It wasn't happenstance that brought photographer Florian Schulz to the wilds of the Northern Rockies—it was Jack London. As a child growing up in Germany, Florian was captivated by the images that formed in his mind when he read books by London and other wilderness authors: forests under a thick blanket of snow, a grizzly bear on a mountainside, moose and wolf tracks written across the landscape. He knew he wanted to be in a place like that; knew he had to see such things for himself.

When he turned sixteen Florian traveled to the United States as an exchange student—and caught a bus for the Canadian Rockies as soon as he graduated from high school. During that trip he watched for bears behind every boulder, but never saw any. He went back to Heidelberg to study biology, but returned to North America often over the next five years, to keep looking. “I was hooked,” he says. While he appreciated his studies of zoology and ecology, he came to realize his true calling was photography, though which he could communicate the beauty and value of wild places and conservation.

Florian spent the next decade photographing the Rocky Mountains—with five of those years dedicated exclusively to capturing the Y2Y region for his book, Yellowstone to Yukon: Freedom to Roam. His extraordinary skills as a photographer are matched by his deep commitment to the environment, and the book and its corollary exhibits, along with Florian's seemingly countless presentations, have carried the message of corridors and connectivity to a wide audience across North America and Europe.

Sometime into that photographic odyssey, he finally had his long-awaited meeting with Ursus arctos. “I climbed up in the high alpine, day after day, for eight days,” he says, his voice still flashing with excitement at the memory. “I was disappointed every day.” It was September, and he hoped to photograph grizzly bears digging for roots. On the last day he was to be in that spot, he spent several hours waiting, lying on his back in the alpine tundra watching golden eagles soar overhead. Every once in awhile he would lift his head to see if anything was happening. Finally he noticed a bighorn sheep staring intensely at something. It was already late, and the blue shadow of evening was moving over the mountainside. Then, a bear.

“I said, ‘hello bear,' so he would know there was a human there.” The scent-carrying breeze was also in the bear's favor. Still, the bear kept prospecting closer and closer, ignoring the photographer. Then in one spit second, he looked up directly into the eye of Florian's camera.

“Those images,” Florian says, “are very special to me because it took me years” to get to that moment. The sequence appears in his book.

During his journeys, Florian is often joined by his partner Emil Herrea Jara. “Without her I couldn't be doing these things,” he says. “We are doing this with our full heart and passion.” Florian spends about nine months a year on the road, often living out of his 1984 Volkswagen Vanagon. If he can find the resources, he would like to expand his conservation photography into coastal Alaska and British Columbia (as well as finally fix the brakes on his van).