Posted on June 25, 2012 - by Nadia

Butedale: A gentle man keeps the past present

Butedale Lou: Master of all he surveys

Saturday, June 24, 2012

Butedale, Princess Royal Island.

I gasped aloud and stopped pushing against the sloppy, choppy slap of a headwind against current. At long last, never knowing what to expect or when, I had turned a corner. The magnificent waterfall was giving off as much light as spray and the looming, decrepit cannery buildings next to it seemed to dance with a life that has been gone for decades. It was the end of a long day and the start of a delay that was full of surprises.

In testimony to the defining power of persistent presence, Butedale remains a dot on almost all maps of the region, while up and coming places with more people – such as Shearwater – often fail to make the grid. The cove that protects Butedale was first home to a First Nations village. Then, from about 1909 until it operations ended in the early 1970s, it hosted a fish oil processing plant, a cannery and an ice plant. It was home to hundreds of workers. Now, Butedale is slowly sliding off the hill and being reclaimed by its abundant greenery. The herring oil tanks that define one end of the protective cove are mostly rust. The dormitory building is mostly moss. The largest residential building is half collapsed, with a toilet hanging at a jaunty 90 degrees. Butedale offers no cell service and no WiFi, but it boasts a rush of fresh potable water and an abundance of sweet hospitality in the form of Lou, the industrious caretaker who calls it home.

It should not reflect poorly on Lou’s caretaking if a building occasionally collapses and a boat sometimes sinks. It seems a miracle that any of these buildings or docks are still standing. Lou’s caretaking is evident everywhere there are people. I arrived Butedale exhausted after three or four nights of hard rain and rising tides (often, it is not the paddling that wears on me, but the making and breaking camp.)

Lou took one look at me and said, in the swarthy French accent of his Alberta youth: I heard you were coming, I’ve warmed water for a shower. And he boosted a three gallon sun shower into a five gallon bucket, put that on a shelf on the roof of what used to be the cold storage facility, and left me to rinse and warm.

Camping on the hardtack at Butedale

Butedale is both a  haven and a hiding place for many types of people in transit. There are few facilities and several challenges on either side of it. Virtually every kayaker stops here, many sailors and motor cruisers and a surprising number of fishing boats stop to moor briefly and continue their march north toward the fishing ground.

The kayakers and sailors especially are likely to ask Lou, “May I charge my …” laptop, cell phone, portable razor? And he says, of course, and then rearranges a couple of extension cords for your convenience.

Lou and his jury rigged powerhouse

The cell phone charges though it has no use there, the razor gets its buzz back, all as though a recharge at Butedale is the same as a recharge at a plug at the airport. It’s not. In Butedale, Lou’s simple yes does not begin to reflect the physical labor it took him to build 200 feet of flume out of scrap wood. To drop the flume into the gushing stream off a slick rock bank in order to steer today’s water into yesteryear’s power plant. It fails to underscore the ingenuity it took to rig the old hydro wheel up to a truck alternator. Or the frustrating three months of trial and error it took to figure out the right gear ratio to get the speed and power required to keep the inverter running consistently. In Butedale, there is nothing simple about the answer to the question, “May I charge my laptop?” And yet Lou answers simply. Maybe later he’ll offer a tour, if you’d like, of the power plant.

Because it remains a dot on the map, people stop by. And because they meet Lou, they return and pay his kindness forward. I arrived after a few long hours of windy chop to meet Ramona and DC and Debbie and Neal, motor cruisers I first met weeks ago in Shoal Bay in Desolation Sound. Debbie had miraculously spotted me on the broad Princess Royal Sound and altered course to chat. I last saw them in Port McNeill when I was getting my drytop fixed.

My motor cruiser family: Neal and Debbie, Ramona and DC

Debbie shouted, “We’ll have dinner on for you!” as they left me in Princess Royal Sound and thank heavens they fixed extra of everything. Even I could not find the bottom of Neal’s barbecued chicken and steak offering as we ate aboard Debbie and Neal’s boat tied to the low and wandering dock at Butedale.

