Six Days on Haida Gwaii: A Visit to Moresby Island

Thursday was our final day on Haida Gwaii, as we were taking the 11 pm ferry back to Prince Rupert that night.  We decided to spend the day on Moresby Island.  Moresby is south of Graham Island and the second largest in the Charlottes.  It has one town, Sandspit, which boasts an airport and a population of 300 people.

The 25 minute ferry ride from Skidegate to Alliford Bay was as close as we would get to a boat tour of the islands.  Even a day tour to the park in the south, Gwaii Haanas, was $200 per person; more than a little out of our travel budget!  We were lucky to have a gorgeous sunny day after a few days of on and off showers.

The only shot we got of Sandspit was of this gigantic fish statue.  But we did stop by the Visitors' Centre in their very nice little airport and make a stop at the local Supervalu.  On Haida Gwaii, a name brand grocery store is quite exciting!

Our main destination for the day was Gray Bay, which is about 23 km down a logging road on the east side of the island.  We found a user-maintained campground with just two vehicles in it, and a stretch of beach with no one on it for miles.  We spent the afternoon reading in the sun (yes, a common theme) and wandering the beach.  Chad even went for a swim.

We also dropped by Secret Cove, next door to Gray Bay.  Which is less a secret and more a well marked small bay.  Chad wandered to the cove while I captured the amazing greenery of the surrounding forest.

Getting back from Sandspit around 7pm, we finished our time on Haida Gwaii by making ourselves dinner outside the Visitors' Centre in Queen Charlotte and soaking in some last minute views before heading to the ferry.

That was the end of our time on Haida Gwaii.  Since then, when asked what we thought of it, our response has been that it was cool but not exactly what we expected.  It's not as magical and mystical as it might have once been, particularly with the depressed economy, the changes wrought by long-term resource extraction and the fact that it is like many other rural BC areas whose existence rests on logging and fishing (and the thin hope of increased tourism).  But it is a unique place and we had a good time there, appreciating the quiet and the calmness.  Maybe if we return we will be able to get further out into the wild areas.

Return From Haida Gwaii

[By Chad] The ferry to Prince Rupert left at 11 pm, but you have to be at the terminal by 9 pm to check in.  We got there at 8:45 and it was already chaos, despite the load being only a couple of hundred people.  Apparently this is a popular sailing time - and our ferry travelled faster than usual in order to make a connection with the Prince Rupert-Port Hardy sailing that left early the next morning, so crossing time was only about 6.5 hours.

While there are rooms available to rent on the ferry, the quicker trip meant we would have had at most 6 hours to use one, and they weren't consistent with our budget, so we decided to do as most people were doing and sleep between the rows of seats on the floor of the ferry.  Yep, nothing but first class for us!  Having sleeping bags, thermarests and earplugs made this much better than sleeping on the floor of Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport, but it could have been better; they started playing the movie "Thor" at 11pm with a loud speaker right over our heads; excited Haida Gwaii kids ran up and down the aisles screaming until finally a PA announcement asked parents to please control their children; and it was pretty brightly lit.  So we might have squeezed out 3.5 hours of fitful sleep - but props to BC Ferries for providing free coffee and pastries at 4:30am, just before arrival.

A quick trip on deck as we threaded our way through the channel to the ferry dock was pretty cool.  It was pitch black, but then the container ship terminal emerged from thick fog as we passed within a ship's length of it.  Eerily beautiful - the photo doesn't do it justice.  (If you are more than a couple of hundred metres from those lights, they disappear and it's black again.)

So 5:30am and we're on the road in Prince Rupert!  Yikes.  Sarah got behind the wheel, and we drove endlessly until Vanderhoof.  Our original plan was to stop in nearby Prince George for the night, but it was only 1pm and we really didn't feel like paying a bunch of money to stay in Prince George.  So I jumped behind the wheel and started my driving shift - through endless rolling plains of forest, and even the odd intense thunderstorm, broken only by a stop in Granville Coffee in Quesnel for pie and coffee, and for gas in Williams Lake.  The scenery got a lot more enjoyable around Lac La Hache, which helped us power through the home stretch and make it to the Frosts' place in Kamloops by 8:20pm.  Queen Charlotte City to Kamloops in under 24 hours - about 1300km in one day!  We gave our poor car a well-deserved oil change after that epic drive, which capped off thousands upon thousands of kilometres we put on it this summer.

Six Days on Haida Gwaii: Queen Charlotte

We awoke Wednesday morning to the views below and breakfast in bed.  It was too much to resist; we decided to stay another night at the Spruce Point Lodge and to spend the day in Queen Charlotte.

Highly recommended by all the guidebooks and thus on our list of things to do was a visit to the Haida Heritage Museum in Skidegate.  It opened in 2007 to much ado, and contains a huge volume of Haida art and artifacts.

The museum from the shore.  A pretty impressive structure.

Dugout canoes in the canoe workshop

This Inuit art was traded with the Haida in a cultural exchange.

Haida canoes were the ultimate technology & very valuable; key to Haida maritime dominance (they raided a lot, and were compared to vikings).  They steamed the canoes with water & children's urine, which  gave them a more rounded shape at the ends.

From the museum we were off to spend some of the afternoon in the sunshine at a local coffee shop, soaking up the rays and the local atmosphere.  Queen B's was a great little place, until they overcharged us for our coffees.  (Note from Chad: an unfortunate part of being on the islands - many places want to squeeze what they can from you while you're there, rather than providing a good experience such that you'll return one day.)

That afternoon Chad also visited the pottery studio run by the owner of our hotel.  It's part of the'Art Walk', a suggested tour of local artists' shops and studios, which is heavily advertised on Haida Gwaii.

That night we stayed in to eat dinner (cooked on our campstove on the balcony outside our room) and drink a bottle of Bordeaux we brought back from Paris (in goblets thrown in the studio above).  Both were delicious.

There was a full moon that night.  I know I keep posting shots of the view from our room, but it was just so damn lovely!

Six Days on Haida Gwaii: Masset to Queen Charlotte

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.

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.

The golden spruce!  Not looking quite so golden now that it has been cut down for years.

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.

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.

Sandy cliffs

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.

Um, yes.  We've been camping for a few days.  

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!

Low-ish tide

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.

The house wine was perhaps not the tastiest we've had, though Chad is exaggerating here.