Although we had a great time in North Beach, as mentioned at the end of the last post we experienced a night of downpour, and awoke to a morning indicating that the day would be much the same. We were lucky enough that at least the campsite has a fancy Haida-longhouse-looking shelter, complete with glassed in windows, through which we could watch the rain while we made our breakfast. There we met some people from Vancouver who were on a two week bike trip whose stove had broken down mid-trip, showing us that we could definitely be worse off. We were happy to share some hot water & stove time!
The forests weren't the stunning, old growth displays of magic that I had envisioned when coming to Haida Gwaii, but they are shockingly green and looked pretty damn cool on a soggy day (excuse the questionable quality of some of the photos, which are courtesy of our waterproof camera).
(Note from Chad: part of this might be our long residence in Vancouver & Vancouver Island, where coastal temperate rainforests abound. We met people from the prairies who were astounded by the "hiking" opportunities, which to us seemed to be flat forest walks through mossy second growth - your standard Vancouver-type forest walk.)
Our first stop of the day was to visit the golden spruce itself, a fifteen minute drive on a logging road out of Port Clements. When the tree was alive, tour busses used to travel up this road for tourists to see it.
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| Although most of the Charlottes have been logged, especially in the flat northeast, some impressively large trees still remain. Perhaps we would have been even more impressed if we hadn't visited the crazy gigantic redwoods in California back in July. |
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| The golden spruce! Not looking quite so golden now that it has been cut down for years. |
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| After the golden spruce was cut down, numerous attempts have been made to grow a new golden spruce from cuttings taken off the original tree. This attempt has been growing for about ten years and has made it to a towering height of two feet. It is surrounded by a chain link fence - security equal to the former military station on the north of Graham Island. One of the problems with golden spruce grafts is that they tend to grow sideways, especially if taken from anywhere but the top of the parent tree - which isn't good for achieving early stage height. |
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| A murky, murky pond full of humus - one of many on Haida Gwaii. Unfortunately the water at North Beach, though allegedly potable, was a lighter version of this. |
Our next stop of the day was a visit to the shipwreck of the Pesuta, the log barge seen in an earlier post that ran aground in 1929. Not a being a diver like Chad, this was the first shipwreck I've seen in real life. Definitely worth the little 10k round trip hike to the beach.
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| Sandy cliffs |
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| The ship remnants (only the bow portion is left) are below high tide, in the middle of nowhere. It seemed like something from the TV series Lost. |
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| Um, yes. We've been camping for a few days. |
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| On the way back we decided to take an alternate route along the river bank. Which was cool, because there were so many salmon in the river we saw one jump every 10-20 seconds. But not cool for the reason above. Luckily for me that's Chad's food, not mine. |
On the way back down to Queen Charlotte we made an obligatory stop at St. Mary's Spring. Legend has it that those who drink from the spring will return to the Charlottes.
You may note there is no photo of me drinking from St. Mary's Spring, for the simple reason that the water was the lovely brown colour discussed above. My theory is that I usually travel where Chad travels, so it was sufficient for just one of us to have a drink. (Note from Chad: only the rocks were brown, the water was pretty clear.)
Back in Queen Charlotte with a soggy tent and the chance of more rain, we splurged and checked into the Spruce Point Lodge. It's in the 'quiet' part of Queen Charlotte (this being a town of 800 people, things can get pretty crazy...?). We were treated to fantastic views and breakfast in bed each morning!
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| Low-ish tide |
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| High-ish tide |
We ended the day with dinner at the Ocean View Restaurant, recommended for its seafood by pretty much everyone we talked to on the island. Chad chose to have salmon (sockeye), figuring it must be fresh after we saw all the fish jumping in the river that afternoon. I chose... pasta. Yeah, I'm still not eating fish.
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| The house wine was perhaps not the tastiest we've had, though Chad is exaggerating here. |
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