A mother and daughter were killed in a suspected grizzly bear attack on a popular hiking trail just minutes from their home in Bella Coola, British Columbia, officials and family members say.
Jennifer Balcarras, 48, an art therapist, and her 20-year-old daughter Selah Reed, a teaching assistant, went missing Saturday while walking the Snooka West Trail, a route located a five-minute drive from their house. Balcarras’ brother Matt told the Vancouver Sun that the family grew concerned when she failed to show up for a scheduled online call.
Search crews found Balcarras’ body on Monday and Reed’s body the following day.
Jeff Tyre of the British Columbia Conservation Officer Service said “there was evidence to suggest a [grizzly] bear may have been involved.” Officials have not disclosed the specific evidence behind that conclusion.
Conservation officers have not ruled out that more than one bear took part in the attack. “It is not yet clear whether more than one bear was involved. Any captured bear will be assessed. If it is determined to have been involved in the attack, it will be dispatched in accordance with provincial human-wildlife conflict response guidelines to protect public safety,” the agency said in a statement.
Family members said the location of the attack made it especially hard to comprehend. “It’s very close to town and it’s not remote,” Matt Balcarras said, adding that his sister and niece “were not naive city folks. They were strong women living the life.”
“It’s surreal. It doesn’t seem real. It feels like a dream.”
That reaction came from Josh Balcarras, another of Jennifer’s brothers, who told CBC the walk had started as something routine. “Just a casual walk,” he said.
Balcarras had recently relocated to Bella Coola, an unincorporated community of roughly 2,000 people located about 268 miles from Vancouver, to start a new career and what friends described as a new chapter in her life. She leaves behind three surviving adult children. A GoFundMe set up by friends to support them noted that Balcarras “was working toward building a future and had not yet had the opportunity to establish savings or put aside funds to help her family with unexpected expenses such as these.”
Reed, the youngest of Balcarras’ four children, was remembered by her uncle Josh as inseparable from her mother on the trail. “[Reed] liked a lot of the same things Jenny liked. I think they got along really, really well. When Jenny hiked, Selah was right there beside her,” he told CBC.
The fundraiser described Reed as “just 20 years old, with her whole life ahead of her,” adding that she “was only beginning her journey into adulthood, making this loss even more heartbreaking.”
The deaths come less than a year after a separate bear attack near Bella Coola injured 11 people in November 2025, including three children left in critical condition. That attack was believed to have involved a bear with two cubs.
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