Published: Friday, March 28, 2008

Ted Rhodes, Calgary Herald

Parks Canada is poised to unveil the first government-run website to publicly track bear activity in the Canadian Rockies, a move that comes in the wake of three fatal maulings in the past three years.

The website, expected to be launched within a month, also follows in the footsteps of locally run online sites that sprung up to fill what some felt was a void of information on bear sightings.

“We’re going to try and improve the information we get to people,” said Ian Syme, Banff’s chief park warden.

A photo of Isabelle Dube, who died after an encounter with a bear, is held by her husband Heath McCroy and daughter Lea, 8. McCroy says he supports a new Parks Canada website for bear sightings. He helped set up a similar site after his wife's death.

A photo of Isabelle Dube, who died after an encounter with a bear, is held by her husband Heath McCroy and daughter Lea, 8. McCroy says he supports a new Parks Canada website for bear sightings. He helped set up a similar site after his wife’s death.

Information received from the public, biologists and Parks Canada staff will be posted on the website to warn mountain-goers about where the animals have been spotted.

It will also caution trail-users of danger areas, such as a section of the park that’s sporting a good crop of berries — a favourite staple for bears.

Heath McCroy, whose wife, Isabelle Dube, died after an encounter with a bear on a Canmore trail in 2005, said the new site should make it safer to hike and bike in the mountains.

“The more information that is gathered and given to the public, the more educated we can all be,” he said.

Parks staff are still working out the kinks, but Syme hopes the website would be updated at least weekly. It will feature information from Banff, Yoho and Kootenay national parks.

He didn’t, however, want it to give people a false sense of security.

“If they choose another trail, it does not mean there’s not going to be a bear on it,” he said.

Fatal run-ins with bears helped reveal the need for public access to bear sighting data, Syme added.

“Obviously, the Isabelle Dube death a few years ago in Canmore raised the awareness of attempting to get better information out,” he said.

Dube, 36, was jogging with two friends when they ran into a grizzly. She scrambled up a tree, but the bear chased after her and mauled the young mother, leading to her death.

She was the first person to be killed by a bear in Alberta since 1998. Since then, two more Albertans have been killed.

Robin Kochorek, a 31-year-old Calgarian, was killed by a male grizzly last July as she was mountain biking on a trail in the Panorama area near Invermere, B.C.

Don Allan Peters, 51, a father of two daughters, was mauled to death by a grizzly last November while he was hunting about 150 kilometres northwest of Calgary.

For McCroy, the deaths of his wife, Kochorek and Peters showed a need to know more about where bears might be.

That led to him and Dube’s jogging companions to launch Trailex.org, a website that tracked bear and other animal sightings based on reports from the public. It has had around 40,000 hits in less than two years.

He fully backed the Parks site, though he said it was critical there wasn’t much of a time lag between the time a sighting is reported and then posted.

He wasn’t surprised his wife’s death partly inspired the new website.

“The whole Bow Valley was really struck by the incident,” he said this week. “It was very real for the government agencies involved.”

McCroy, however, is hoping this will only be the first step.