GWAII HANAAS
On the coast of British Columbia lies a jewel the indigenous people call “Place of Wonder”
The dinghy grounds on the gravel of S’Gang Gwaay (Skang Gway), and I jump out and let the large swell carry it well up the beach. I pull it above the tide line, tie the painter to a log and then look back toward Grey Cove where Hawk bobs and dances over her anchor. The barest indentation in the side of the island, the kelp-choked cove offers little protection from the 20-knot winds and even less from the large Pacific swell. From where he stands on the foredeck checking the anchor, Evans sees me hesitating and waves. He isn’t comfortable leaving the boat at the only anchorage on the island, so I have come ashore to explore this UNESCO World Heritage site on my own.
Killer Whale in the Queen Charlotte Islands
On a map, S’Gang Gwaay lies at the southern termination of a reversed comma of islands and channels sixty miles offshore from Prince Rupert just to the south of British Columbia’s border with Alaska. Called the Queen Charlotte Islands on our chart, the two large and almost 150 small islands are known as Haida Gwaii (Hie-da Gwie) or “Islands of the People” to the Haida, the indigenous “First Nations” people who have lived here for more than 10,000 years. The southern half of the 175-mile long archipelago has been designated a national park called Gwaii Hanaas (Place of Wonder) that can only be reached by float plane, kayak or boat. At the tail end of the park, S’Gang Gwaay (“Wailing Island,” called Anthony Island on our chart) is home to the world’s best-preserved totem village, a village that was abandoned just over a century ago when epidemics decimated the Haida population.
A trail leads from the beach into the pine trees, and I follow this past a pump house and across a small point of land to another beach. I leave the cool shadows and filtered green light of the forest and find myself standing on the foreshore of a perfectly protected lagoon separated from the sea by a large islet covered with full grown Sitka spruce trees. In the absolute peace of that place, only the soft exhalations of the sea as it caresses the shore break the silence. A wide beach of fine gravel and coarse rocks lie above the still water, and behind this a small forest of totem poles guards a large, grassy meadow. A few of the poles still stand straight, but most lean at drunken angles. The wood of the weathered poles shines silver in the sunlight except where shadows pool in the eyes and mouths of fierce, frowning figures. They were carved to tell stories, to terrify enemies, to memorialize the lives of great men. They were raised more than a hundred years ago to replace totem poles that fell before them, which replaced others that fell before that. But when these poles succumb to nature’s inexorable demands, the last evidence of at least 2,000 years of human habitation in this protected cove will rot away to dust in the grass and moss along the lagoon’s shore.
REMNANTS OF A CULTURE
We arrived at Haida Gwaii three weeks ago after a pleasant light-air upwind crossing of sixty-mile wide Hecate Strait that separates the archipelago from the mainland. The Strait’s shallow depths and tidal currents result in high, steep waves in strong winds, giving it a nasty reputation. Before making the short passage, we had waited for a week tucked in behind an island on the mainland side of Hecate Strait while the buoys a few miles away reported gale-force southeasterly winds and waves of ten to fifteen feet between us and the Queen Charlottes. By the time the weather broke, we had slipped from June into July and summer had arrived.
The bulk of the Queen Charlottes (or Haida Gwaii) consists of a large northern island, called Graham Island, separated by the Skidegate Inlet and the narrow Skidegate Channel from a large southern island, called Moresby Island. Much of Graham Island has been clearcut, and logging continues to this day providing much-needed employment. Moresby Island is shaped a bit like a dragon with a flowing tail along which runs a spine of mountains known as the San Cristoval Range. The clearcutting on Moresby Island has been confined to the body of the island; the tail, cut deep by fjords on either side, remains untouched along with the dozens of small islands and intricate channels lying to the east. This is the area of Gwaii Hanaas, the park we intended to spend the next month exploring. Access to the park is strictly limited in order to minimize the impact of visitors on the islands and to preserve the wilderness experience. We had made a reservation for our visit before leaving the mainland by phoning Tourism BC and paying about $60 each for a four-week stay. Before we could enter the park we had to attend an orientation session at Queen Charlotte City which lies on the Graham Island side of Skidegate Inlet.
Dawn in the Queen Charlotte Islands
As we started down the four-mile wide mouth of the channel, billowing dark clouds flowed down from the ridge tops to the west and we could see rain falling. The lowering gray clouds, silver water and rocky ridges a few miles distant contrasted sharply with the blue skies overhead, the forested slopes ashore and the brightly-painted houses of Queen Charlotte City. No more than a village of three streets running parallel to the waterfront, the small settlement consisted of a dozen tourist businesses and about the same number of restaurants and shops. Though it was almost 5:00, we went ashore to the Queen Charlotte Visitor Info Center and found that we could attend the orientation session that evening.
