August 3/00

Shower, breakfast, and check out. Pick up fresh vegetables for the island. Head for the ferry dock and we’re the first RV in the line up. None too early it seems, as the waiting room and parking lot is filling up. We have reservations but must still get in the line-up for our tickets. A return ticket for overweight vehicle under 20’ with two passengers costs $404. We bag things we may want during the six+ hours of the crossing, as access to vehicles is not possible one hour after departure.

We breakfast lightly, and I take the truck and camper, while Cecile drives Keith’s Suburban back to the ferry. As we arrive at the active forestry road intersection, a logging truck comes along headed "our" way and we follow. Two kms down the road he pulls off to the left side and I think it is to let us pass. He honks madly and we wisely reverse to "safety" behind him, just as another 16’ wide monster barrels by. We make it onto the 10:30 a.m. ferry with four minutes to spare.

Queen Charlotte City is just five kms from the Skidegate ferry landing. We drop off the Suburban. Time for groceries, camera batteries, and a nice lunch at a funky tea shop, "Hanging by a Thread". A look around, and a drive through this busiest of the Island’s centres confirms that there is a place in BC without theatres, Starbucks, car dealerships or billboards.

Our purpose now is to visit Naikoon Park, and the settlements of Masset and Skidegate. Heading north on the paved road with a brief stop at the much-photographed Balancing Rock, we go to Tlell, the southern gateway to Naikoon. Misty Meadows just a three-minute walk from the ocean is our first provincial campground on the island.

August 4/00

Sunny but a bit cooler, off to Port Clements after breakfast. Another quiet town! Where is everyone? Actually, the whole island — campgrounds, highway (singular), beaches, towns and streets, stores — is incredibly quiet, laid-back, with seemingly very few tourists. We buy two macadamia nut cookies, pass up the logging museum (it seems closed and much of the equipment displayed is visible outdoors), and head up to Masset. Crews have been clearing the roadsides of over-hanging birch trees and locals with big smiles are making sure they get next year’s supply of firewood.

Masset and Old Masset are Haida centres. We get more groceries at the Co-Op, and stop for coffee at Haida Bucks! We are not surprised to meet a couple from Anvil Cove, fellow adventurers also visiting the town. We stop for gas, swallow hard, and fill up at .83 cents per litre (65 cents will feel like a bargain later) before heading up the gravel road towards the north end of Naikoon and Tow Hill. (The only gas available at this end of the island is at this one station in Masset.)

The north shore features a few quaint seaside B&B establishments, and waterfront cabins. We stop at Agate Beach and select a site (there are a few campers) right on the beach with a full view of the waves crashing onto the coast of Graham Island. We park as close as possible to a treed wind break protection from the cold wind. When the fog and clouds lift we can see the mountains of Alaska across Dixon Entrance. In the afternoon we walk along the pebbled shore looking for agates in the rising tide and blowing sand. On our way back we get a glimpse of the base of Tow Hill, a 100 metre high geological anomaly rising up through the fog. We hope to climb it tomorrow as well as see another oddity, the blowhole. After supper the other couple from Anvil Cove happen along. We have tea and marvel at how compact this island world is.

August 5/00

Tow Hill still has its head in the clouds. We return to Masset to pick up a newspaper and to visit Old Masset. A number of poles distinguish some of the homes and indicate the shops of the native carvers. They are not yet open, so we drive to the cemetery—non-natives are not allowed in—and stop by a gift shop to purchase a couple of books on the Haida and Ninstints in particular. We drive by the Delkatla Bird Sanctuary but fail to see any of the 130 species of migratory birds scheduled to stop here.

By now, the sun has nearly burned off the fog on Tow Hill. We begin our ascent over an asphalt-shingle covered sloping boardwalk, which takes you right to the top in 30 minutes. Unfortunately, we only get a glimpse of North Beach, and see little of South Beach where we are camped, as the fog and clouds continue to obscure the view.

At the bottom of the hill, we take the path that follows the base of the mountain for another 20 minutes to the blowhole, a volcanic oddity, where at mid-tide, water if forced through a hole in the shoreline rock, creating a "whale" of an eruption. There is actually so much whale action, there appears to be a number of blowholes. More interesting perhaps is the columnar basalt of Tow Hill, formed through a vertical lava flow, and rising from the sea’s edge to its 100 metre treed crest. Some of the columns have detached over the years and crumbled into a honeycombed heap, to the dark volcanic shore below. This is the hill from which Haida legend claims the cruel ogre Tow threw boulders to slay the Haida warrior Hopi, as retold in Kathleen Dalzell’s The Queen Charlotte Islands: Vol. 2: Places and Names.

Another legend also claims the distant Rose Spit in particular is the birthplace of the Haida. "The wellspring of Haida mythology—it is about their very origins as a people and culture," according to Ian Gill in "Haida Gwaii".

