Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to Yukon on the Grizzly Bear's Trail

by Karsten Heuer

Winner of the Banff Book Award for Mountain Literature, Walking the Big Wild is the account of Karsten Heuer's extraordinary 18-month journey of hiking, skiing, and paddling across 2100 miles of mountains, forests, and rivers from Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming to the Canadian Yukon.

Following wild route Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y), Heuer encounters wolves, bears, and other creatures that make use of this natural migration corridor and documents the importance of its preservation as one of the last great wilderness areas of North America.

Accompanied by occasional human companions and a remarkable border collie named Webster, Heuer faces immense challenges; storms, avalanches, floods, and grizzly bears. At the end of the journey, Heuer proves that there is nearly continuous wilderness that can support wildlife along the length of the Rockies, and is salvageable if the right decisions are made now.

Genres: Adventure, Nonfiction, Travel, Nature, Outdoors, Memoir, Animals

238 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Karsten Heuer is a wildlife biologist, park warden and author of Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bear's Trail. He has worked in Banff National Park in the Rockies, in Inuvik in Canada's far north, and in the Madikwe Game Reserve in South Africa. He is a recipient of the Wilburforce Foundation Conservation Leadership Award.

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I skim-read this for the bear parts. Those were good to read. It was also cool to find out (after randomly picking this book up from the library) that the story was focused around the author's efforts to establish a wildlife corridor from Yellowstone to the Yukon. This is the area where I will be honeymooning this summer and the Yellowstone to Yukon foundation is the charity we put on our gift registry!

[Olivia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Karsten's writing and storytelling definitely made this adventure memoir fun to read. I enjoyed how it had me thinking about the places within the y2y corridor that I inhabit or recreate in on a daily basis, and my responsibility to the land and wildlife. Getting a glimpse back at the origins of y2y through this book while currently following developments around the project 20 years later was also enriching.

[Jordan Parrott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such an amazing story of the importance of conserving a network of connected habitats through a vast area, rather than individual patches of habitat. Breath-taking depictions of the wilderness that does still exist through the maze of development. Thirlling interactions with wildlife and our relationship to them. All balanced together with the polictics of driving such an initiative.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author walked from Yellowstone to the Yukon in order to publicize and promote the Y2Y wildlife corridor initiative and also to evaluate whether there was enough wilderness to support certain wide-roaming keystone species such as the grizzly and wolverine. This account of his journey is an honest adventure story where he's not afraid to present himself as at times a person with poor judgment or other failings. I was glad to read about it but even gladder not to have experienced the many discomforts and stresses of the trip itself - it certainly killed any ambition I might have had along those lines!

[Linda Elsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing journey of hiking, skiing, canoeing, and more hiking from Yellowstone National Park to the Yukon (Y2Y). This is a project that finds corridors of wilderness for wildlife to move through. This is the story of the adventure to see first hand where this could be possible and what signs of grizzly bear, wolverine, wolves etc. are there still to be found in these remote areas. I loved it!

[Mike Dettinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

You might worry that reading about a 2100 miles trek along the Rocky Mtns from Yellowstone to the Yukon would get pretty monotonous. Karsten’s telling of this epic trip thru hundreds of miles of deep wilderness, over hundreds of passes, and traversing only 3 highways and a handful of railroad tracks (but hundreds of communities and “working lands) is real good reading and never got to monotonous, never lost interest. AND some pretty exciting encounters to boot. Recommending.

[Vanessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eminently readable, a wild adventure to follow the range of the large carnivores, seeing from the land what blockages and pinch points these animals face as they live their lives. Heuer is living the dream that few of us could follow, but brings us all with him, ranchers, hunters, coal miners, Indigenous and city folk, listening with respect while presenting his case that a wildlife corridor from Yellowstone to the Yukon was something to be supported.

[Rus Zee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspirational read for me. Although slightly flawed structurally and could have been more better. The fact this book is not perfected or the author fluent in writing in relation to capstone authors made this book what it was. It's like an adventurer talking to another adventurer. Inspirational book for me in my youth.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Heuer finds himself as a writer earlier in the text, giving a much-needed overview of conservation efforts in northern Montana, Alberta and British Columbia. However, the pacing of the narrative leads a lot to be desired. It is interesting to engage with, though would benefit from tighter wording and a consistent approach to telling the tale.

[Sally Welch · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book introduced me to the Y2Y initiative, an attempt to protect animal corridors from Yellowstone to the Yukon. Or to develop some, as in animal overpasses or underpasses on highways and major roads. Well written. Felt sometimes like I was on the journey.

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

This fun travelogue brought back good memories of bear encounters and dangerous river crossings in Alaska.

[gnarlyhiker · Rating 4 out of 5]

twenty years later we know everything has drastically changed: give a little and take a lot in the name of tourism and wherever a profit can be gained: wild life be damned!

good luck

[Irene Motion · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful inspiring

[Matt French · Rating 5 out of 5]

Entertaining writing with an exciting portion outlining the travelling. Inspiring to bring about change!