Besides the wilderness of islands, fjords, channels and mountains, the park also contains five Haida heritage sites, places of cultural significance to the Haida that are manned by “Watchmen” – Haida volunteers who spend the summer ensuring that no harm comes to these sacred sites. The orientation session ensures that park visitors know how to deal safely and respectfully with the park’s inhabitants, including a large population of black bears, and with the heritage sites they will encounter. Our hour and a half session, led by a young Haida woman with jet black hair and slightly oriental eyes who happens to be a park ranger, turned out to be an interesting and informative introduction to Haida history told by one whose grandmother had witnessed the near extinction of her people and whose father was serving as a Watchman at one of the heritage sites that summer.
The Haida have lived on these islands for somewhere around 10,000 years. They were here when Columbus discovered the New World, when Christ walked the earth, when the Egyptians built the pyramids – and for some 5,000 years before that. Anthropologists believe they arrived at the end of the last Ice Age shortly after the first humans crossed the land bridge from Siberia. During the summer, like all the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, the Haida fished and foraged, traveling widely in their large canoes, up to 60 feet in length. They were much feared by their neighbors for their raids on the mainland where they took slaves as well as food and other treasures. They were virtually untouchable on their island stronghold, for the mainland tribes had neither the knowledge to build ocean-going canoes nor the navigational skills to reach the offshore islands. When the autumn came, they returned to their winter villages where they lived off what they had gathered in the summer. There they carved their totem poles, wove their ceremonial robes, developed intricate dances and turned the most mundane objects into works of art.
At the time of European discovery, the Haida population has been estimated at between 15,000 and 30,000, and winter villages lay in almost every protected cove. Even tiny S’Gang Gwaay, half a mile long and a quarter mile wide, was home to about 300 people. The Haida lived in long houses made of cedar accessed through a huge totem pole with a door carved through the bottom. More totem poles stood in front of each long house telling the story of the extended family within. Mortuary boxes carrying the remains of chiefs and shamans balanced atop other poles. Like other indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest, the Haida used cedar for everything from their totem poles to their long houses, from canoes to clothing, from bowls to fishing gear, from jewelry to buttons. These tribes are believed to be the only indigenous people with permanent settlements that never learned to make pottery. They had no need – their ingeniously constructed bentwood boxes were watertight and were used to store liquids, to cook, to carry their possessions, and to house their dead.
The first “flying canoes” were sighted off the north end of Graham Island in 1774 when Spaniard Juan Perez came to the islands. The islanders quickly learned that the men manning the canoes were neither ghosts nor cormorants as first supposed, but flesh and blood men greedy for sea otter pelts. Having gotten a taste of the advantages of metal over wood, the Haida were quick to comply. In one short century, more than 10,000 sea otter were harvested from the islands, and then there were no more to be found. In that same period, all upon which the Haida depended – whales, salmon, cod, and even the old-growth Cedar from which they made their longhouses and canoes – had suffered from the rapacious attentions of the newcomers. And smallpox had decimated the Haida, reducing the population to a mere 600 people who abandoned the 50 or 60 villages throughout the islands to congregate in Skidegate and Massett on Graham Island. The park ranger who ran our orientation remembered her grandmother’s stories of the abandonment of the last of those villages, including S’Gang Gwaay, at the nadir of her people’s history.
In a couple of generations, the Haida lost their weavers, their storytellers, their shamans, their canoe builders, their navigators, their warriors, their healers, their basket weavers… The tattered remnants from a dozen different clans came together in Massett and Skidegate and tried to preserve something of their culture and heritage. But entire dialects were lost, whole lineages were forgotten, critical stories died with their tellers. The culture could never be put back the way it was.
RISING FROM THE ASHES
As we rounded the narrow headland separating Dana Inlet from Logan Inlet, Hawk rolled and pitched in the sloppy southeasterly swell still running up Hecate Strait. We had left Skidegate Inlet four days before, and then spent two days sitting out a gale in a sheltered anchorage off the Carmichael Passage that runs between Moresby Island and Louise Island. There the bottom was littered with cables from old log booms, and the hills were still recovering from clearcutting sometime in the 1960s. Four decades on, the long scars of landslides were still plainly visible where precious topsoil had slipped down the denuded slopes to be lost in the waters below. There had been a bit of birdsong at dawn, but a Raven’s harsh croak was all we heard for the rest of the day. We had explored the cove in the dinghy and found nothing living in the inter-tidal zone except for a few baby mussels trying to find a foothold on muddy rocks.
