Maple Leaf Adventures, we believe that amazing travel experiences can be good for conservation, too. We celebrate the fjords, rainforests, whales, bears, seabirds and the entire food chain of the BC/Alaska coast. It is an immeasurable treasure worth exploring and protecting.
We support a number of people and organizations who are researching and conserving it – we donate money, or time, or donations in kind, and do work ourselves for conservation, too.
One of the organizations we support is Raincoast Conservation Foundation. This group of scientists, explorers and environmentalists work on many fronts to scientifically investigate this “rain-coast”, to educate the world about it, and to work with government and the public to protect it.
Raincoast has researched and documented the Great Bear Rainforest’s salmon eating wolves, as well as hundreds of salmon-bearing creeks not previously in the inventory of the government, and is also doing a long-term project to estimate the actual population of grizzly and black bears in the Great Bear Rainforest. They created baseline data of the marine mammals in the Hecate Strait – Queen Charlotte Sound – Great Bear Rainforest area (site of proposed tanker traffic), and were responsible for bringing public attention to the plight of the Great Bear in the 1990s. And a lot more. All of this work was done on a shoestring and all of it is very valuable and not done by government researchers.
Each year Raincoast publishes a summary of their programs, progress and goals, called Tracking Raincoast. It’s a small booklet well worth the read. You can contact Raincoast if you’d like to read it or support them. The booklet will be out soon.
In the meantime, here is the sponsorship page we’ve donated; the fourth one to date. Enjoy!
And to learn more about our trips that support Raincoast’s work, view Maple Leaf’s Great Bear Rainforest tour.
