HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LIN! BEST WISHES FOR THE COMING YEAR!
Day 307 – Our signal here is intermittent, not as good as the last campground, but better than others. It rained on & off last night and all day today. We’re hoping the rain stops before our 2nd Grizzly Bear Trip tomorrow! When we checked in with Tide Rip this afternoon, we asked if they’d seen bears since Tuesday which is the last time we went out with them. They said they had. (They ask that passengers check in before 5 p.m. the day before their scheduled trip in case there are changes.) Fingers crossed for a day with lots of Bear sightings and no rain.
Because we’ll be gone all day tomorrow and are leaving Vancouver Island Tuesday, today was the only day we had to explore this area. But it was raining. We took a drive and hoped for the best. First we took a long, but well-maintained, gravel road to a very small town called Holberg. There were no other towns and no other houses during the hour and 15 minutes it took us to get there. The scenery was beautiful, even in the rain, with dense woods and large lakes all along the drive. We stopped at “the Famous Shoe Tree”, and also stopped to eat our sandwiches at Nahwitti Lake Recreation Site, a primitive remote campground by the Lake.
Continuing on, the road got rougher as we neared Holberg. The trees were varying in age and growth due to logging and replanting at different times. Some of the area had been logged more than 75 years ago, and the trees that had been planted in their place were very large. Holberg was a logging town and a First Nations reservation. Some First Nation community prefer that you don’t take any pictures – others don’t mind at all.
Leaving Holberg we looked for the road that was on a map that would take us, as part of a loop drive, to Coal Harbour, another small town on a beautiful inlet. We couldn’t find the road. It was not on another map that we had, and the GPS didn’t have it either. So we turned around and drove back to Port Hardy where we caught the proper road, a paved one, to Coal Harbour.
These few towns here in the northernmost part of Vancouver Island, are basically in existence to service the fishing and logging industries. There are probably more bears in these woods than there are people in these towns. Various First Nation tribes have called this area home for thousands of years.
Coal Harbour was bigger than Holberg – their road was paved, after all. The scenery around the town was amazing with the deep water inlet and harbor, the mountains, and the forests. Still, there was only one road in “town” with no gas station, no grocery store (except for the supplies you could buy at the bait and tackle store), a field where maybe 5 trucks & trailers were parked, a small marina (which did have fishing charter boats), 1 small apartment building, 1 old house for sale, 2 small streets where the First Nation peoples lived, supposedly a lodge but we never saw it, tons of parking for fishermen and boats, and a short street with maybe 10 nicer houses located right by the water. And this was a tourist attraction. After walking out on the docks and taking a few pictures, we drove back to the RV to make Candied Smoked Salmon Chowder – a big pot of it – because we’ll be too busy to cook for the next couple of nights.
