The Bellingham-based broadcaster tells stories of bears, the Pacific Northwest and the new season of his podcast, ‘The Wild.’
To be a professional adventurer is good work, if you can get it. You’re paid to travel to some of the world’s wildest corners, to meet people from all walks of life and hear their stories. But full-time adventuring also comes with certain penalties: a feeling of rootlessness, of always being far from home. So when Chris Morgan — the Bellingham-based creator of KUOW’s popular podcast “The Wild” and the host or narrator of dozens of television nature documentaries — gets a break from his far-flung journeys, he likes to return to some of his favorite Whatcom County spots. Stuart Mountain sometimes, the North Cascades as much as possible, the Chuckanuts or that jewel box of urban nature, Whatcom Falls Park.
On a late March afternoon, the park was in early-spring swing. Bright yellow daffodils dressed the park signage on Lakeway Drive and the buds on the big leaf maples were fat and pink, on the edge of unfurling. Morgan pulled into the parking lot near the salmon hatchery in a standard-issue-Bellingham adventure vehicle: a black pickup truck with a canoe tied down to the roof of a pop-up camper shell.
“Let’s cross the bridge and go from there,” Morgan said to me.
The previous days had been packed with rain, and beneath the stone, WPA-era bridge the water hurdled over the rock lip. “Hey, it’s busy. It’s thundering after all this rain,” Morgan exclaimed with the sort of boyish enthusiasm that is a signature of his broadcast persona. The white spray cast micro-rainbows into the air. “Wonderful!” Morgan said.
He headed up the path and into the park’s wooded area. The second growth stands of cedar and fir reminded him of some of the forests he had enjoyed as a kid. Morgan, 57, grew up a long way from Cascadia. He was born near Liverpool, and when he was 12 his parents — an aerospace engineer and a teacher-turned-librarian — moved to the south of England, where they would often visit the “New Forest,” one of Britain’s few unfenced wildlands. During the First World War, the area’s deciduous, broadleaf trees were replaced with fast-growing conifers, which Morgan loved.
“I was always drawn to trees like these, coniferous trees,” he said. “I was more drawn to those forests than the native beech and oak woods. For some reason, I feel like I always had the Northwest in my soul, even as a kid. So I feel very at home here.”
Crossing the creek downstream at the wooden bridge, Morgan passed two 30-something women walking their dogs. One of them — no doubt noticing how I was holding a phone up to Morgan’s face like a caterer offering hors d’oeuvres — stopped and asked if an interview was happening. She was a fan. “I really love your work,” the woman said.
“Oh, hi, thank you,” Morgan said. “That’s really nice.”
Walking onward, he reflected on the encounter. “It’s really funny — I used to do way more TV stuff, and people would see me from across a room and say ‘Hi.’ And now people hear me and recognize me. Nice people listen to our work.”
Morgan’s passion for wild nature was sparked by watching Sir David Attenborough’s iconic “Life on Earth” series as a boy, but he never imagined going into media, which “came as somewhat of a surprise.” His original wild love was bears. He first visited the States during a college-era stint as a summer camp counselor in New Hampshire, and during that time got to shadow a black bear biologist. He eventually earned a master’s degree in wildlife ecology, then spent several years doing field work, which took him from the Himalayan foothills of Pakistan to the Andean highlands of Ecuador. He was working on a grizzly bear study in the Canadian Rockies when, at a pub in Banff, he met the woman who would bring him to the Pacific Northwest. “My eyes met those of this woman across the room and, fast forward eight months later, she became my wife.”
They initially lived in Gig Harbor. “I remember my first weeks being there,” Morgan said. “It was in the fall, and there was a run of chum salmon coming through there, and I stepped into this creek, Minter Creek, and a chum salmon swam between my legs. From the second I landed here, I was in love with Washington state.” Two years later, in 1999, the couple — since separated — moved to Bellingham, where they raised a son and a daughter.
Morgan kept up with his fieldwork and started guiding wildlife-viewing trips to bear country — Alaska, the Arctic Island of Svalbard, the shores of Hudson Bay. But he was developing an itch to be a storyteller and to share the stories of all the bear biologists he had met over the course of his travels.
His big break came when he was leading a bear-watching trip in Katmai National Park. “There’s bears running all over the river, catching salmon, and my guests are like eyes as wide as saucers, and I’m interpreting the scene. And one grizzly comes running out of the trees and almost brushes past our pants and I’m like, ‘Don’t worry, it’s running from another bear’.”
