her Rocky.

Our group of polar bear obsessives whispered from about 100 feet away. We watched her clean her paws, stretch her neck, and tuck herself back into bed against the rock. I couldn’t help but think how much she reminded me of my dog. She drifted into a slumber and we roved on.

Polar bears will make remarkably close approaches to the monster-truck-esque rovers used on polar bear safaris.

Less than an hour away, we came upon a mother with two cubs. You’re lucky if you get to see cubs, and we spent about two hours capitalizing on our luck, watching their mother using her body to shield them from the winds and keep them safely tucked into the grasses. Eventually, we slowly peeled away, heading back on our monster bus to the launch site.

The next day, we went out again. We found Rocky in the same spot, but this time, she was awake. She paced around her rock and eventually started moving towards us, her big paws thumping the ground as she stalked over. From the observation deck, I waited, short, bated breaths swept into the brisk winds. She got closer and closer, and then she was underneath the deck, right below my feet.

We froze and locked eyes. A mirrored curiosity passed in our gazes. Then she gave one sniff, tilted her head, and moved on.

As Rocky walked away, a singular circuit of adrenaline coursed through me. I was left with a strong sensation. Even though I loved polar bears, I imagined a close encounter could be frightening. But it wasn’t fear that filled me. It was a deep respect.

A funny thing happened after my encounter with Rocky. I found myself paying closer attention to Churchill itself, this strange former port town where people live alongside polar bears. Respect for the bears is a guiding principle in the town; bears are part of the community, and Churchill governs itself around the needs of its people and its bears.

After two days on the rovers we got time to experience other aspects of life there. Out dogsledding, I asked my musher, Wyatt Daley, and his father Dave Daley, owner of Wapusk Adventures, about coexistence. “There’s a lot of beautiful landscape around Churchill, especially in the summertime, but you have to be really wary,” Wyatt said. “You can't really enjoy the beaches too much because polar bears get off the ice once the bay starts to thaw.”

Letting the bears have the beaches! The people of Churchill understood the animals in a different way than us tourists. “There's jerky polar bears, and there's shy polar bears,” Dave told me. “And there's smart polar bears, and there's polar bears that like to perform for the tourists. They’re all different, just like we are. Just like all animals are.”

Maybe the best way to understand just how much polar bears are seen as fellow Churchillians is to see how jerky bears get treated. Often, a few cracks from an unloaded gun are enough to scare the bears off should they come too close to the people in town. But for the problem bears that keep coming back, Churchill has a special way to teach them a lesson.

They put them in polar bear jail.

What’s officially known as the Polar Bear Holding Facility is about ten minutes outside of town, a large barn-like structure with a giant, beautiful bear mural on its facade. There, bears are put in holding cells for up to 90 days, where they learn to chill out until the ice comes back. Eventually, they are airlifted to a prime spot on the tundra and rarely return to town again.

Only a few authorized workers can go inside—absolutely no tourists allowed. It’s said that even Martha Stewart was denied entry.

The concept of polar bear jail gets at something core to life in Churchill. The guidelines that, to the uninitiated, seem designed to protect people are just as much for the bears. Preventing encounters with humans keeps them safe; after all, a bear threatening humans might get threatened by humans in return. In fact, until 1978, the policy was to shoot problem bears. Since the jail opened in 1982, only one bear has been put down, in 2013. But I shuddered to imagine how easily the situation could spin out of control if Churchill becomes overrun with tourists.

A fundamental shift in Churchill’s approach to living with polar bears came in the 1980s, when the town resolved to relocate problem bears rather than shoot them. The Polar Bear Holding Facility has been a big success. Today it is painted with a mural that express the beauty the town sees in the new approach.

On our last day in town we did a driving tour of a collection of murals that paint landmarks throughout the town. At one point, we saw another tour group getting out of their shuttle bus in a polar bear alert zone. When we asked our guide why they, unlike us, could be out of their vehicles taking close-up photos of the murals, she said—clearly having given this speech before—that each tour operator in Churchill takes a different approach. Natural Habitat prioritizes safety. A photo is not more important than the life of a polar bear, she told us. Other groups prioritized the human experience.

This is Churchill’s conundrum. Tourists are critical to the survival of the town. “When the grain commission quit at the port, and our port jobs were all drying up, we started to put the energies into being a tourism destination,” said Dave Daley, who was once president of the Chamber of Commerce. “Tourism has saved Churchill.”

But while tourism has saved the humans of Churchill, it’s not so simple for the bears.

This is how I found myself thinking not about Last-Chance Tourism, but ethical tourism. As the tourism industry offers more opportunities for travel centered on rare and threatened wildlife, it’s only going to become more important that the kind of respect I saw in Churchill is part of the travel package. I wish it were the case that Last-Chance Tourism and ethical tourism were the same thing, but I was seeing that they are two roads nearing a point where they could merge or diverge.

As we left for another mural, I noticed something that shocked me. The other tour group had an armed guard. I heard Dave Daley’s voice in my head. “I've been here 62 years,” he’d told me, “and I've never had to kill a polar bear.”

The very next day, we left Churchill. We traded murals for the airstrip, rovers for a prop plane. As our flight rose into the sky, I watched Churchill fade into a tiny speck surrounded by vast tundra and boreal forest. From above, the idea that humans might have any kind of primacy over the bears was laughable. And given the effects of climate change, it’s clear that humans don’t exactly deserve it. Yet some scientists estimate Churchill's polar bears could be gone by 2060.

It was two more nights of travel before I could finally collapse into my bed at home in New York City, just as exhausted as I had been that first night in the arctic. I lay in bed, thinking. I’d left on a Last-Chance trip that was about me, satisfying my childhood obsession. But I’d come back with a bigger perspective. The Hudson Bay ice might be melting, Dee might be losing stuffing, and the polar bears need our help. Tourism isn’t the answer. But a trip to Churchill might be. It’s a place where people, polar bears, and tourists can coexist. And that gives me hope.