“I’ve always been extremely conservation-minded because of Dad.” — Shannon Lansdowne

How can a tourism business stay resilient for the long term? At Bella Coola Grizzly Tours, it’s through perseverance and adaptability.

What began as a grizzly hunting operation took a significant turn when founder Leonard Ellis recognized the shifting social values and growing environmental awareness. In response, he transformed the business into a wildlife viewing outfitter, proving that tourism can succeed while supporting conservation while remaining economically viable.

Today, his daughter Shannon Lansdowne carries on her father’s vision. Committed to his legacy of conservation, she works to make sure that Bella Coola Grizzly Tours continues to celebrate and protect the region’s natural landscape. “It’s the mountains. It’s the waterfalls. It’s the estuaries. It’s the ocean. It’s the lakes. It’s the big trees. It’s the vegetation,” she says. “Everything is bigger in Bella Coola.”

Her experience highlights a key lesson for the tourism industry: businesses that adapt to changing traveller demands and prioritize long-term sustainability are more resilient in an evolving landscape. Bella Coola Grizzly Tours is a model for how tourism and conservation can grow together so that the land, wildlife, and community remain at the heart of the experience.

You’ll also learn:

• What it means for operators to honour and sustain their impact over generations.
• How diversifying with ecotourism at the forefront ensures resilience and relevance.
• The journey of returning grizzlies to the Great Bear Rainforest and the people behind it.
• How Bella Coola is a unique environment that helps people reconnect with nature.

Subscribe to Travel Beyond through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast player.

Show notes

Bella Coola Grizzly Tours —  A land and marine-based tour operator offering guided marine tours, wildlife viewing, and grizzly bear watching excursions, and lodging. 

Great Bear Rainforest — A protected temperate rainforest along British Columbia’s central and northern coast, home to old-growth forests, diverse wildlife, and the rare white “spirit bear.”

Episode transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has been lightly reviewed for accuracy.

Shannon Lansdowne: I’ve always been extremely conservation minded because of dad. He’s always been very focused on, you know, having sustainable harvests and ensuring that our stocks are good and always recognizing that and pointing it out to us. And he was always one. To step up and, you know, fight for it.

David Archer: Welcome back to Travel Beyond. I’m David Archer from Destination Think, recording from Haida Gwaii, the territory of the Haida Nation off the north coast of British Columbia in Canada. On this show, we look at travel’s role in making a better world and we highlight leading destinations and change makers.

Our guests are taking local action that the world can learn from. They’re helping to regenerate ecosystems, economies, and communities, and they’re often making positive change happen from the bottom up. Many of the voices that we’ve highlighted are part of the Destination Think Collective, a peer group of ambitious forward thinking destinations that are working toward a better future for travel and the planet.

Members represent places like Banff and Lake Louise, Cape Breton, Seattle, Copenhagen, Queenstown Lakes, and several others. Today we’re traveling to the central coast of mainland British Columbia to a town called Bella Coola. You might remember that we’ve been here before on the podcast. A few months ago, we shared an interview with Leonard Ellis, the owner of Bella Coola Grizzly Tours, and Leonard told us all about how the business pivoted from being a hunting outfitter to becoming a wildlife viewing operator, which was a major transition.

But Leonard has also led efforts to reintroduce grizzlies to an area where he says hunters had previously overharvested. In this episode, we’ll give you a little more insight into how seeing ecotourism through the lens of leaving a legacy can not only make your business stronger, but bring more clarity about how it can steward the land that you operate in.

Today, we’ll meet Shannon Lansdowne. Shannon’s an accommodation operator in Bella Coola, working alongside her father, Leonard Ellis, her brother, Daniel, and her family. Shannon grew up immersed in the tourism world, influenced by her dad’s trailblazing spirit. She takes a lot of pride in her father’s work in conservation and particularly his efforts in the reintroduction of the grizzlies and here she discusses the responsibility she feels in continuing that legacy of conservation and sustainable tourism.