A guy on the riverbank had been filming the whole scene with a professional-grade video camera and he turned to Morgan and said, “Thanks very much. You just gave me my narration.”
The cameraman was Joe Pontecorvo, a veteran director-producer of wildlife documentaries. Together, Morgan and Pontecorvo cooked up “Bears of the Last Frontier,” a three-part show aired by PBS-Nature in 2011 in which Morgan travels 2,000 miles across Alaska by bushplane and motorbike to encounter grizzly and polar bears. The pair would go on to make “Beartrek,” a 2016 feature-length documentary that took viewers to three continents to learn about bears. Along the way, Morgan became a go-to narrator for PBS, the BBC, the Discovery Channel and National Geographic. With his resonant bass-tenor voice and his Middle England accent, he was a natural. Some of the programs won Emmy Awards.
By now we made our way beyond Whatcom Creek into the open, grassy section of the park where dogs are allowed off-leash. Chickadees chittered in the understory. A maniacal twitter sounded from the maple trees overhead. “Pileated woodpecker!” Morgan said gleefully. “Have you noticed an uptick this week? I swear these last three days they’ve been going off the charts.”
He turned around to head back to the falls, and on the way passed the memorial sign commemorating the 1999 Olympic Pipeline explosion and the three boys who died in the accident. Normally, “The Wild” podcast takes Morgan to remote locations — the Everglades, Glacier Bay, Death Valley — but sometimes he does stories closer to home, and last fall the show aired a segment about the disaster and the revival of the area burned by the explosion. It’s an emotionally wrenching subject — several people choke up during the episode — and it played to Morgan’s strengths as a broadcaster.
“The Wild” is immersive, landscape-level journalism that brings listeners right to the heart of untamed ecosystems. What makes the show tick is the host’s heart, Morgan’s unabashed wonder at all creatures great and small. The show’s nearly 100 episodes are peppered with him exclaiming “Wow!” or, his second favorite interjection, “Unbelievable!” He can be moved to tears easily — and then laugh just as quick. The Whatcom Creek disaster episode featured a similarly broad emotional range, and it is one of his favorites. “I’m an emotional kind of guy,” he said. “I’m in touch with my emotions, I think, and I don’t have to try very hard for them to surface in my storytelling.”
He stood at a small elbow of rock that juts out above the lower falls, where the creek pours down a narrow chute into a large pool. The water rose in an emerald froth and the pounding sound of the creek was enveloping. Morgan seemed transported. “Whenever I come to this spot, I just always think about how it’s always been here. It’s always been in this shape or form, in some manner, for thousands of years. And now you superimpose a public park on it and all of these human beings. And the human beings that were here have had a relationship with this place for so long, and you can see why. It’s just off the charts, isn’t it?”
To those cynics who think it might all be schtick, Lucy Soucek, one of Morgan’s producers at KUOW, offers assurances that he’s genuine: “He just shows up with his whole self.” Christopher Preston, a University of Montana professor and a fellow transplanted Brit who co-writes some of the program’s scripts, says, “That’s who he is — he lives a life full of emotion.”
It was time to return to the parking lot. One the way back, Morgan passed an elderly man decked out with binoculars and an outsized camera — a fellow birder. The man said he had seen one mallard drake on a log upstream, and Morgan eagerly shared with him his report of the woodpeckers he had heard. “We were just saying that the pileateds seem to have gone crazy these last three days.”
Once again at the stone bridge, Morgan talked about how he tries as best as he can to keep some of his work anchored here, even though most of his segments happen far away and are tailored for a national audience. “I traipse around everywhere, and it’s always nice to bring things home.” The Padilla Bay Foundation had recently invited him to talk about environmental education with 250 teachers for Storming the Sound in Mount Vernon, and this coming fall he will give an address to the whole student body of Squalicum High. In the meantime, he and his producers will start work on a new season of “The Wild,” and just this April he hosted and narrated a PBS TV series called “Our New World.”
Whether he’s talking to audiences on TV, on the radio or in person, all his work comes back to trying to make people feel more connected — to the natural world and each other.
“I mean, you walk through a park and you feel it, don’t you? We talk to a photographer, we meet someone who listens to ‘The Wild.’ It’s just because we are out in the trees, tapping into something, reminding us all where we came from in the not-too-distant past. If we were walking downtown, that wouldn’t happen.”
—By Jason Dove Mark
Jason Dove Mark is a Bellingham-based environmental journalist. He is the author of “Satellites in the High Country: Searching for the Wild in the Age of Man.” His next book, “The Earth Said Remember Me,” will be published summer 2026 by Norton.