Coastal Nature & Cultures in Film…

Totem: The Return of the G’psgolox Pole | Bear Man of Kamchatka | Pacific Feast

This excellenct NFB film “Totem: The Return of the G’psgolox Pole” documents the story of the Haisla’s search for a sacred totem pole that was mysteriously lost to them in 1929.

Located in the 1980s as the centerpiece at the Stockholm Museum of Ethnography, it was returned to the BC coast in 2006.

This incredible pole, erected to memorialize the dead in the late 1800s, is currently inaccessible for viewing. But we are thrilled to have been able to coordinate a tour of it for Maple Leaf Adventures guests on our Kitlope Summer and Great Bear Rainforest summer trips!

To find out more about this film, please visit NFB’s web site.

To find out how you can see it on a Maple Leaf trip, visit the Great Bear Rainforest trip page and look up the Kitlope Summer and Great Bear Rainforest Summer 1 trips.


In the late 1990s, after incredible experiences with bears in BC’s Great Bear Rainforest, Charlie Russell and partner Maureen Enns set up an experiment in living with grizzly bears in Kamchatka. This film, by exceptional nature filmmaker Jeff Turner, shows the incredible “Eden” they were able to establish.

Charlie will be leading a Great Bear Rainforest trip on the Maple Leaf this fall, in September 2011.  This clip is from the film Bear Man from Kamchatka which can be ordered directly from Charlie. (A feature-length version, Edge of Eden is also available.)


This amazing clip shows what’s going on under the water when you’re on the Maple Leaf watching hundreds of seabirds and huge humpback whales gulping up food in the sea.

BBC’s Nature’s Great Events: Pacific Feast was filmed in some of the same areas of Alaska, Haida Gwaii, Vancouver Island and the Great Bear Rainforest that we visit on the Maple Leaf .  This series aired as Nature’s Most Amazing Events in North America and Nature’s Great Events in the UK.  For more information on this excellent series, including how to buy your own DVD copy click here.