A day trip adventure to a Rocky Mountain glacier last month turned Tyler Wall into something of a seasoned wildlife photographer after it led to an encounter with a huge grizzly bear.
“We did our little tour, and then we were coming home,” Wall told The Epoch Times, speaking of the first getaway he and his girlfriend took to the Columbia Icefield, northwest of Banff.
Wall moved to the mountain town during the pandemic as a way of embracing Alberta’s more laid-back lockdown laws. He loves photographing landscapes too. Offering natural beauty and hospitality jobs, Banff was a choice destination, he said.
Avoiding the crowds of tourists along Banff Avenue, saying “it feels like an amusement park,” Wall has taken to visiting idyllic pastoral settings like Lake Louise. On this particular day in May, he had his first grizzly bear sighting in the woods while driving back to Banff from the icefield glacier.
“We saw a car pulled over with its hazards [flashing],” Wall said.
He realized the car had pulled over for a reason—a grizzly bear—and recognized the opportunity it presented since he had his camera with him. He guessed the grizzly wasn’t long out of hibernation. It was probably hungry and searching for berries when it found this large grass clearing by the roadside.
“Luckily from inside my car I had my 25–150 millimetre zoom lens,” Wall said.
As he swung a U-turn back and parked, the other car pulled out and drove off, leaving them alone with the grizzly. Wall had seen other bears, but only as brown blurs beside the highway as he drove by. This grizzly was a first.
The bear wasn’t far off, some 15 metres away from them. Thinking it irresponsible to venture out and disturb this pristine scene, Wall took photos from his car. He says he saw no signs of aggression from the bear, but it definitely noticed them and looked over several times. The grizzly was enormous—might have weighed a ton. Paying them no mind, it seemed healthy and relaxed, Wall said, lying in the grass, just chilling with them.
“This time was really special, because not only was the bear just kind of hanging out, but it decided to sit down, scratch itself here, lay there, and just pose for me in a funny enough way,” he said.
He snapped a dozen photos at least. They speak for themselves, and really got him noticed once he posted them on social media.
Before moving to Banff, Wall had majored in film studies at Ontario’s York University while living in Toronto. Still photography only grabbed his interest when the COVID pandemic hit, because, he says, there wasn’t much else to do in Ontario at that time. He soon bought a Canon T3. He travelled to photograph nature, then he moved out west.
“I want to be outside. I want to explore,” he said. “I want to adventure and then take shots of maybe views that people can’t see every day.”
Before his grizzly encounter, he'd been to the stunning rock arches of Bryce Canyon in Zion Park, Utah, to take landscapes. Now that his grizzly encounter has attracted more attention, he says he is considering doing more wildlife.
“When I put the pictures out there, the grizzly, I’ve had the best, or the most, reactions, I would say, from it,” he said. “I’ve never had this much activity from pictures before, so it does make me think: I do need to get out there and try to get more wildlife.”
“When I get this amount of feedback, it’s like I’m doing a good job,” he added.
He says the grizzly takes the cake for the “coolest” and most “astonishing” animal he’s ever seen, though he’s leery of the challenges scouting them presents in the wild. “It is very much a right-place, right-time scenario.”
