When we met in 2010, our first shared journey into the wilds of Canada’s Rocky Mountains was centred around our passions for photography and nature, but we never imagined that the trip would be the beginning of something far greater. During the following six summers, we gave up city life and embraced months of living in a tent to document the stories of the animals we encountered and the landscapes we were immersed in, bringing them to life off the sides of our of desks through Ghost Bear Photography.

As the years went by, it was increasingly hard to detach our passion project from our daily lives – and not only because we derived so much joy from sharing our tales. We also started to encounter issues affecting the people, animals and places we love and with our backgrounds in education (Jill) and advocacy (Simon), we couldn’t resist trying to do our small part. Be it our views on the management of our parks or our wildlife; whether it was the discourse surrounding the fate of grizzly bears Blaze, Scarface, 148 or the orphaned black bears in Banff, we tried to make a difference where we could, as imperfect as it was. Yet, for every action we took, we ultimately knew our efforts were unsustainable – as was Ghost Bear Photography – for we weren’t tackling the root of the problem.

2016 was an unquestionably hard year, where much changed without us having a say in the matter. That’s life. But the byproduct was a move from Toronto to Calgary and a chance to spend more time in Canada’s mountain parks. And it was during one of our trips we began to reevaluate our lives, reaching a critical decision. Jill would not return to the classroom and Simon would start his post-Spirit Bear Youth Coalition journey in a very different way than he intended. We elected to re-invent Ghost Bear and launch a new signature project that combines what we love with the chance to make system-level change, the heart of the issues we feel we can address.