After less than a mile and a half in the open waters of Hecate Strait, we slipped back into the sheltered waters of Logan Inlet and entered Gwaii Hanaas National Park. Instead of the uniformity and homogeneity of the trees in the inlet just to the north of us, mighty cedars and spruce trees rose in serrated ranks from the steep slopes to heights of a hundred feet and more. When I peered into the understory, I saw mosses and lichens clinging to low branches and fungi growing on moist trunks. Several dozens large birds squawked and tussled over some drying islets, and it was only when I looked through the binoculars that I realized they were bald eagles, not seagulls. As we motored into the dead calm of the channel, we kept getting distracted by all the eagles sitting in the trees, and Hawk wove drunkenly from one side to the other while we exclaimed and took pictures. One took off from a branch, and for the first time I heard its piping, twittering call. I remembered then the legend of one of the coast tribes that says the gods gave him this strange, high voice to he wouldn’t get too full of himself given the marvelous qualities that made him the king of all the birds.
To the south of us, the rounded back of Lyell Island rose above the smaller Tanu Island that formed the southern side of Logan Inlet. On its slopes I thought I could make out a few large patches where the trees were all of the same height and age. Back in 1985, after seven years of arguments and negotiations, the government of British Columbia gave a Canadian company permission to begin logging on Lyell Island. But the Haida refused. Even the promise of employment could not induce them to change their minds. Eventually three million people and the federal government rallied to pledge their support for the protection of South Moresby and its surrounding islands. But that was not enough. British Columbia resented being dictated to by Ottawa. When the province approved logging on the hitherto untouched southern slopes of Lyell Island, the Haida protested at the logging sites, tribal chiefs chained themselves to trees, and 72 Haida – many elders in their sixties and seventies – were arrested and charged with criminal contempt of court. It took the passage of a unanimous resolution to support the Haida by the Canadian parliament to end the confrontation. Logging stopped on July 11, 1987.
We came into the entrance at Echo Harbour to find mussels growing thick on the rocks and a few red and purple starfish below them, stranded by the retreating tide. A half dozen different species of kelp were visible in the depths. Steep slopes rose from the water covered by a mixed coastal forest of cedar, spruce and fir except at the head where a stream foamed across a grassy meadow and a narrow inlet cut off to the north. An hour before low, we took the dinghy up that channel and found ourselves in five feet of fast moving water which wound between sandy banks backed by grass-covered meadows. At the head of the lagoon, a wide torrent rushed out of the forest, a rushing waterfall some ten or fifteen feet high and more than a hundred wide. From where we sat in the dinghy, we could see the meandering stream bordered by light colored beach, the grassy meadow up on the river’s banks with half a dozen deer grazing in it, the wide white slash of the waterfall at the head of the lagoon, and beyond the pine forest stepping up the steep ridges around the sheer, black rock faces, and the dispersing clouds still twisting around the tops of the peaks far above. The only sound was the rushing of the water.
The Haida won another victory when the Canadian logging company, MacMillan Bloedel, sold out to Weyerhauser. Part of the assets transferred in 2000 included logging rights to the Queen Charlottes, and the Haida objected saying that the transfer was encumbered by aboriginal title. Weyerhauser’s own employees laid down their tools and participated in a daylong walkout to support the rights of the Haida in deciding the fate of their own islands. The courts eventually found in the Haida’s favor, and held both the government and the company liable. This finding sent shock waves throughout Canada may well have paved the way for the Haida to regain complete control of the Queen Charlottes, including all logging and mineral rights.
We woke the next day to find a cloudless sky and not a breath of wind. Perfect reflections surrounded us on the dark-colored water, and it looked as if Hawk were sitting on the slope of a pine-forested ridge. Beachcraft, the Canadian boat sharing the anchorage with us, hovered over her reflection. As I stood on deck, I couldn’t help but feel grateful for the foresight of the Haida leaders who had not chosen the easy path, who had instead kept this land pristine and perfect as a reminder of what once had been… and a promise for the future.
MOVING FORWARD
As I stand on the foreshore of the cove at S’Gang Gwaay contemplating the totem poles in their frozen fall, I find myself thinking back to the three weeks we have spent in this “Place of Wonder.” In that time, we’ve seen bears scavenging along the foreshore for seafood snacks, turning boulders with a flick of one huge paw. We’ve snaked through narrow channels at low tide surrounded by rocks and shoals covered with mussels and brightly-colored starfish. We’ve been surrounded by flotillas of Rhinoceros Auklets and Tufted Puffins. We’ve seen bald eagles every day, not a few but dozens. We’ve sailed through protected channels under the 3,000 foot peaks of rugged, rocky mountains in the wake of Orcas. We’ve shared our anchorage with other boats only a couple of times, though we have seen kayaks and sea planes almost daily.
