During a busy season on the trail crew at a provincial park in the Kananaskis Valley, Karsten Heuer volunteered to help monitor a radio-collared female wolf named Pluie. That was June, 1991. In November, Pluie's signal suddenly disappeared. A month later her signal showed up hundreds of kilometers south in Montana. Before Pluie settled down with a mate in British Columbia a year and a half later, she had traversed parts of Alberta, Montana, Idaho, and British Columbia.

While Pluie got on with her new life as an alpha female, Karsten, recently graduated from university, was studying the effect of human activities on large mammal movement in the Bow River valley. He found that some traditionally important wildlife corridors, already naturally squeezed by steep, precipitous terrain, had been virtually blocked off by development. When mitigations recommended by the study were implemented, wildlife took nearly immediate advantage of their improved travel options. But Karsten knew that being able to move across one valley would be meaningless to animals like Pluie—wolves, or grizzly bears, or other species whose nature it is to range widely.

When Karsten heard Harvey Locke speak about the Y2Y large-landscape conservation concept in 1996, he thought, “Wow, this sounds great. More people need to hear about this idea.” But at the same time, he wondered if it was actually plausible. He couldn't get the answer to that question from any of his colleagues, “or even from Harvey himself, really. He was full of optimism, obviously.”

So Karsten decided to assess the situation by traveling the landscape as a wolf or grizzly bear might—on foot. He also decided to speak about the Y2Y concept in communities along the way. He admits to being fairly pessimistic when he walked north out of Yellowstone Park. But his biggest surprise in a journey full of surprises was arriving at Watson Lake hugely inspired and invigorated. Then again, he was also surprised by the harsh and organized opposition he ran into, which included the occasional death threat. But once people understood Y2Y wasn't a massive park proposal, that at its core it was about the coexistence of humans and wildlife, they started to come around.

“There wasn't anybody,” says Karsten, “whether it was a miner or forestry executive or ski area developer or whatever, who didn't want wildlife in the future of the Rocky Mountains.”

Another major surprise was how the trip went on to shape his life in totally unexpected ways. For one, he didn't set out to write a book. But he did, and Walking the Big Wild succeeded beautifully in bringing the Y2Y vision to a broad audience. For another, he walked his way out of one relationship and into a new one that led to marriage and partnership with filmmaker Leanne Allison, followed by a baby boy named Zev.

“All I was doing the whole time was following my heart,” Karsten says. “And then these opportunities were opening up along the way.”

In their latest adventure, Karsten, Leanne, and two-and-a-half-year-old Zev paddled, walked, and sailed their way from western Canada to the Maritimes to meet author Farley Mowat, stringing together settings from many of Mowat's stories as part of the journey. A few years before that, the newlywed couple honeymooned for five months with an endangered caribou herd, which resulted in the book and award-winning film, Being Caribou.