Painting with light: Coeur d’Alene wildlife photographer to release book

Thirty-seven years ago, Tim Christie pulled over in Glacier National Park to make a sandwich.

The nature photographer from Coeur d’Alene went to Glacier with hopes of photographing mountain goats. Cloud cover spoiled that plan. Instead, he drove around a bit, looking for something else.

As he was making his sandwich, he saw two deer, a big buck and a doe, walking across the road. He took some pictures as they crossed, then followed them into the woods, not even taking the time to change from his running shoes into his hunting boots.

He took a lot of photos. One wound up becoming a magazine cover. But as he got toward the end of his last roll of film, he heard something bust through the brush behind him. The deer spooked, and he started walking back to his truck.

Then he saw a brown blur through an opening in the trees.

“I don’t know how I knew, but I did. Grizzly cub,” Christie writes in his new book, “Stories Painted With Light.”

Certain the mother was near, Christie started climbing a nearby tree. Sure enough, as he got higher, he heard and then saw the sow.

The bear started climbing the tree after him, trying to reach the human who had bothered its cub. When it reached Christie, it bit down on his shoe.

He kicked and struggled. He couldn’t break free. The bear had him, he thought.

The bear seemed to think so, too. It let go of the tree, likely thinking it could pull him down.

Then the running shoe slipped off Christie’s foot. The bear crashed to the ground, and Christie stayed in the tree.

There’s no telling how long Christie waited in the tree, staring at the bear and hoping it would move on. It eventually did, and Christie got back to his truck without further incident.

It was the scariest moment of his life, Christie said in an interview last week.

“After it happened, I came to the realization that I very easily could have been killed if not maimed in profound ways,” Christie said.

Instead, he walked away. He got to continue going into the woods to take photos, to make something of a career out of it.

Now 74, his life is divided perfectly in half by the encounter. The book, which he expects to release this month, is a celebration of the simple fact that he survived, and all the beauty he’s seen and documented with his camera.

It’s also meant to help people understand the creatures he sees. Even the grizzly bear he got too close to.

“It’s not just a pretty picture book,” Christie said. “It’s a book that gives a sense of what it’s like to be that animal or that bird.”

Christie grew up in southwest Montana, spending a lot of time fishing and hunting. He picked up photography in earnest as an adult, after moving to Coeur d’Alene to teach at North Idaho College.

A photography professor encouraged Christie to buy a nice camera, and Christie learned the basics by taking the professor’s class. Soon, he was taking the camera with him on hunting and fishing trips, and he was hooked.

“I was taking more pictures than I was hunting and fishing,” Christie said.

After a few years of messing around without trying to make money, Christie started sending photos to outdoors magazines. He learned from the critiques of editors and got better and better. By the early 1980s, his images and articles were regularly being featured in a number of publications.

He continued teaching at the college until 2007, when he retired. His focus then shifted toward photography full time. It’s been a good life, he said, and it’s allowed him to travel all over the world.

A friend suggested he collect some of his archives in a book. He began working in earnest on it this past spring. The title came from the words of a different friend, the longtime outdoor writer and photographer Bill McRae, who told Christie that photographers are always “painting with light.”

The book showcases dozens of Christie’s photos. There are birds, deer, bears, pronghorn and one snake. With each photo, Christie pairs a brief essay and the technical details about the making of the image – the type of lens he used and the camera settings.

Among his favorite images in the book are a couple of polar bears in the Arctic. But his favorite subjects are closer to home – grizzly bears and big bull elk.

“I’m an elk-a-holic,” Christie said. “I can’t find it in my head that it’s fall until I hear a bull elk bugle.”

He ends the book with the story of his grizzly encounter.

He said the moment changed his life. It wasn’t the first time he’d been close to a grizzly, but it was the first time he felt his life was in danger.

After it was over, he no longer thought he was invincible. He started being more careful. He still photographs grizzlies once in a while, but always from far away with a tripod and an enormous lens.

When he reads about other grizzly encounters, he’s transported back to 1986, and he becomes grateful for his good fortune, and for all the days since.

“My life was rich,” he said. “I feel like I’m one of the luckiest guys that I could be.”