Josh Caspers and Carolyn Hanson on their Arctic Discovery at Nanuk Polar Bear Lodge.
(Photos courtesy of guests Josh Caspers and Carolyn Hanson)
Josh Caspers has a rule about tattoos. He only gets them for places that mark him. A Balinese dragon after Bali. A revolutionary artist’s work after a meditation retreat in Mexico. He has not travelled much in his life, so the list is short and it means something.
Churchill Wild made the list.
“You could say Churchill Wild left a mark on me,” he said.
He loved the Churchill Wild logo, so he had it inked on. Not for everybody, he admits, but…
“I want to find another way to get back up there,” he said. “It was just pretty amazing.”
Josh’s Churchill Wild tattoo.
That’s where this starts, with a man who put the place on his body. Here’s why.
Carolyn Hanson did not set out to take a wildlife trip. She set out to see polar bears before they were gone.
She had been thinking about it for a while. Climate change was real to her, and so was the math. If the bears were going to disappear, she wanted her family to stand in front of one first. An African safari was the other dream, but the logistics never worked. So she went looking, found Churchill Wild, and booked the Arctic Discovery for August of 2025. Then she surprised her partner, Josh Caspers, and her two sons, David and John, with the trip.
“This is too good to be true,” she remembers thinking when the company first came up in her search.
It was better than that.
The Middle of Nowhere
A bear from the air at Nanuk. In the middle of nowhere.
Josh runs a small remodelling business, CaspersBuilt.com, in East Seattle. He works on old houses, mostly 1920s, the kind that need someone who cares. He grew up working hard on the Oregon coast, single mom, four kids, the whole story. A trip like this was never something he pictured for himself.
He felt it the moment the Cessna touched down at Nanuk Polar Bear Lodge.
“All of a sudden you’re like, wait a minute, we’re nowhere,” Josh said. “It made me feel like this little speck on this planet. No one can reach us. Phone’s on airplane mode.”
He tried not to log on once the whole trip. The lodge offered Wi-Fi. He left it alone.
Mike Reimer, who founded Churchill Wild with his wife Jeanne, has a word for what Nanuk does to people. He calls it the Nanuk magic. It pulls the toxins out of you. Josh did not have a word for it. He just knew it was happening.
Hundreds of Belugas
Carolyn heading out to kayak with the beluga whales in Churchill.
Before the bears, there were the beluga whales.
The morning after they arrived in Churchill, the family went out on the water. They did it over two days, boats one day and kayaks the next, under a clear sunny sky. The belugas came in by the hundreds.
“You can’t touch them, but you could have,” Josh said. “They were that close.” Carolyn was paddling her kayak backwards, and a line of belugas was following her, drawn along behind the boat like she was leading a parade. It was just incredible.
They loved the whales. The little smiles on the side of their faces. They could have watched them all day.
Breakfast with Mike
Northern lights in Churchill above the Blueberry Inn.
It started before the lodge, at the Blueberry Inn in Churchill. Josh had read the family’s history. He had Churchill Wild’s 25th anniversary book at home on his coffee table and had gone through it twice. So when Mike Reimer walked into the Blueberry Inn, Josh went over to introduce himself.
“I just wanted to say your story is amazing,” Josh told him. “It’s so great that you’ve created such an established business. Thank you for developing this thing, because it’s such a cool experience.”
Mike asked his name. Josh told him.
“Hey, you know what? You’re Josh? Okay, well, give me one second and I’ll come have breakfast with you,” Mike said.
He came over and sat down on a couch with Josh, and the two of them talked for what felt like twenty minutes.
“He had all these other things to be doing, but he took the time to sit with me and just talk, face to face,” Josh said. “It was really neat.”
What struck Josh was not just the time. It was the man.
“Such a personable, authentic guy. Just a great smile,” he said. “He’s busy, and it was just really cool. We ate together. I found that to be very wow.”
Mike Reimer has been doing that since 1993, when Churchill Wild had one guest. It was one of his trademarks then, and still is.
The First Bear
Bear on the move at Nanuk.
Walking with polar bears is Churchill Wild’s signature. But the area around Nanuk is vast, so getting out to the bears sometimes takes an ATV journey first, and that week the group went out on ATVs pulling trailers. Josh loved it. Carolyn loved it more.
They were a few miles out when guide Norm Gregoire stopped the line and got quiet. He raised his glass and scanned the horizon.
“I think we’ve got one over here,” he said.
Through the binoculars it was a little white blur. They drove closer, got out, and formed a single file line to walk in. The blur started moving towards them. Then it became two blurs.
A Mother and Cub of the Year
Mom and cub relaxing on a beach ridge at Nanuk. Carolyn Hanson photo.
Gregoire thought the mother had likely lost a second cub, since they usually have two. That hit hard. Josh and Carolyn both had tears in their eyes as the bears came within a hundred yards, the government limit, two animals covering an astonishing amount of ground in the open.
“It just took our hearts,” Josh said.
It was the first wild polar bear either of them had ever seen. There would be many more that week, plus a black bear with cubs near the lodge, a lone black wolf, a red fox down by the creek, and caribou and moose from the air. But the first encounter with the mother and the cub, was the one they will carry with them forever.
