SIPPING COFFEE IN the morning’s quiet, looking south from the top of a Canning River bluff at the boundary of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, I noticed a white blob on the bench below, muscling toward our camp. I did not believe my eyes. A polar bear! The clients I was guiding, when I alerted them, popped from their nylon cocoons like ground squirrels from their burrows — one clad in boxer shorts and a down jacket.

We stood and watched the bear sniff and root around. Some 30 miles from the Beaufort Sea coast, this was unlikely territory for the marine mammal. To the carnivore (the largest on land), which prefers to dine on seals, ground squirrels, foxes, or birds, could have been the only morsels of interest there. As mere flashes in its metabolic pan, these critters would never provide enough calories for this blubber-burning powerhouse. The bear’s wedge head swung on its pendulous neck, snakelike, gauging god-knows-what. Radiant against willows and heather, the bear looked as displaced as it would have in a zoo.

The previous year, 2010, sea ice — a haul-out for seals, hunting base for the bears, and snowmachine highway for the Inupiat — had shrunk to the third-lowest extent ever. This melting of what Canadian novelist Murray Lee calls “a crucial piece of traditional Arctic infrastructure,” further endangers wild animals already pushed to the brink by development.

Hunger or curiosity could have driven the bear this far inland. It appeared healthy and fat. But in preparation for the winter, it needed to grub for 12,000 calories every day, five times the amount people who aren’t Olympian swimmers or cyclists need. On the bear’s inland meal plan, that meant almost 40 quarts of blueberries, or six ground squirrels, notoriously hard to dig up.

While we all had read about the effects of global meltdown on the bears listed as federally endangered in 2008, seeing this stranded one drove home the stark message.

I ONLY FOUND OUT after the trip that our sighting qualified as the farthest inland sighting of Ursus maritimus inside the Arctic Refuge. The farthest overall excursion on record for an Alaska polar bear, took place in the spring of 2008 — the year sea ice was at its second-lowest ever. A Gwich’in hunter killed this wanderer near Fort Yukon, 250 miles south of the Beaufort Sea coast. Normally at that time of year the animals would have been ambushing seals on the ice, but their hunting platform had been declining drastically since the early 2000s .

In 2011, a scientific study reported another polar bear marathon feat. A GPS-collared female with her yearling cub had churned 426 miles across the Beaufort Sea, from east of Barrow to near the Canadian border. In search of an ice floe on which to rest, she spent nine days straight in water barely above the freezing temperature. Her cub did not survive.

As far as northern species and their behavior go, we now should expect the unexpected.

In January 2023, in the first fatal polar bear attack in Alaska in three decades, an older male killed a young mother and her baby boy right outside the school in Wales, an Inupiaq village at the tip of the Seward Peninsula, the southern margin of their range. The bear was described as being in “poor physical condition.”

A climate connection may be hard to prove in some of these cases. Clearly, though, as far as northern species and their behavior go, we now should expect the unexpected. And not just in the Arctic where species are struggling to survive.

I also have hung out with the likely-doomed in the other landscape that tugs at my heartstrings: the desert Southwest. As an instructor of a Grand Canyon Youth science trip in 2011, the same year I saw the bear, I caught, measured, and tagged humpback chubs in the company of rambunctious tweens, strangers to each other, who by trip’s end had become steadfast friends. The federal government at the time had the fish listed as endangered. Now, it has been reclassified as “threatened.”

Of the humpback chub, the fish with an eponymous submarine bulge, only six populations remain in the wild. The largest of these, numbering fewer than 10,000 individuals, now lives and spawns near the mouth of the Little Colorado in the terraced depths of the canyon. Each humpy is said to be worth a million dollars, the amount spent on research and their protection.