Bella Coola, as I mentioned, is on the central coast of B. C. and is in rugged terrain. The area features spectacular fjords and it’s near the Great Bear Rainforest, which is an area the size of Ireland that is a lush habitat for grizzlies and other wildlife. There aren’t very many roads in this part of B.C. and it is remote. It’ll take you about 12 hours to drive to Bella Coola from Vancouver. winding through the mountains. Shannon says she loves how the area allows people to disconnect, and asks us all to consider how we might view nature differently if we were a little less plugged in. Here’s Shannon now, speaking with Destination Think CEO, Rodney Payne.

Shannon Lansdowne: My name is Shannon Lansdowne and I am an accommodation runner or operator in Bella Coola with my father Leonard Ellis and brother Daniel Ellis and my husband and my three kids. They’re all kind of involved.

Rodney Payne: Can you describe your most memorable travel experience?

Shannon Lansdowne: Oh, it was a travel experience but it wasn’t a far distance but it involved transportation of helicopter.

My dad decided that we should go look at some area in the Kimsquit, the head of the Dean Inlet, and, um, explore it for bear viewing possibilities. And this was, I don’t even know how old I was. I might have been 17, 18. And we flew in in a helicopter, got dropped off, and all he had was a wall tent and a cooler.

And we had to build the wall tent. It was pouring rain. I don’t know if it was in the fall or the spring. And we got socked in, then he told me this is like the best grizzly bear habitat you’ll ever find, and that there’s bears crawling everywhere. And we slept in this wall tent and just were soaked. I got a picture of me in a, in a trench coat from head to toe, and it’s my dad, so it’s for a 6’2 person and I was about 5’3 And, uh, yeah, we just kind of explored and and luckily didn’t see any bears but it was just kind of one of those travel experiences that were on a whim and it we weren’t prepared for it and my dad was just like let’s go for it and that’s kind of one of the experiences that I always remember.

It’s not an international travel it wasn’t a far distance but it involved like helicopter and just kind of be being wild.

Rodney Payne: I get the sense that you had those kinds of experiences a lot growing up.

Shannon Lansdowne: We did. I did. I was kind of his right hand in, in anything that he, my dad was always, he was a trailblazer in, in his own way.

He, he always was looking at the next way, the next thing to offer people, um, in the tourism industry and whether it was as an outfitter and, you know, hunting bears and, and mountain goat and black bears. Diversifying into the ecotourism and when we were diversifying, it was kind of like he was stepping out of like his familiarity of, of being an outfitter for so many years.

I think he was an outfitter for almost 25 years. And then as like society started to changing to change and we, we evolved more into the bear viewing and, you know, more of the eco tours. He kind of started like looking at like, what are all of our possibilities? And there are so many possibilities. It’s not just pointing a gun as an outfitter in the ecotourism world.

There’s so much more opportunity for people in the tourism industry. And, um, he just was always kind of trying to explore and see what the next adventure was, whether it was pulling me up a river to look for a spot where we could maybe put a cabin or Like I say flying into the Kimsquit with no like I had no idea what we were doing they’re a wall tent that had holes no wood stove like we had to he’s like, okay now we need to go find poles to build the the wall tent I’m like what we’re finding poles had to go into the bush and we were in a big logging slash and pulling out these poles for the for the wall tent and it was a pretty pitiful wall tent by the time we were done with it, but it worked and it kept us half dry for the day.

Rodney Payne: So you’re reminding me of the Netflix show. Um, have you watched Outlast where they send them up to Alaska with nothing?

Shannon Lansdowne: No, I’ve watched Alone.

Rodney Payne: Yeah. It’s not, it’s not Alone, but I think you’d really enjoy it. Or maybe it’d be. 

Shannon Lansdowne:Yeah, it was always, it was always an adventure and he just was always kind of looking at, you know, the next place that he knew people would enjoy and whether like it was always, it was always on the coast.

And I just remember there was always some sort of obstacle that we had to overcome.

Rodney Payne: What do you think caused the shift from outfitting to ecotourism?

