Cold War Hot Spot to Polar Bear Capital

Smack in the middle of this bear paradise lies the small outpost of humanity called Churchill. Canada's lone Arctic seaport, accessible only by air or train, it currently has roughly 900 inhabitants. But it was not always so small. Back in the 1960s, when Churchill was the site of an important NATO installation, the base (Fort Churchill) boasted a population of some 5,000. In the waning days of the Cold War, however, the facility-including its rocket range-was closed, the town's population plummeted, and the remaining residents were forced to find new employment. The answers to their dilemma, they found, were all around them, in the natural wonders that abound in their region.

One of the most dramatic was the aurora borealis, or the famed northern lights. Forming a celestial ceiling over the Churchill region through much of the winter, the lights are another tourism leg the town relies on during the other ten months of the year when it's not polar bear season. Another local spectacle is the annual congregation of beluga whales, whose sojourn into the Churchill River creates an alternate tourist attraction during Churchill's summer season.

But far and away, it's polar bears that have put Churchill back on the map. For every bear that passes through the region, there are now ten bear-watchers coming to town, filling hotels and Tundra Buggies® (large vehicles with massive tractor wheels and viewing platforms). Lying along the bears' coastal migration route to Cape Churchill, the town had to learn early on how to cope with—and then embrace—the creatures that would eventually turn their town into the "polar bear capital of the world."

It took some doing. Back in the old days, the military shot and killed the bears. Today the only thing that shoots them is a tranquilizer gun, which enables wildlife managers to detain those bears caught rummaging in the local garbage dump and then to return them to their natural habitat.

The Bears' Bon Voyage

Where the bears go, so follow their human admirers. As the bears amass around Gordon Point in October to await the great freeze-up in Hudson Bay, Churchill's Tundra Buggies® pull up and park. In early November, as the water in the bay starts turning to pre-ice sludge, the bears embark on the final leg of their terrestrial migration: the trek to Cape Churchill. Though now the centerpiece of Canada's recently created Wapusk National Park, the cape is still open to the Tundra Buggy®, whose accessibility to the site has been grandfathered into the park's legislation. The freeze-up comes fast, and the bears are literally "here today, gone tomorrow" as they find their way onto the ice islands forming around the cape. Visitors lucky enough to view this goodbye phase of the bears' migration count it as one of the most amazing wildlife spectacles ever seen.