Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site - or five days in the absolute wilderness

The ancient Haida village of Tanu (T'aanuu Llnagaay) was the first stop on our five-day paddle in Gwaii Haanas. We used our radio to hail the on-site Watchmen (these are Haida people who live and guide at these ancient sites) and asked for permission to come ashore. Our Haida guide met us right at our kayaks and watched while we lugged the beast of the double kayak up the beach away from the encroaching tide. Then he took us on a tour of wonder in the forest. It may not look like it in these photographs, but you are staring at a once thriving ancient Haida village. Back in ~1870 this village was full of life; it is estimated that 540 people lived here. Looking around today, however, you wouldn't know it because the forest has reclaimed the majority of the village in ~140 years. But depressions from the longhouses as well as their posts and beams remain. You can see the carvings on a totem pole to the left (look on the bottom of the fallen pole) and you can see an image of the village back in the 1870s below. Amazing isn't it - how quickly the forest reclaims a village?

 The Watchman who guided us around the village of his ancestors was a really neat guy. He was pretty darn well-traveled, spoke Japanese better than his native Haida tongue (very few Haida still speak their language), and was learning to draw Haida art while living with his father in the Watchman cabin for the summer. He took us into his cabin, made us tea, and showed us this old book with photographs of the village we had just walked through. We were stunned at the difference between then and now.

 

Here is the village now. You can still see the remains of the beams and posts and even the slight depressions in the ground from the longhouses. In the photograph on the left, I'm staring at an old mortuary pole. The Haida people placed the remains of their deceased in grave boxes at the top of these mortuary poles. You can pick out the standing mortuary poles in the old image of the village, they are the shorter poles where the pole top is slightly wider than the base.

The Haida people believe in letting their ancient villages return to nature, so these places are not "preserved" and rather are allowed to become a living part of the forest again. It is a lovely way to end one part of life and continue into another. But it also makes me appreciate seeing these sites even more, as the next generation surely will not see these structures. You can really visualize the change from thriving village to thriving Sitka spruce forest in the image below. You are looking at the remains of a longhouse. One part of the cedar house collapsed onto another and a Sitka spruce seeding took root on top of the two. If you look carefully at the long cedar log, you can see the difference between the living (and huge) Sitka spruce root and the cedar log below it. Really neat.

After spending several hours at Tanu, we reluctantly said goodbye to the beautiful site and our guide and excitedly said hello to wilderness. We hoped we wouldn't see a single soul after leaving Tanu, and Gwaii Haanas fulfilled all our dreams and then some!

We paddled around the southern end of Tanu Island, heading west toward the tip of the island where we hoped to set up our first camp. This paddle was magical. It was raining a lovely, gorgeous rain with no wind or waves. The mountains were encased in soft clouds and you could hear every bird, raindrop, and breath. Loud breaths to be exact. A closer look with binoculars revealed three orcas, including a big male, far off in the distance - wooohoooo! Too bad they were not heading toward us, but we were thrilled with the sighting in either case. 

We found a campsite on a big beach after a few hours of paddling and it couldn't have been more perfect. An easy beach for landing, a perfect spot for a tent, a great spot for intertidal dorks to dork out, and the view!! Oh the view!!

The best camping spot ever? Our other sites were also amazing, but I'll admit that this was my favorite spot from the trip.

I checked out the intertidal zone (while Jay took the kayak out to set a crab pot) and was distraught, but not surprised, to find evidence of sea star wasting syndrome in the purple sea star, Pisaster ochraceus. You may think this sea star looks healthy, but look again. All the arms are sort of deflated looking and the bottom two arms are tiny and turning white. In time (a few days) the sea star will lose one arm, then the other, then another, etc. until it simply melts and dies. Could you imagine if this happened to humans? We would start losing weight, then a finger or two would fall off, followed by an arm, then a leg, and then we would disintegrate into a pile of bones. Ebola sounds nice when compared to what this would be if it happened to humans. Lucky for us, this syndrome is not infecting anything but sea stars. Jay and I provided the first recorded evidence of the syndrome in Haida Gwaii, which is nothing to be really proud of. We found the syndrome whenever we had a low tide and remembered to look for it. This was interesting to us because Haida Gwaii is a relatively isolated archipelago - so whatever causes this syndrome (they think it is a virus but are not sure) travels easily.

Why should we care about sea star wasting syndrome?? Well, sea stars, like the purple star species, are keystone species. This means that they play an especially important role in the ecology of a community. Without the keystone species holding the community together, the entire community could change drastically or collapse. Sea otters are a great example of a keystone species. They eat sea urchins and urchins eat kelp (like the gorgeous kelp on the left that we saw in Gwaii Haanas). When you hunt otters to near or complete regional extinction the urchins explode and eat all the kelp. Without a kelp forest, an entire marine ecosystem collapses and you get the dreaded urchin barren. When you remove purple sea stars from the intertidal, the mussels they typically eat take over the entire rocky intertidal and exclude other species from making homes on the rocks, making that intertidal zone a homogeneous environment rather than a diverse and resilient marine community. And the syndrome isn't only affecting this species, it is appearing in almost all the sea stars species along the west coast and species along the Atlantic as well. Scientists are working as fast as possible to figure out the cause....but not much can be done now except watch loads of sea stars turn into piles of goo and try to determine if the juvenile stars will survive the outbreak.