“We ended up seeing, I think it was like nine to 12 polar bears that week,” Josh said. They watched others hundreds of yards off the lodge through a telescope, and saw bears swimming through Hudson Bay. “It just showed you how strong they are,” he said. “They can cover so much area.” On the tundra he knelt and put his hand inside a paw print. “Holy cow,” he said. “They’re just huge.” By the end of the week the family came away, in his words, “completely blown away by the quality of how we were taken care of, and the amount of wildlife we saw.”
What the Broken Branch Meant
The bears kept coming. At a hundred yards, one of the guides snapped a branch. The sound turned the animals, and they walked off the other way. Carolyn’s first reaction was irritation. She could not believe someone had spoiled the moment.
Then she understood.
“I realized, oh, that was for their safety,” she said.
That was the lesson she took home more than any other. The guides were not protecting the guests from the bears. They were protecting the bears from the guests. Every decision out there bent towards the animals.
It showed again on the sand spit. The group had driven out, and a mother and cub crossed in behind them, cutting off the way back. So the guides made lunch and waited. When it was finally time to leave and the bears still had not moved, the whole group gathered their gear in silence and crept to the ATVs, low and slow, the way you would approach any animal you did not want to disturb.
“One engine started, and maybe Mom’s eye opened, and then one of us goes,” Carolyn said. “Trying to not take up the space that would alarm them and waste their precious energy.”
The Bear Behaviour Nobody Could Explain
Selfcare for Mom.
Carolyn saw something that stumped the whole group. The mother kept returning to her own underside, licking, and tending the area around her teats, again and again.
The first day they thought she was sore. The next day she was still at it. The whole cohort stood there scratching their heads, guests and guides alike, and nobody could say for certain what they were watching. Maybe the lost cub had left her engorged. Maybe it was something else. The not knowing was part of it.
Terry Elliott was with them that week. He has guided at Churchill Wild since 2008, after years guiding grizzlies, and there may be no more knowledgeable polar bear guide in the world. Carolyn, who follows the conservation photographer Paul Nicklen, asked Terry on a long shot whether he knew him.
He did. They both live on Vancouver Island.
“Holy cow,” is roughly how Carolyn took that news.
The Fourth Guide
Josh grew up around elk and black bears on the coast, so he never felt scared out there. He felt useful. He kept his binoculars up and started spotting wildlife before the staff did. A fox. A polar bear. Another one. By the end of the week the guides had a name for him.
The fourth guide.
Norm asked him, more than half serious, whether he would ever think about coming to work at the lodge. Josh asked Carolyn the same question that night. What would it be like to come back and guide for a season?
“I didn’t want to leave,” he said. “To think that this is how some people live their lives. Wow, what a life.”
The Boys
The boys (and girl) at Nanuk. David on the front left, Alex on the front right, Shannon on the back left, John on the back right.
Josh was nervous about bringing David and John, 21 and 24, at the time. Like a lot of young people, they live close to their screens, and the lodge sits in the middle of nowhere.
He need not have worried.
“They bought in,” he said. “They were all go from the time we woke up. Out searching for things with their binoculars.”
Another family on the trip had kids close to the boys’ ages, and they bonded fast over cards at night. Sixteen guests filled the lodge that week, from New York and London and Toronto, and the staff mixed up the dinner tables every night, so nobody talked to the same people twice.
One night it went further. Josh has practised hot yoga for eight years, and a couple from London were curious about it. There were mats at the lodge. So, at ten o’clock, in the lounge in front of the fireplace, six guests rolled out mats with soft music playing on a little speaker. The husband, a stout old glazier who had spent his life in construction like Josh, folded himself into the poses while his wife laughed.
“It was just a great time,” Josh said.
When the Tide Came In
On one safari heading east, the tide came in faster than anyone expected and stranded the group on the far side of a river. The water was too high to cross.
They made the best of it. They pulled the ATVs into a circle, the way a wagon train used to, gathered twigs for a fire, and broke out coffee, hot chocolate, and snacks. The wind blew sideways. Nobody minded. Kids included, the whole group hunkered down and enjoyed it until the tide dropped and they could pick their way back through the rutted creek trails.
A trip like this never goes exactly to plan. That is the point.
Every Sense
“It touched every sense.” ~ Carolyn watching mom and cub from a beach ridge at Nanuk.
When asked to describe her trip, Carolyn did not reach for the easy words.
“It was the most overwhelming, glorious adventure,” she said. “To experience powerful nature with incredible, heartful guides, all along with a cohort. It is beyond moving.”
She nearly cried saying it. Josh said so aloud.
Carolyn has friends in their eighties headed up to Nanuk this summer. It’s their lifelong dream. She has already decided on her own next trips, the coastal wolves, and the grizzlies. Josh wants to come back to Nanuk. When asked for a one-sentence description of the trip, he said, “It’s just a once-in-a-lifetime experience. You can’t do this anywhere else.”
The trip did not end when they flew home. Carolyn teaches, and she took the knowledge and the pictures she gathered up north into a kindergarten class at her school. “That was super cool,” she said.
Earlier in our conversation, Carolyn had summed it up another way. “It touched every sense,” she said. “Every sense that you have, including your heart and your brain. And the value that all life has on this planet.”
When asked what she would tell someone thinking about going on an Arctic Discovery safari, she did not hesitate.
“Hurry up,” she said.