I had arrived at 6 p.m. and the ebb tide best for leaving was at 3 a.m. I was exhausted and decided it would be best if I didn’t push the early departure but stayed to tour this ghost of a place. Like all decisions on this trip, that proved a mixed blessing. Probably a very good thing. Ahead lay two crux crossings: Wright Passage and the infamous Dixon Entrance. The weather forecast called for treacherous outflow winds in Wright on Saturday as a low pressure system built over Haida Gwaii, and persistent winds 15-30 knots in Dixon. Mike and Donna, sailing home to Alaska with two dogs, turned back, choosing to be windbound in Butedale rather than an anchorage short of Wright Passage. Albert and Lynah stopped their headlong rush to the commercial fishing opener to see Lou, but chose to stay rather than take the thrashing they took last year in Dixon. If the forecast was enough to slow Albert and Lynah, I knew it wasn’t something to mess with. I girded for a long wait and started devising alternate plans.

In the back of my mind, I knew Herman was gaining on me. We had never met, but people told us about each other. I had leapfrogged him when I took the ferry around Cape Caution, which he paddled. On Saturday, he appeared around the corner, a lone kayaker drawn in for a closer look at the falls. He had paddled a tough 15 miles already on the day and had planned eight more, but the chop  left him worn out and looking for options. I rigged him a shower and a cup of tea as Lou was out wrestling with a breakaway breakwater. Paying it forward.

Herman is headed to Glacier Bay, just past Skagway. He is doing his paddle to raise money for Mexican school kids in need (he lives in Baja.) Like me, the challenges of this middle portion are more fraught with risk and delay than reward. We agreed we are both willing to figure out a way to get a ride around Dixon Entrance. Herman needs to go to Prince Rupert for a resupply and to fix his blown drytop gasket. I do not need to go to Prince Rupert, but would gladly skip Dixon Entrance. For now, we’re working together.

Saturday evening and Lou is now in full host mode just as everyone is figuring out a way to move on. The ever-present specter of looming loneliness is the everyday hardship of the host. He stayed up late talking crafts with Lynah, who is trying to get him to take the winter off. Lou reluctantly admits he’s edging toward 69 and thinking it might be time to retire. He spent last Christmas corking a boat that was half underwater.

“The cold, oh, all day in that damn boat,” he says. “My knees were so sore I could barely walk up that hill.” He needs a tutorial in warm fun. He actually needs a nice widow with a boat. If you’re interested, send him a photo of the boat.

Lou has been taking care of Butedale for 11 years. Its owner, who lives in California, seldom visits. He’d just as soon sell. The environmental regulators, a fisherman told me, would just as soon scrape the whole industrial site away. “Someday they will,” he said. “I never know when I’ll come by here and it will all be gone.”

As I typed this post, sitting in the former mess hall, at an old, 40-foot-long table cluttered with Lou’s life, a breathless Donna burst in the door. “The bear,” she gasped. “The beach. The white bear.”

I grabbed a scope off Lou’s table and took off down the rickety ramp, past the stream that shoots out of a flume. Past the ricketier ramp to the boats. I raced across the roof of the massive concrete dock of rough concrete and rusty bare fittings where my tent was set up. I scanned the beach across the bay, and there, eating berries among the ferns, was a white spirit bear – a kermode bear.

Then, with a glance over its shoulder, the rare white bear, like Butedale itself, faded into the foliage.

Posted on June 25, 2012 - by Nadia

Bugs and bears

A mossy root serves as backstop to my campsite and a bear's sea urchin lair.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Greene Inlet

Tired, I started the day by ignoring compass points and going where I thought was right. That resulted in a 5 mile detour. Never again. I raced to catch the flood tide north through the narrows that would lead me to Graham Reach. The race was exhausting, but the ride through the narrows was easy. I made Greene Inlet, my first camping possibility, and knew I needed to call it a day.

Big bear poop: Time to find a new campsite.

The challenges of last night remained. By stopping early, I could see the height of the low high tide of the day. The high high would only exceed it by two feet. I checked two islands and a low grassy point. The low point was nice because it promised an easy launch in the morning. But as I walked around I stumbled on a trail. Quickly, the long curved claw marks revealed whose trail it was – as did some of the biggest, grassiest bear poop I have ever seen. I beat it back to the boat and set up shop on one of the grassy islands. It too has bear sign all over it. This bear clearly loved to come here and harvest sea urchins at low tide.

Distracted by the bear sign, a hardly noticed the true predators of Greene Inlet. The place is thick with biting black flies. I don’t even bother to take off my wetsuit and drytop in places like that, I just put on my mosquito net. At Greene Inlet I made dinner on a rock and ate, flies biting at my bare finger tips, until it mercifully poured rain, driving the flies away. I sat on the rock in wet neoprene,  rain pouring off my hat, spooning rice and glop into my mouth under the net. It was pretty early still and I was all set for the night. Things were going pretty well.

