Connecting corridors from Y2Y: inspired hikers are promoting the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative, a proposed buffer zone that would permit the movement of wildlife across vast spaces while coexisting with man.

• Author: Gillis, Alex

Right from the start, Josh Burnim felt he wasn't wanted. The twenty nine year-old student was in the wildest part of Idaho--in the Rocky Mountains--and the animals he met seemed intent on either bullying him out of their territory or eating him altogether. This became clear on the fifth leg of Burnim's hike, when he and a friend inadvertently sat in a lush meadow filled with juicy shoots, towards which a black bear was lumbering. That the men were finishing dinner was significant, as was the fag that the hungry animal was the largest black bear they'd ever seen--and that it was running downhill right at them.

Meeting a bear wasn't necessarily a bad thing. After all, this was bear country, and one of Burnim's purposes out here was to encounter wildlife. He was in the middle of a live-month trek through the Western Cordillera, promoting Y2Y, the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, a Canadian-based network of 160 organizations in North America. The group, which includes the U.S. Humane Society, the Sierra Club, and World Wildlife Fund Canada, wants to create a continent-long, buffer zone for bear, wolf, caribou, and other large mammals.

According to the network, which opened its head office in 1997 in Canmore, Alberta, Canada, "The Rocky Mountains are home to the largest collection of land-dwelling carnivores in the world." These mountains are also the birthplace of national park systems in both Canada and the United States. Y2Y wants to ensure that those carnivores can migrate through 468,000 square miles, an area that encompasses towns and cities. This means that the carnivores have to migrate around the humans.

Burnim had been inspired by another hiker, Canadian wildlife biologist Karsten Heuer, who trekked the entire Y2Y in 1998 and 1999--a 2,127-mile hike. Heuer's long and danger-filled trek generated a lot of media coverage. He and Burnim have been championing this message: While towns grow and industries extract resources, animals have rights as well, to thrive in a wilderness that's not being destroyed. The point of Y2Y is to help humans coexist with other, larger mammals, which need vast areas, not just isolated parks, in which to roam.

Of course, coexisting with a black bear two hundred yards away is not part of the plan. It's terrifying. Burnim was a graduate student in environmental studies at the University of Montana, so he knew that killing the beast was not an option. He didn't even carry a gun.

Burnim's goal was to...