Shannon Lansdowne: It was society’s acceptance of bear hunting in general. Not hunting, but just specific to bear hunting. Um, especially grizzly bear hunting. It just became so hard to operate on government tenures and allocated quota, uh, that he just you know, he kind of just, he didn’t give up, but he went to the people that were really trying to shut us down.

And he said, look, you have two options here. You can keep fighting against me, or you can come to the table with a, an offer that, that I’ll accept. And it took a couple years, but the phone rang and, and they said, we want to take you up on your offer and we want to buy you out. Because all they were doing was squeezing the government, squeezing the government.

They got a full moratorium where a whole area shut down for grizzly bear for a full season. And then once the government did some and realized the numbers were quite healthy, they reopened it up. But when they reopened it up, they gave us a fraction of our area. They gave us a fraction of our quota, which when you invest in, you know, five guide territories and amalgamate five territories, it’s a huge financial investment.

And it just wasn’t sustainable anymore with the quota they were giving us. So, um, it was kind of a healthy decision. He was, he was the first person, the first outfitter, um, to sell to the environmental group. Um, but in the long run, a lot of other outfitters started doing it as well, um, especially on the coast, and that is actually what created the Great Bear Rainforest.

Um, it wasn’t the Great Bear Rainforest when we were outfitting it, and then as these, uh, this environmental group started buying up areas, they were able to amalgamate it. And the ironic thing is, is it’s still a guide territory. They still hold the hunting license as an environmental group. And they conduct hunting, hunts where they’re unsuccessful, um, because in BC you have to use it or lose it for a license.

So you have to, you have to submit guide declaration forms in order to still keep the license.

Rodney Payne: Oh, wow. Yeah. It’s an amazing story.

Shannon Lansdowne: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it, it came down to, you know, what it wasn’t a, it wasn’t by any means a lottery like that. He, you know, walked away a wealthy man. But it was enough to get him out of debt and able to start into something else and that’s when he bought the the property here in Bella Coola.

Rodney Payne: Yeah, awesome. What do you think makes this part of the world so special?

Shannon Lansdowne: Everything. There’s just, when people come here, it’s not a specific thing that they love. It’s, it’s just everything that it has. It’s the mountains. It’s the waterfalls. It’s the estuaries. It’s the ocean. It’s the lakes. It’s the big trees.

It’s the um, vegetation. Everything is bigger in Bella Coola, we always say. It’s, it’s got the big bears. It’s got the big trees. It’s got the big waterfalls. Um, It’s got a lot of big personalities. It’s just something, it’s a place for people to disconnect. Even though we have the Wi Fi, we have the cell service here now, it’s a, it really gives you a sense of serenity, where you can just come here, unplug, go for a hike.

It’s, you know, Bella Coola has such a welcoming presence. You, you drive and people are like, why, why are people waving at me? And I was like, well, it’s a Bella Coola wave. And they’re like, what’s the Bella Coola wave? And it’s like, well, everybody, every car you waved you. I go down to the city and I’m waving at people and they’re like looking back. I don’t know them. My mom’s like mom., why are you waving at everyone? We’re not in Bella Coola. It’s like it’s just the welcoming. It’s the welcoming committee here. It’s everybody seems to know everybody and if they don’t they don’t care. They’re just gonna wave

Rodney Payne: What parts of your dad’s work would you say you’re most proud of.

Shannon Lansdowne: All of it? I’ve been alongside him my whole life since I was just like my, my kids age since I was very young, um, and it was kind of ironic because growing up. My dad’s a very traditional man and you know the the the son goes hunting and the daughter stays home or the daughter is, you know the the bookkeeper and so for years I was the one that got to go down to the States and do the trade shows and and you know get to know everybody down there and market the company um, but I wasn’t the one that got to go hunting with him because I had already missed enough school to go down to the, to the trade shows that I wasn’t allowed to do the other side of it.