August 6/00

We leave Agate Beach a bit heavier (more souvenir agate and driftwood) on a sunny morning - this would have been a better day to climb Tow Hill - and head south. The highway is deserted. It is Sunday, when we approach Tlell; signs advertise the Tlell Fall Fair. Volunteers stop all traffic on Highway 16, (assuming everyone on the road is going to the fair). They direct us towards the ball field where all the vehicles in the Charlottes appear to be parked. Misty Meadows is across the street so we squeeze into a site by the campground woodpile - they had warned us to reserve ahead; sure enough all 30 sites are taken — and we go to the first fall fair in BC.

Characters seem to have stepped out of the 60’s. Garden produce, fishing derby, logger sports, baking and crafts are featured. A rock hound has fossils he collected from the blasting of logging roads. Kids (and adults) compete in sandcastle construction. Tomato Joe’s produce provides garden-fresh sandwich making. A walk on the beach ends the festivities.

August 7/00

Skidegate Mission is a very pleasant Haida town facing east on shallow Skidegate Inlet. A couple of fine new poles stand in front of well-kept homes. We visit the sight of the Queen Charlotte Island Museum where Haida artists are carving monumental cedar poles. These will grace the longhouses and grounds in the future recreation of Nunstints/Sgaang Gwaii.

Unfortunately it is a holiday and the museum is closed. I talk to a sculptor assembling small bent wood boxes. He explains they are gifts to be presented to chiefs in the Hull at the Museum of Civilization. In a future ceremony, the remains of Haida taken to the capital and "preserved" by the Canadian government will be placed in the larger boxes lining the walls (there are 150) and "repatriated" to Gwaii Haanas. Here also in the famous LOO TAA, Bill Reid’s 50-foot cedar canoe. Another carver nearby is working on the main pole for one of the houses. He invites me to sign the guestbook, and shows me an architectural drawing of the future village. Though it is BC Day, he says sometimes its good to work alone.

We head into Charlotte for lunch on the deck at Howler’s Restaurant.

With few camping options, we return to our "usual" campsite by the woodpile at Misty Meadows. The neighbour complains of the green firewood — birch no less! I tell him the secret is a supply of dry cedar kindling in your camper. A final walk, a final campfire, we must be at Skidegate Landing in the ferry lineup by 10:00 a.m. tomorrow.

August 8/00

The Lam Coffee Shop in Charlotte serves us our eggs, bacon and hash browns promptly. We line up ready to board at 9:50. The same care and attention is brought to the loading of vehicles today. We are first on after the cars and wedged in just ahead of a semi-trailer.

The Queen of Prince Rupert leaves promptly at 11:00 a.m. There is no room to spare on this remarkably smooth crossing. It is difficult to believe this is the same Hecate Strait we crossed earlier. The hum of the engines makes it impossible to fight sleep. We doze and read and arrive in Prince Rupert at 5:00 p.m.

We make sandwiches from Tomato Joe’s tomatoes. On an evening walk to Cow Bay, I discover Yamamoto’s fishing boat preserved in a local park. The small craft floated across the Pacific after its owner disappeared on a routine fishing day in Japan, September 26^th, 1985. It ended up on the West Coast of the Charlottes. Prince Rupert residents restored the boat, which they discovered originated in their sister city, Owase.

August 9/00

All the excitement and new experiences of the past weeks must have taken their toll. It is 8:30 a.m. by the time we leave Rupert. Of course a return to "civilization" meant a short night when I woke at 2:30 a.m. with local rowdies howling in the street, four floors below.

Overcast and spitting rain. Traffic is light, we stop in Hazelton and briefly visit the village of K’San. There are reproductions of Roy Henry Vickers’ work in the gift shop. The instructor tells me Vickers studied carving here in the earlier days of the school which opened its doors in 1970.

The return trip along the Skeena east on Hwy 16 is again breathtaking, the veils of rain outlining the peaks, shades of gray, green and silver, blue lakes competing with the sky, quaking aspen contrasting with other greens of the valleys, waterfalls streaming off the glaciers.

We stop for coffee in Burns Lake and camp at Beaumont Provincial Park.

August 10/00

We are on the road by 7:00 a.m. Without having decided to make it home, we still arrive in Maple Ridge at 9:00 p.m. that night.

Covering the distance from Prince George to the Lower Mainland in one day provides a panorama of the diverse geography of our province. The physical beauty of British Columbia is truly awe-inspiring, from the Cariboo aspen and jackpine, the sagebrush country between Cache Creek and Boston Bar to the dry, weathered, knuckled and veined landscape of the Fraser Canyon, like the hands of on octogenarian; the grandeur of the Coast Mountains around Hope, cloaked in the golds, violets, greys and purples of the valley in the dusk of an August evening. Indeed, it is a fitting conclusion to our exceptional "Voyage of Discovery" to Gwaii Haanas.

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