[Marion · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved Karsten Heuer’s epic hike from Yellowstone to the Yukon: the equivalent of traveling from Canada to Mexico and halfway back again, climbing 107 passes, ascending Mt Everest from base camp 20 times, in 190 travel days over 18 months in 1998/1999. My introduction to the necessity of giving animals the ability to roam thousands of miles safely without having to navigate highways, resorts, and other manmade impediments - what the Y2Y project is all about.

[Lisa Kearns · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book thinking it was the journals of someone who, with his dog and girlfriend, hiked the wild places from Yellowstone to the Yukon where the grizzly bear roams. At first I was put off by the un-relenting attack on human development and the frequent message of "save the wilderness". There are millions of acres of national parks within the United States and Canada, and many more acres of private preserves and state and local parks. I get weary of reading how awful humans are and having to apologize for breathing air and taking up space on this planet. Heuer's purpose in taking this journey was to promote the Y2Y movement - connecting parks from Yellowstone the the Yukon with wildlife friendly corridors. The title and back cover didn't give me any indication of this subject.

But upon reading more, I learned that many animals are suffering from inbreeding due to being isolated in parks too far from others of their species in other parks. Some animals, like the wolverine, are just not breeding at all if crowded by humans and limited in their preference for true wilderness. Many animals who would naturally migrate hundreds or thousands of miles are stopped by development, or killed trying to cross highways. And I think most people feel the same way about the intrusion of ATVs into the wilderness - they are loud, destructive and take all the "natural" out of hunting and camping.

I'm not sure I agree with Heuer on the subject of logging. Logging companies are careful to replant areas after harvesting, if for no other reason than to give them something to harvest in future years. I've personally hiked along old logging trails in Missouri and don't see any long term damage from the roads and even clear cut areas. Forest fires naturally clear large areas of land, which for millenia hasn't affected wildlife populations. Within a few years of a logging company pulling out (or a wildfire), wildlife, trees and bushes return and flourish. Deer and bear use the most accessible routes through the wilderness, which is sometimes a logging trail. Heuer himself commented on how the game trails were always the easiest traveling routes.

I enjoyed the journal entries and daily details of Heuer's adventure, especially his descriptions of animal encounters and the beauty of the areas he traversed. I also enjoyed reading about Webster, his dog.

After finishing the book, I agree that North America should set aside areas to act as corridors between parks, so wildlife can migrate naturally and add diversity to their genes.

Overall this is a well written, informative and interesting book on a subject I hadn't considered fully before. I hope that the Y2Y movement continues to grow, to preserve not only the wilderness areas for the future, but also the many animals who live in them. I just hope that while we limit development in wildlife areas, we don't make areas off limits to man.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Y2Y, if you're not eco-minded, is "Yellowstone to Yukon." The idea behind is that large animals, above all grizzlies, need a lot of room to roam -- and this room needs to be adequately networked and connected, with as few human-disturbed chokepoints as possible.

Well, Karsten Heuer, a native of Canmore, Alberta, and a former Parks Canada ranger at Banff, decided to hike all the way from Yellowstone National Park to the British Columbia-Yukon border -- more than 2,000 kilometers/1,200 miles, and involving skiing and canoeing, not just hiking. Breaks in the trip were jam-packed with PR work on both sies of the border.

This book is about his trip. It's also about some of the problems the development of Y2Y corridor would face.

Surprising for many from the American side of the border (and contrary to one brief reviewer, this is about preserving ALL the Rockies, not just the American portion of those mountains) overall, more of the problems are probably on the Canadian side of the border. And that's in spite of the often anti-environmental leadership that currently resides in Washington, D.C.

Both exploratory oil drilling and coal mining crowd closer to the heart of the Rockies north of the border. Logging in the north involves more rapacious cutting, often clear-cutting in places it wouldn't be allowed in the U.S.

What's driving this is Canada's governmental structure, which is even more "provincial rights" in *reality*, in many ways, than the U.S.'s is "states rights" in *hyperbole.* And the Alberta and B.C. provincial governments have generally been as knee-jerk pro-development as California's anti-environmental Congressman Richard Pombo -- and in a position to do more with that.

Read this book, complete with stunning photos, to show why Y2Y needs preserving.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally! A through-hiker's story that doesn't involve an emotionally disturbed, thoroughly unprepared hiker. Instead, this one revolves around a mission: to see whether there is enough connected habitat to support grizzlies and the other mammals that need long connected spaces in order to support genetic diversity.

Wildlife biologist Karesten Heuer undertook a 3400 kilometre hike from Yellowstone in Wyoming to Watson Lake in the Yukon as a means to do research for and generate publicity for the Y2Y or "Yellowstone to the Yukon" movement. Y2Y is an effort to define how much habitat the animals need, what passages they use, and protect it.