Um, and then as I got older, he realized that I had a passion for it as well and started engaging me in more of the male dominant side of the business. Um, and I ended up being a guide for him, um, before he sold, but it was just my dad’s perseverance, his determination, his stubbornness. That, you know, helped him along.

It wasn’t easy. It was a, it was a struggle for years. Um, and only now that he’s facing retirement that he can sit down and say, you know, we have a successful business and that, that was a lifetime of a lot of hard work. But every, every success and every failure that he, he did, um, he learned from. He didn’t do it again and I learned from him as well.

And now as a business person myself, I start seeing my, seeing that I’m, I’ll start going down a road that becomes very familiar. And then I’ll talk to dad and he’ll be like, remember that time we did that? And how did that turn out? It’s like, yes, that’s right. So pull back and do it a different way. So he’s got, you know, he’s got more than a lifetime of experience and knowledge in tourism, and uh, it really shows, not only with his experiences, but his, his relationships that he’s built over the years. I’ll run into people and, and they’re like, are you Leonard Ellis’s daughter? I’m like, yeah, and they’re like, oh yeah, say hi to Leonard.

There was this one time that Leonard and I did this, or we were down in Reno at a trade show, and oh, we had a good time, I remember he didn’t even, he, he, he came down just enough money in his pocket to get there. And he wasn’t sure how he was getting back unless he booked a hunt. And, and that’s how it was.

It was like feast or famine, famine with us growing up in the outfitting industry, because he invested everything into his business. Every penny. My mom used to always say that you, you make 10 cents and you spend 10. And that’s how he was just to, to keep the business going. Cause it always needed that extra buck to, to keep going.

Rodney Payne: Reintroducing grizzlies is quite an accomplishment. Do you feel a sense of responsibility to carry that on?

Shannon Lansdowne: Yeah. In the conservation side of things, I’ve always been extremely conservation minded. Um, because of dad, he’s always been very focused on, you know, having sustainable harvests and ensuring that our stocks are good and always recognizing that and pointing it out to us.

And he was always one to step up and, you know, fight for it. And that’s the example with the grizzly bear introduction is that he just saw such potential in that area and wrote letters after letters, after letters to the ministry. And then finally, you know, he, he was instrumental in saying, look, this is a possibility, and this is what I think we should do.

And they did it. And, you know, it doesn’t happen very often in government where you can see those results and now, because of those introduction of grizzly bears into this territory, there’s bears everywhere and there’s businesses, you know, flourishing because of these bears that have been introduced to this area and the healthy fish stocks and, you know, every year we, we hear, you know, the salmon are declining, but this year was a, was an excellent year for our salmon stocks.

All species that came up were, were a healthy run and, um, but it’s funny that we didn’t see as many bears. So it’s kind of, it’s weird how, how it all works in the cycle of life in, in this valley, but it’s, it’s pretty special.

Rodney Payne: What do you think the world can learn from your dad’s story?

Shannon Lansdowne: Perseverance.

Perseverance and determination. Um, he just didn’t give up. Like, there were so many times, oh, when he, he, he took me down to the boat that he wanted to buy. So that we could have for the grizzly hunting and, and the outfitting. And there was a tree growing out of the deck. It was an old, old wooden, insane boat.

And he’s like, we’re gonna buy this. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we’re not. And he’s like, yeah, yeah, this is gonna be our base camp and we’re gonna fix it up. And then, you know, we’ll have the cabin on the back and that’s where the guests will stay. And I said to him, I said, dad. This is going to sink. It’s going to sink right here. Like this is not a good investment. And I was always like a very conservative investor and he was, he was always the risk taker. And I think that’s what you need to be successful, um, is take, to take risks. And if, if someone needs to learn something in, in business or, or kind of look at Leonard Ellis’s life, it was, it was always taking risks. He fixed that boat up, we put it up on the ways, we redid the, the side, the boards and everything, and it was a beautiful boat that we hosted tons of hunters on for many, many years. And then he bought a second one that had a tree growing out of it too. Um, but yeah, same thing with the property over here.

