I knew that I would study geology from a very young age – collecting and studying rocks, canoe trips in northern Ontario, winter survival courses: I was ready. But in the summer of my second year at the University of Toronto, I took a summer job as a geophysical technician in a three-person fly camp in the central Yukon. A helicopter would deposit us ‘in the middle of nowhere’ for 7–10 days and we would do reconnaissance geophysics with proton magnetometers and electromagnetic induction on lines cut into the boreal forest by First Nations sawyers. My first day alone in the bush I had a grizzly bear encounter with a narrow escape. The summer proved to be a punishing series of such encounters. I returned to Toronto to change my major to physical geography and to seek refuge in a kinder, gentler fieldwork: hydrology. Something closer to civilisation. Fieldwork without grizzly bears.