Are you sick of me blabbing all the time now? I'll shut up. Just enjoy some photos! This image is looking into Echo Harbor.

We came here to eat our lunch next to a bunch of dead, stinky, rotting salmon. No really, we did. Why? Well, we had heard that there was an active salmon run here so we paddled over to check it out. We saw the salmon carcasses first (note the white dots in the water behind Jay) and then spotted the little stream.

Jay took up a spot in the middle of the run (these were pink salmon or humpies)

He was curious about catching one with his hands. This one went right in between his legs.

But this one didn't get away as easily. Jay was shocked that he was able to catch a fish by hand! He promptly put it right back, upstream, and still alive.

After leaving that magical place, we paddled south for a few hours and found a tiny, rocky island where we could pitch our tent. Little islands don't mean you are guaranteed a black bear-free evening, but the likelihood is higher, so it made our lives easier (no hanging the bear bag, there were no trees anyway!). We had another problem to deal with though - the tide. We thought we would be O.K. pitching our tent in the only spot available on this little island because we could see the "wrack line" where the tide was last high and the tent was above that. Nevertheless, Jay set an alarm in the middle of the night to check on the tide and it was, ummmm, right there! But it never got high enough to make us scramble to get the tent to higher ground. That said, look at the photo on the left and you can see the line marking where the rocks are still wet from the tide. Yup. That is how high the water came to our tent. Intelligent little folks we are. It worked out fine though!

In the morning we had a lovely tidepool to play in! It was filled with bat stars and sculpins! Once we packed up and left this awesome island we paddled further sound into De la Beche Inlet, aiming at De la Beche Island for our third camp. But the journey to the next campsite is always the best part of the day. We paddled past rocky cliffs, bald eagles, so many massive jellyfish right beneath our boats, and beautiful Sitka spruce trees. We stopped for lunch by a stream, refilled and treated our water from the stream, and paddled on. The wind picked up, as it did every day, and we had to paddle hard to make it across to De la Beche Island. We made it eventually, with soaking wet arms, and happily found an awesome beach with a mossy forest to camp in. Actually, I didn't think it looked awesome at first, but Jay inspected and found us a perfect spot to camp and I discovered a huge log that served as our evening kitchen! Yippee!

The sunset was horrible that evening.

Morning sun (the first time we had seen the sun on the paddle) on De la Beche Island. The intertidal zone was AWESOME here and we had a lot of fun hopping around on the rocks.

Mossy mattress

De la Beche Inlet (an awesome clam bed is just under the water in this photo)

Lunch on the perfect rock in Skittagetan Lagoon.

We crossed some bumpy water to get over to the west side of Lyell Island where we found a lovely little cove with a mossy spot for a tent and a big rocky outcropping for sunset watching and tidepooling. Lyell Island is ground zero for the peaceful protests the Haida people organized in an attempt to stop the clearcutting that was occurring throughout their native home of Haida Gwaii. These 1985 anti-logging protests eventually lead to the creation of the park we were now happily paddling in and thoroughly enjoying. We owe everything to the brave Haida people who stood up for the protection of their ancestral lands and people.

Happy paddlers

We set up dinner and sunset-viewing from the log on the far left. This was our last night in the wilderness and we lingered on this outcropping until it was almost too dark to see our way back to the tent.

The sunset was amazing that night. If you look at all the photos (link provided at the bottom of the blog) you can see all the changes in color and light.

The next morning we broke camp and paddled up Beresford Inlet - checking out some cool shorebirds and watching some loons. Then we paddled into the Bischof Islands where we were hoping to be found and picked up by the water taxi. They had told us that they were going to hail us on our radio around 10 or 11am, but we had not heard a peep from the radio - something that made me a little nervous since we didn't really have much extra food in case they didn't pick us up. After unsuccessfully trying to hail some Watchman on another nearby island we decided to stop and eat lunch in a visible place. It was at this point that we finally heard the taxi hailing us and we were able to tell them our location. They came to us, we loaded our crap into the boat, and settled in for the long ride back through the wilderness we just paddled through on our journey south. It was a beautiful and unforgettable paddle. We already are thinking about where to go when we head back - but next time I think we will just fly in from Vancouver rather than taking three days worth of ferries!

Photos are here (more will soon be uploaded from our day on Graham Island in Haida Gwaii and our drive back to Anacortes): https://picasaweb.google.com/111221596171793333099/HaidaGwaii2014AndOtherAreasOfBritishColumbia?authkey=Gv1sRgCO7y6IjJytrt_QE