Like he showed it to me and he was kind of always, he always looked for my opinion, even though he never really acted on it. He just, I feel like if I cried it was, he was gonna go with it. Like that was his telltale sign that this is a good thing. She doesn’t agree with it and I’m going forward. But the property that he’s got now, I mean, we walked into the house and the, the floor was sunk in and there was like people just put the garbage out on the front deck and there was glass everywhere. It was a teardown. Like I looked at it. I was like, well, this is going to have to go. It was a huge logging slash stumps everywhere. And he just, he sees a vision. It’s a vision that I still don’t see ever. Um, but he sees the vision and he doesn’t stop until he’s accomplished it.

And he’s finally sitting in the position that he can just look out at it and say, it’s done. And, and it’s time to just, you know, operate the business and keep it, keep it going.

Rodney Payne: When people come here and they get a chance to sort of slow down and immerse themselves in nature, what do you think they take away?

And what do you hope they’ll take home with them?

Shannon Lansdowne: A sense of, of peace. There’s like, one of the ladies the other day was saying that, you know, um, Bella Coola offers silence and it does, but then if you actually sit there and you close your eyes and you’re standing outside in Bella Coola, Steve Waugh made a good point.

He goes, it’s never silent here. There’s the waterfalls. There’s the birds. There’s, you know, there’s, there’s the wind. There’s, there’s just so much in this valley that people come and they, they’re like, I’m coming back. And I’m like, yeah, but you’re from New Zealand. Like, this is a big, big thing to come here.

They’re like, nope, I’m, I’ll be back here. And it’s Bella Coola specific. It’s not just our province of British Columbia. It’s, it’s the Bella Coola Valley. And I think people take away a sense of community. A lot of people build friendships here, and it’s also, Bella Coola doesn’t offer that big corporate aspect to people that a lot of tourism towns do.

It’s, all these companies are family owned, people who have been here for generations, or people who are just coming here and are experiencing it, and um, it’s, it’s very personable.

Rodney Payne: You’ve got young kids, what are your, what are your hopes for their future here?

Shannon Lansdowne: One of the reasons we moved to Bella Coola a few years ago and bought the lodge was dad, dad has his place that I was running for him, but we wanted a sense of something that was ours, that we could offer our kids, um, and so that’s why we bought the lodge here and moved to Bella Coola to be around family, but on the other side of it is it was right after COVID and, and, you know, we’re seeing the world make some drastic changes that we didn’t agree on, um, and it was really starting to influence our kids.

And so we decided that, you know, Bella Coola was the place that we wanted to go and we wanted to teach them a sense of ownership, responsibility, the same way that I was, I was raised. I was always, we were always engulfed in the family business. And I think it’s really important. I, you start seeing people that don’t have that sense of ownership of things anymore or responsibility.

They, a lot of people are just feeling like, you know, there’s not that loyalty anymore. With bringing the kids into the family business. It’s no mom has to get up and I have to do this and I don’t if I’m sick or you know it doesn’t matter if I’m tired you have to go to work and you have to keep the lights on or because people are depending on us and I really want to instill a positive work ethic in our kids, but then also being raised with the bears and the salmon and the deer and the moose and and being able to go, you know an hour away and start hunting and just show them the outdoors, it’s it’s so important to us to have that part of life really be important to them.

Rodney Payne: Thank you for getting up early and spending some time with us today.

Shannon Lansdowne: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it

David Archer: This has been Travel Beyond presented by Destination Think, and you just heard Rodney Payne speaking with Shannon Lansdowne about legacy, stewardship, wildlife, and the unique experiences for visitors in Bella Coola. For more resources and show notes, visit the blog at DestinationThink.com. This episode was produced and has theme music composed by me, David Archer, Sarah Raymond de Booy is my co producer, Lindsay Payne, Jamie Sterling, and Cory Price provided production support.

If you like what you hear, please take a moment to give us a 5 star rating on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, or wherever you happen to be. It helps more people find us. We’ll be back next time with more from the Cariboo Chilcotin Coast. Talk to you then.