Thompson resident Lori Walsh and a couple of coworkers had an unexpected wildlife encounter Dec. 7 when they came upon a polar bear while driving back from Gillam.
Walsh said this was only the second time she’s gone to Gillam over seven years of living in Thompson. It was a work-related trip and her two colleagues were with her because they are more familiar with the community.
The trio departed for Thompson around 8 a.m. and spotted the polar bear about 20 minutes after leaving Gillam.
“The driver actually that I was with, she spotted it and she screamed and I was in the middle seat of the backseat,” Walsh told the Thompson Citizen in a phone interview on Wednesday afternoon. “I was like, ‘What the hell is wrong?’ And then the three of us just whipped out our phones. We slowed down and just started taking pictures and videos.”
It was Walsh’s first in-person sighting of a polar bear.
“It was really cool,” she says. “I think he was observing us the same as we were observing him and then he just kind of went over the snow bank like, ‘See you later.’”
After the bear had disappeared into the bush alongside Provincial Road 280, Walsh tried to upload the video but there wasn’t any cell service. She posted it later when they got back into cell range and the views began piling up.
“By the time I go back to Thompson, I got 11,000 views and then by 2 o’clock I got 40,000 views and my phone was literally blowing up and people have been messaging me from everywhere across the world.”
Walsh jokes that she wishes she had a YouTube channel so she could have made some money off her experience but reasons that it has paid off financially regardless.
“I don’t have to pay $10,000 to go to Churchill,” she said. “I got it for free.”
Walsh says she has heard from people since posting the video that there have been polar bear tracks spotted in the area but that people hadn’t been able to get pictures or photos.
Looking back on her experience, she said the bear did not look particularly well-fed.
”He or she looked pretty thin,” she said. Recalling a recent situation where a polar bear was wandering around in Shamattawa, which is further south than she was and where polar bears have been spotted before, Walsh says she wonders if that is significant.
“Things are perhaps going on with climate change and stuff like that, where they’re starting to migrate out,” she speculated.
