From the mountains to the sea, British Columbia combines a remarkable array of Gold List hotels with epic natural beauty—and some hungry quadrupeds. Irene Schneider finds it hard to keep her eyes on the road

The first black bear was a cub who bounded across the road like a puppy, emerging from the forest and vanishing back into it so quickly that he brought my car to a standstill, leaving my jaw open. Glimpsing a big animal in the wild always hits like a jolt of electricity. It's a thrilling bit of luck, this sudden close encounter with tooth and claw—but is it good luck or bad?

The omens weren't encouraging. I was in the web of back roads on Vancouver Island, possibly lost. My last human contact had been at Port Renfrew, a town I had passed through twice because the first time I didn't take the scattering of houses for a settlement. The waitress at the Coastal Kitchen Cafe had assured me that the map I was using, while accurate, was wrong. To get to my destination, Tofino, about eighty miles north as the whale swims, I had to backtrack big-time, returning east, then looping north, then west again—a 250-mile detour. I chose to believe that her specialty was coffee, not cartography, and sped to the local visitors office and some real authority. The affable attendant there approved of my map, except for one detail. He spread his weathered hands across it to encompass an area that showed not only lakes and rivers but whole parks and mountains marked with what looked like roads.

"Logging roads," he said. "All dirt. Anybody who goes in there without knowing the place might not come out the other side."

But then, perhaps seeing my disappointment, he allowed that there was a shortcut, a fairly straightforward logging road that would knock some time off my trip. He made it clear that I'd be in the middle of nowhere, eating dust and driving twenty-five miles an hour, and then washed his hands of me.

So when the bear cub crossed the logging road in the first half-hour, I wondered if I'd make it to Tofino and the Wickanninish Inn for dinner by sunset. British Columbia has a cornucopia of Gold List hotels, which is what brought me here. I was less prepared for its cornucopia of fauna: Vancouver Island has North America's highest concentration of black bears (as well as cougars, thank you very much), and I could imagine that one of them, weary of salmon sashimi and able to scent edible flesh a mile away, might suddenly fancy a helping of girl tartare. A momentary worry. Black bears are omnivores but not hell-bent predators. And I wasn't about to turn back. Inside this temperate rain forest, dwarfed by slopes of Douglas fir and hemlock, the solitude was seductive, as was the silence. And, too, I liked being where none of British Columbia's 22 million visitors go (that's one-fifth of all tourists in Canada). I liked seeing the underbelly of this big, gorgeous island. And I'm glad I chanced it. Though I didn't know it at the time, those few hours inside the rain forest would prove crucial to my understanding of the changing fortunes of British Columbia.

It was an hour or two before sunset when I finally arrived at the cool, wooded grounds of the Wickanninish Inn and pried my fingers from the steering wheel. My car looked like it had tailgated Ma Joad's truck from Oklahoma, and I looked like Ma. One usually tries to present better at your finer establishments, but I brushed off my embarrassment along with a few pounds of road dust and decided that it would take a rambling rose like me to test if a hotel could simultaneously crown your adventures and help you shed them.