Travels to Churchill, Manitoba to see polar bear

Rumble — As we walked across the tarmac, a bitter wind took the temperature below zero even though it was only November. Inside, our group was greeted by a woman named Deb, who shepherded us onto a red school bus to Lazy Bear Lodge, one of several outfits running tours out into polar bear country.

Driving into Churchill, I could see this was a strange place. The population is right around 900 (899 with a baby on the way, Deb said), which is less than the number of polar bears living here. Every autumn, those thousand or so bears in Wapusk National Park, hungry from lean summer months, make their way toward shore, waiting for Hudson Bay to freeze so they can light out and hunt seals. Inevitably, a few wander through Churchill’s streets, root through garbage and occasionally prey on a person. Those troublemakers are trapped and taken to Polar Bear Jail for 30 days before being flown up the coast.

Close behind come some 10,000 tourists from across the globe eager to see the bears, a symbol of climate change despite their spectacular comeback from being decimated by hunting in the 1970s. Today, there are some 25,000 worldwide, up at least 50% since then.

Being at the end of the world, Churchill has a certain apocalyptic charm: houses with boarded-up windows and peeling paint. The writer Zac Unger moved his family here for a season several years ago and wrote in his book Never Look a Polar Bear in the Eye, “The few houses in town that are not owned by the government have a fairly consistent outdoor aesthetic, a scheme that relies on rusted-out car bodies, stacks of mildewed lumber, and twisted piles of scrap metal as the lawn ornaments of choice.”