In 1997 I joined my father on an expedition to the Canadian Arctic to camp and photograph at the northern reaches of Baffin Island. We set out on a five-day trip from the subsistence village of Pond Inlet in a small, open boat, accompanied by an Inuit guide and his grandson. Near Bylot Island, my father spotted a mother polar bear and her twin cubs. “Polar bears! Right there on the left,” he yelled, overflowing with excitement. He had our guide navigate us to the shoreline.

Adrenaline ran high as my father quickly scrambled for his camera gear and began snapping pictures as the bears tried to climb a rocky cliff. Failing, the mother took up a perch with her offspring in a rocky alcove, from which she watched us intently. I followed my dad’s lead and jumped off the bow of the boat onto some slippery rocks on shore, our little boat pounding against the rocks all the while.

My father made it clear that we shouldn’t walk directly toward the animals and should have little or no eye contact with them. To my amazement, we were able to work our way to within a coulple hundred feet of the protective mother and her cubs. As we quickly set up our cameras and tripods, my dad stopped for a moment to say, matter-of-factly, that if the mother were to charge us, we should leave all our equipment and race for the boat.

In the next few minutes–which seemed like an eternity to me at the time, heightened by my nervousness and excitement–we shot through several rolls of film. Whenever the mother bear raised her nose to sniff our scent, I felt uneasy, while my father couldn’t seem to get enough of the moment. “It's unbelievable! Just amazing!” he said again and again. I was struck by the fact that, although he had stacks of polar bear photos in his files, he was as excited about this encounter as if it were his first sighting. He had seen polar bears traversing ice and flat land, and from large tundra vehicles filled with camera-wielding tourists set up for just those times when hardening ice permits the bears to cross a specific patch of ground that affords easy picture taking. But this was entirely different: a sighting electrified by the intensity of the mother bear’s instincts and my father’s passionate response to the wild.