Sharing the Valley: How Canmore and Banff Learned to Live With Grizzly Bears

Scott Renyard

November 9, 2026

AI-assisted article

A town where bears walk the neighbourhood

Imagine living in a place where a grizzly bear might wander past the school, cross the golf course, or amble along the trail behind your house. For the people of Alberta’s Bow Valley — the mountain corridor that holds the towns of Canmore and Banff — that is not a hypothetical. It is daily life.

Living With Wildlife, a 23-minute documentary by Canmore filmmaker Leanne Allison, opens with a striking claim: the Bow Valley is the busiest place in the world where people and grizzly bears still coexist. The film, released in 2017 and now streaming on The Green Channel, tells the story of how that coexistence was built — not by accident, and not by keeping bears and people apart, but by two decades of deliberate, practical work by an entire community.

What makes the film worth watching is that it is not really about bears. It is about a town deciding, collectively, to change its habits.

Small changes, repeated thousands of times

The first lesson of the film is that coexistence is mostly unglamorous. There is no single heroic intervention. Instead, there is a long list of small, stubborn changes to how a town runs.

Canmore introduced bear-proof garbage bins, so a bear passing through town finds nothing worth stopping for. A bylaw governs bird feeders, which can be an easy meal for a hungry bear in spring. Fruit trees — a classic attractant — were gradually replaced with trees that only flower. Food sources were removed from town, one yard and one bin at a time.

None of these measures is dramatic on its own. Together, they add up to a simple principle: a bear that never finds food in town has no reason to stay in town. And a bear that stays out of town is a bear that lives.

That logic runs through everything the film shows. The people featured — wildlife experts like Jay Honeyman, Mike Gibeau and renowned bear researcher Stephen Herrero, alongside volunteers and Canmore kids — are not presented as heroes. They are neighbours doing maintenance work: picking up attractants, teaching newcomers, and keeping the system running year after year.

Teaching a town that keeps changing

One of the hardest problems the film identifies is turnover. Canmore and Banff are resort towns. Staff arrive for a season, visitors pass through by the millions, and new residents move in every year. Every one of them needs to learn the same rules: store your garbage properly, keep your distance, carry bear spray on the trails, and never feed wildlife.

That is where WildSmart comes in. The community-based program, which works with Alberta Forestry and Parks, the Towns of Canmore and Banff, and the Municipal District of Bighorn, runs training for kids and adults alike. Its job is essentially education at scale — making sure the knowledge built up over twenty years does not walk out the door every time someone moves away.

The film shows children learning about bears in school and volunteers helping neighbours bear-proof their properties. The message is that coexistence is a skill, and like any skill it has to be taught, practised, and passed on. A town that forgets the rules for even one season can undo years of work.

A highway that stopped being a wall

The second half of the story is about the Trans-Canada Highway, which runs straight through the valley and, for decades, cut it in two. When the highway was widened to four lanes, vehicle collisions with wildlife became a serious problem. Fencing kept animals off the road, but it also trapped them on one side — splitting populations and cutting off the movement corridors animals need to find food and mates.

The answer, pioneered in Banff National Park, was to build crossings instead of just barriers. The first two vegetated wildlife overpasses went up in 1996, landscaped with soil, rocks and native plants so they look and feel like continuous forest. Underpasses were added for species that prefer a sheltered route. Today there are six overpasses and 38 underpasses along 82 kilometres of highway, paired with fencing that guides animals toward them.

The results are striking. The film reports that the crossings and fencing have reduced wildlife deaths from highway collisions by 80 percent. Independent reporting backs that up: the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative notes that collisions with wildlife have fallen by 80 percent overall, and by 96 percent for elk and deer, while researchers have recorded more than 200,000 safe animal crossings. A 2014 study led by Montana State University researcher Michael Sawaya used hair samples to confirm that grizzly and black bears were actually using the crossings to reach mates on the other side of the highway, keeping the populations genetically connected.

It is the world’s longest-running wildlife crossing monitoring program, and the model has since been copied around the world. The film closes by describing the Bow Valley as a world leader in bear-proof waste management and the model for highway crossing structures globally — a claim the record supports.

The people behind the playbook

What gives Living With Wildlife its warmth is that it never lets the infrastructure overshadow the people. Directed and produced by Allison, with camera and editing by Mike Quigley, the film is built from conversations with the residents, scientists, and volunteers who did the work — people like Karsten Heuer, Andreas Comeau, Pat and Ann Kamenka, and Jon Jorgensen, along with what the credits affectionately call “a whole bunch of cool Canmore kids.”

The film was an official selection at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival in 2017, was featured on the National Geographic Short Film Showcase in 2018, and has since been translated into Italian, Mandarin and Korean — a sign that the Bow Valley’s story travels well beyond the Rockies.

Groups including WildSmart, the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, and the municipalities of Canmore and Banff have used the film to help educate new staff, visitors and residents. In that sense, the documentary has become part of the very system it describes: another tool for teaching a changing town how to live with its wild neighbours.

What other towns can take from the Bow Valley

The Bow Valley’s story matters because its problem is becoming everyone’s problem. As towns expand into wild country and wildlife adapts to living near people, conflicts over bears, coyotes, deer and other animals are rising across North America. Most communities facing that challenge start from scratch, debating the same questions Canmore debated twenty years ago.

Living With Wildlife offers those towns a tested playbook, and its lessons are refreshingly practical:

Remove the reward. If animals find no food in town, they have no reason to linger there. Bear-proof bins, feeder rules and fruit-tree policies are cheap compared with the cost of a conflict.
Teach constantly. Newcomers and visitors arrive every year. Education is not a one-time campaign; it is permanent infrastructure, like the bins themselves.
Build for movement, not just barriers. Fences alone divide habitat. Crossings and corridors let animals move safely, which protects both wildlife and drivers.
Measure what you do. Decades of monitoring — from remote cameras to genetic sampling — proved the crossings worked and gave other regions the evidence to copy them.

None of this requires a town to choose between people and wildlife. The Bow Valley’s achievement, as the film presents it, is that it refused that choice — and did the patient work of making both possible in the same valley.

Why this short film earns its 23 minutes

Living With Wildlife is a modest film: short, local, and focused on bins, bylaws and bridges rather than sweeping wilderness. That modesty is the point. Coexistence, it turns out, is not a philosophy. It is a maintenance schedule — one that a community in the Canadian Rockies has kept, season after season, for more than twenty years.

For anyone who lives near wildlife, visits the mountains, or simply wonders what it takes for people and grizzlies to share a valley, it is 23 minutes well spent. And for towns facing the same question, it is something rarer: proof that the answer already exists, and that it works.

Living With Wildlife (2017, 23 minutes), directed and produced by Leanne Allison, is streaming now on The Green Channel. Allison’s Highway Wilding, which looks closer at the highway crossings, and her wolverine film Chasing a Trace are also available on the platform.

Watch on The Green Channel

Sources

This article was written with the help of AI and submitted through The Green Channel’s AI Publishing programme. Please check the sources listed above.