Yes, he has some harrowing experiences, but his story is actually a faster and easier read than either Cheryl Strayed's "Wild" or Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods", and he has much more interesting encounters with animals.

It was also fun reading about his adventures near places I have been, like Banff National Park, Waterton Lakes, Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks, and the Bridger Mountains, although it was sad that he repeatedly pointed out my beloved Bozeman as one of the places with too much urban sprawl that is jeopardizing the movement of animals.

Heuer claimed in 2002 that "not since the 1960s, not since the last one was hunted down and killed, had anyone seen one of the great bears" in the Bridger Range, and there are unsubstantiated reports of a wolf passing through. Well, I've seen what we believe were wolf tracks in the Bridgers in 2014 and have heard several unsubstantiated reports of grizzlies in the Bridgers, so there's still hope!

[Foster · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was a lot more to this book than I expected: equal parts discussion of conservation policy, adventure tale, and coming of age romance. Yes, romance - as in the human sexual relations kind.

Romance:
I can see now why he chose to begin the book with a weird description of starting the walk with his recently estranged girlfriend. Not something I would've done, but it does add intrigue and anticipation to the latter half of the book.

Policy:
I originally picked this up to get some background on the Patagonia-endorsed "Freedom to Roam" campaign (the title is listed on Patagonia's website). This book is a good account of the genesis of one part of that effort, establishing a wildlife corridor between Yellowstone and the Yukon. There were some surprisingly impressive statistics: 85% of the route had recent grizzly sign, and he only crossed a handful of roads and railways. He certainly made it seem that the corridor is a practical possibility.

Adventure:
Heuer has the rare ability to write descriptively enough to allow you to create a nice picture in your mind of the land he is travelling through, without being long-winded. He encountered many life-threatening situations (and was actually pretty lucky to make it), so there's plenty of thrills. That said, he is surprisingly modest about it all - and often downplays the achievement of having travelled such a long distance. There were some memorable sections he crossed, and I certainly hope to make it to the Fraser River valley sometime.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up in the library because I like to read travel books about the North. This was about a ranger who wanted to walk from Yellowstone to the Yukon to attract attention to the Y2Y project: a movement to try to link wilderness corridors between National Parks and Preserves in the Northern Rockies so that large animals can have room to migrate. It took me a long time to get through the book because it is non-fiction and I wasn't drawn to wanting to read it, but every time I force myself to pick it up I found that I was re-interested in his adventure and project. It had some interesting ideas about conservation that were new to me and I also enjoyed some of the human elements that went into his hike. There were a couple hair-raising bear encounters as well.

[James Christensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Walking the Big Wild : from Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bears' Trail by Heuer, Karsten (non-fiction) '08

A fascinating story of endurance, planning, courage (the bear encounters are incredibly instructive and frightening), and concern for the environment. Well rounded perspective: reveals an understanding of farmers, ranchers and developers, yet details realistic means of saving the wildlife by creating corridors of connection between wildlife reserves. His personal life is nothing to emulate, but his intentions and achievements are very admirable.

[Terri Kempton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating account of a 2,200 mile trek - on foot, skis, and canoe - from Yellowstone to the Yukon in an effort to see first-hand the wildlife habitat and corridors for creating more connected protected areas. Packed with animal info for conservation biology geeks, but balanced with plenty of action as the author experiences avalanches, raging rivers, bear encounters, and the temperamental landscape of love.

[Karin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating read about the area spaning from Yellowstone National park to the Yukon. The conditions both wild and not so wild that exsist in this area present unique challenges for wildlife to continue to thrive in the area. It is an adventure book that I love to immerse myself in; reading about the adventures that sound so awe inspiring but I would never have the courage to actual set out on!

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Walking the Big Wild, Heuer hikes, paddles, skis through 2,200 miles of land in Y2Y, Yellowstone to the Yukon, moving through the land as a bear, moose, wolf might try to migrate. Doing presentations along the way in an effort to prove that wildlife need corridors uninhibited from roads, pipelines, etc. to migrate and to survive whether those corridors are manmade tunnels or natural, they are still needed. Fascinating book!

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title says it all... the author walks (and skis), mostly with his trusty pooch companion, from Yellowstone to the Yukon to see how highways, logging roads, and sprawl are affecting the "wildlife corridors" essential for the survival of large land animals, like the grizzly.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, quick, worthwhile read. While I didn't really love the writing style - it was fairly simplistic and not all that engaging - I found the content very interesting, a good balance of hiking/ adventure stories and wildlife facts.

[Doug Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book by Karsten Heuer. It's both a call to preserve a unique corridor of western habitat (Y2Y - Yellowstone to Yukon) and an adventure story in itself.

[Tonya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not just another "find myself in the wild" memoir. This is Truth. In hiking boots.

[Kathleen McRae · Rating 4 out of 5]

there were times in this book when I felt as though I were hiking those ridgebacks too and that makes this a good book

[Dree · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love long distance hiking books, this one is actually fairly disappointing.