Elizabeth Miller shows a picture of herself as a young woman, going on her first bear-related adventure in Canada. Tabitha Johnston

SHEPHERDSTOWN — Over the past 91 years of her life, Elizabeth Miller has gone many places and seen many things. Out of all of them, some of her favorite memories are those of seeing bears in the wild.

According to Miller, this love for bears led to her developing a unique nickname.

“Everybody calls me Mama Bear,” Miller said, with a chuckle.

That nickname has followed her from when she worked as a real estate broker in Woodbridge, Va. to when she moved to Harpers Ferry and, recently, to when she moved to Canterbury Center nursing home.

According to Miller, her first encounter with a bear was while on an adventure through the tundra in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada.

Elizabeth Miller gives a presentation on the grizzly bears she encountered, with the help of Canterbury Center recreation staff member Brandon Bordwine, on Nov. 14. Tabitha Johnston

“It was magic,” Miller said. “This was the first trip I took! We rode around on tundra buggies. When I walked out onto the open platform one day, this 10-foot-tall polar bear got up on one of the wheels and came over the side. He was so close to me, I could smell his breath!”

Although the polar bear, which she referred to as “Nick,” had climbed up the side of the vehicle in pursuit of food from the dining area, Miller said she hadn’t felt any fear. Instead, she was overwhelmed with excitement.

“I just started talking to him like you would talk to your dog,” Miller said. “I’m standing there and talking and he’s chomping his jaws, and all of a sudden it was like there was this electrical current that ran between me and Nick. I’ll never know what it was, but he looked up at me and then he turned around and he went down off of the side of the tundra buggy.”

That moving encounter created a lifelong passion in her for polar bears and, to a lesser extent, black bears and grizzly bears. This led Miller to take 11 more trips throughout her lifetime, to remote areas in North America with healthy bear populations.

One of her best experiences viewing grizzly bears in the wild was along the Johnstone Strait in British Columbia, Canada. Every day, indigenous tribe members would take small groups of tourists up into hunting blinds along Johnstone Strait, from which the tourists could safely and unobtrusively observe the wildlife. The tourists had to pick which blind they would visit each day, which Miller proved to have a particular knack for.

“They got to calling me a witch, because everywhere I went, the bears came!” Miller said, mentioning she also saw bald eagles, humpback whales and orcas on that trip. “It got to the point, by the end of the week, where they’d say, ‘Where do you want to go?’ and they’d say, ‘With her!'”

Miller’s deep appreciation for bears and the natural world drove her to devote her free time to lobbying for environmental protection. That work eventually took her all the way to the U.S. Congress, before which she testified in the early 1990s in favor of reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone National Park.

“I’ve been fighting for over 70 years,” Miller said. “It’s time for someone to pick up my torch, because the fight is not over and it will never be over!”

As she looked back on her life, Miller said she most wished to encourage those who had the opportunity, to take advantage of the adventures life had to offer.

“I have had a very blessed life. The good Lord has shown me many things that many people never get a chance to see,” Miller said. “I’m 91, so I can’t say I’ll do a trip like this again. But the memories I have are so wonderful and nobody can take them away from me!”