And we’ve visited other Haida heritage sites. At T’aanuu Llnagaay (Tanu village), I asked Frank, the watchman, if they were trying to stop the decay of the wooden village, and he said no, that the chiefs had decided to let Tanu go back to the forest. “It’s all going back,” he said. “It’s all going back. Soon it will all be gone.” There’s little left to see there now – moss has carpeted the huge cedar poles which have caved into the house pits.
Here at S’Gang Gwaay, there have been repeated attempts to stabilize and preserve the poles. But they will eventually return to the earth as part of the natural cycle. The Haida no longer need these fragile reminders of their heritage. In the last few decades, there has been a resurgence in every aspect of Haida art led by the internationally renowned carver Bill Reid, now buried at Tanu. When we were in Queen Charlotte City, we had visited the new Haida Cultural Center being built at nearby Skidegate. There we had found a busy worksite crawling with helmeted men working on several large buildings. The $19 million complex has been designed to replicate a traditional village made up of a half a dozen long houses. The brand new totem poles, newly carved and freshly painted in the traditional manner, already stand proudly in front of each.
The 2,500 Haida now living on these islands are a thoroughly modern people who have not forgotten their past and who are working to salvage as much of it as they are able. They understand far better than I that the past cannot be resurrected, but it can be honored, and it can be built upon so that it becomes a firm foundation for the future rather than the grave marker of a lost culture.
CRUISING NOTES
harts/Guides. Canadian and DMA charts as well as the half dozen electronic charting programs we have aboard all provide extremely accurate and highly detailed charting of every inlet and cove. Exploring the North Coast of British Columbia by Don Douglass and Réanne Hemingway Douglass (Fine Edge Productions, available at FineEdge.com or from marine booksellers) devotes 140 pages to the archipelago and includes detailed information on anchorages, navigation, and facilities. Anyone with some experience wilderness cruising will find their warnings a bit on the hysterical side, so don’t let their descriptions deter you from visiting the park in the first place or from exploring some of the more interesting narrows and inner harbors along the way.
Chartering. There are no bareboats available for chartering north of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island; to reach the Queen Charlottes from there would take at least a week if you were very fortunate with the weather. A few crewed charter boats operate in the area, most notably the Oceanlight II, a 71-foot sailboat that visits all the Haida heritage villages and many anchorages in the archipelago over the course of an 8-day cruise (www.oceanlight2.bc.ca, 604-328-5339).
Getting there. While Gwaii Hanass park is remote, it is not difficult to get to the Queen Charlotte Islands. BC ferries run the Queen of Prince Rupert between Prince Rupert and Skidegate on Graham Island five or six times per week in the summer, less in the winter. Air BC (888-247-2262) flies daily between Vancouver and Sandspit, on the northern end of Moresby Island. Harbour Air (250-627-1341) offers daily service from Prince Rupert to Sandspit.
Permit. No permit is needed for the part of the archipelago that lies outside of the Gwaii Hanaas national park. The park is run jointly by Parks Canada and the Haida nation, and before entering the park visitors must buy a park permit and attend the orientation session. The permit can be obtained ahead of time through Tourism BC (250-387-1642 or 800-435-5622). Permits for a week or less average $10 per person per day, but they can be purchased for up to a month, and per day costs decrease the longer you stay. A limited number of permits are issued each day to control traffic in the park, but a few spots are left open for purchase on a standby basis at the Queen Charlotte Visitor Info Centre in Queen Charlotte City. During the summer, orientation sessions take place at 8 A.M. and 7:30 P.M. They provide a pleasant – and painless – introduction to the islands.
Supplies. Queen Charlotte City has a well-stocked supermarket. You will be able to find anything you might have forgotten or run low on before heading into the park, though you will pay slightly more than you would have on the mainland. There is also a marina where water is available and fuel can be purchased. Once in the park, the only facilities consist of a few very solid and well-maintained buoys in a couple of anchorages and three water hoses. Water from these must be treated by boiling for fifteen minutes. Generally speaking, cruising boats need to carry whatever they plan to use for the duration of their stay.
Timing. During the spring and fall, the Queen Charlottes form the demarcation between the often tempestuous Alaskan weather and the usually benign BC coast weather. Until the Pacific high pressure system has become well established in the summer, the area is prone to frequent gales and a good deal of rain. Depending on the year, summer may come in late May or it may not arrive until early July. At Cape St. James at the bottom of South Moresby Island, the weather buoy reports winds in excess of 36 knots only 1% of the time in July and August. These tend to be very settled months with lots of sunshine and very little wind. September is often just as lovely and with a lot less traffic, but it can be difficult to get back down the coast against the increasingly frequent SE gales before winter closes in.
Weather forecasts. VHF repeaters provide continuous marine broadcasts throughout the Queen Charlottes. These are unavailable only in a few almost landlocked anchorages where the high mountains block the signal.