The humpback chub’s decline traces back to the completion of Glen Canyon Dam in 1963, after which the frigid Colorado River waters that jet from its spillways were stocked with trout. These trout in the main stem are a threat to the canyon’s native fish species — humpback chubs, flannelmouth suckers, and bluehead suckers. They compete for food and prey on the young of rare, protected species. The dam also altered the chubs’ habitat. Before it was built, unregulated highwater inundated the river’s dry side channels and depressions, forming backwaters in which juvenile chubs and other native fish hatched and matured. The water was slightly warmer in those lagoons, and they shielded fry from adjacent strong currents. Those channels and lagoons now lie dried out during the crucial months.

The wealth squandered is hard to grasp. Two men in a 1911 photo pose near Bright Angel Creek with a string of pale-bellied two-pounder chubs whose worth today would equal a lottery jackpot. Ben Beamer, who prospected from a stone cabin under a Tapeats Sandstone ledge overlooking his ten-acre “ranch” at the mouth of the Little Colorado in the early 1890s, in the springtime saw hunchbacked fish “so thick that you can lean over the water’s edge and pull them out by the tail two at a time.”

AS RIVER SOUNDS WILL, the Canning’s monologue that day had made me pensive while we watched the bear sleep. In my 52 years on the planet, much of them spent in the backcountry, I had never seen a federally endangered species. That summer, I had crossed paths with two: the passels of humpback chubs and then the polar bear. Did my odds simply increase as more animals ended up on that shameful list? Or had I, on some subconscious level, sought out the rare and the blighted before they could disappear?

Had I, myself, moving between Alaska and Utah, become an accidental extinction tourist? If so, was I doing enough to protect these wild places?

I know that each time this Arctic refuge plays big in the media — which always occurs when yet another attack on it has been launched by industry — more people will come. Many with whom I speak confess that they want to visit this place while there is time. This market, booming in the Anthropocene, is known as “extinction tourism.” Had I, myself, moving between Alaska and Utah, become an accidental extinction tourist? If so, was I doing enough to protect these wild places?

Though they’re havens for wildlife, we humans need these refuges just as badly. What, though, does it say about us as a species, or a country, if we cannot guarantee the integrity of enclaves we’ve set aside, not even for the duration of one person’s lifetime?

With Trump back in office, I’ve spent more time pondering these questions — and lamenting the ways in which his administration seems to be driving all manner of wildlife closer to extinction.

On his first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order targeting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and Alaska more broadly, for additional drilling and development. Elsewhere too, public lands until now spared, may soon be up for grabs by corporations. Funding has been cut for agencies that safeguard our wild spaces, and federal science staff is being fired by the thousands, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, to the National Park Service. Overseas, the freezing of US foreign aid will likely expose threatened species like rhinos and elephants to more poaching, while a “God squad” assembled to gut the Endangered Species Act will doom the ones hanging on by the tips of their claws at home. With their land diminished, developed, and defiled, and the specter of Earth-wide heating uncurbed, wildlife is being hung out to dry — and more likely to die.

Thinking to back to that morning by the Canning River, I’d like to believe what I felt in that bear’s presence was a mixture of helplessness, guilt, awe, wonder, and regret, rather than morbid, rubbernecking curiosity. Like conscientious criminals, my clients and I had been drawn to the scene of the crime, witnesses and perpetrators rolled into one, forever haunted by our deeds and sins of omission. Perhaps, in the white apparition’s presence, we were hoping to somehow be forgiven, for what humans have already done, and for what was likely yet to come. Maybe that is part of what draws people to these vanishing landscapes, and to seek out imperiled wildlife.

Except for the occasional monarch butterfly tumbling through the canyon country, now in my mid-sixties, I haven’t encountered the imperiled since that distant summer. More and more species find themselves in trouble though during this sixth mass extinction, the one that is human-caused. I console myself somewhat with the thought that remaining childless is the biggest contribution I have made to preserve Earth and its nonhuman denizens. The lifetime carbon footprint of one offspring alone equals emissions from over 600 transatlantic flights. Despite heading north every year, I had some miles yet to spare, at the time. I no longer fly, living landbound in southern Utah. I continue to write and to educate people in conversations about the malaise we have created for ourself and the planet. It needs to be seen if the facts take root and grow into the political will to turn around things.