Posted on June 25, 2012 - by Nadia

A whale of a camp in Work Bay

The highwater log at low tide. Alll my belongings are under the tarp. Imagine the water two feet up that log.

Wednesday, June 19, 2012

Work Bay, first cove, off Finlayson Passage

The new moon and summer solstice are conjuring big tidal swings just as camping has gotten scarce and information about specific sites all but dried up in my guide book. So it was that I circumnavigated four sprawling coves of Work Bay long after I should have made camp.

There were plenty of spots for a five-foot tide, but few to even contemplate for a 15-foot tide. I looked behind creeks and waterfalls, scampered into the cedar thicket and measured the elevation of every sloped beach with my GPS. I contemplated hoisting the boat up steep cliffs. I wished I had a hammock. At about 7:30 I went back to the first cove and measured the beach and did the math over and over again. A conservative estimate warned the highest tent site was about 6 inches too low. An optimistic one said it would be dry by about the same. I had no choice. I needed to stop. I pitched the tent, putting a minimum of gear into it.

The boat was a different story. If I was with someone else, we would carry the boats and secure them above the high tide line and near camp. I always store the boat at or above the tide line, but I hadn’t carried my kayak yet this trip. Usually, I slide it across logs. Sometimes I slide it for great distances, sometime fetching logs from far away. The reason I had initially passed this beach by was its long, slopping shallows. Even at the low-high tide of the day, the closest I could get the kayak to the tent was about 150 yards. The low-low tide promised to triple that distance. In between the kayak and camp lay a field packed with ankle busting, slime- and barnacle-covered cobblestones the size of bowling balls.

I pondered. It was already clear I wasn’t eating dinner. I was willing to risk the bears and leave all the food in the boat. In fact, I would leave everything in the boat except the tent and sleeping bag and sleeping clothes. That way, when the tent flooded, not much would get wet, I figured. Moreover, I would tie 5-foot-lomg logs under the boat so that when the tide went out it had a platform to land on and protect it from the barnacle balls. I did all that and tied the kayak to the only thing on the beach that wasn’t a barnacle ball – a five-foot wide, 40-foot long chunk of tree that looked like it had been there forever.

It was 9 o’clock when all that was done. I choked down a peanut butter tortilla roll and surveyed my work. I was not happy. I ran through a list of things that could go wrong. I had thought of everything, except the things that would spell disaster, I figured. Actually, I hadn’t thought of much but the tent and tide. Now I was overcome with ill-defined anxiety. What if the log moved? What if it floated away? What if it lifted up and came down on my boat? Leaving the boat so far away, alone,  was the worst idea I’d ever had. By the time the tide lifted my boat, I would be cut off from it by 150 yards of rising water. In the dark. I needed my boat up with me. If this beach flooded, at least I’d be able to keep an eye on the kayak, my only way out of this wilderness, never mind my every worldly possession.

I raced for the boat. The rising tide was already lifting the back end. I untied all my knots and let the log go. I did the same for the front log. I hauled the boat forward to buy time and grabbed my two carry bags. I threw every small item I could lay my hands on into them – TastyBites packets, VHF radio, sandals, sponge, baggies of gorp, baggies of gorp, baggies of gorp. I filled the bags, grabbed as many other dry bags as I could carry and raced for the tent site. I threw everything on top of a truly giant and ancient log next to the tent and raced back again. The water was rising. Lapping now at the log that had been my moorage, now at the stern of my boat.

Once I’d emptied the boat of absolutely everything, I reviewed the rules for moving her: Stop as often as you want, but never fall and never drop it. I hoisted the 70-pound boat to my shoulder and walked the barnacle boulders like it was a hallway at home, never stopping or falling or dropping. I looked back from the tent site. Water had filled the space I left behind. The cove’s long shallow was filling quickly, but high tide – the time that would tell – was not until 1:40 a.m.

I was mad at myself for being lazy and compromising everything a good camp should have just because this location was challenging. I slowed down and started doing things right. It was 9:45. I sorted the food into the two carry bags and hoisted them on a double pulley high into a tree down the beach. Scouting the forest behind another cove I’d seen the skunk cabbage-looking muskeg plants ripped up, their roots eaten. Bears were afoot.

Focused on the hoisting, I jumped in my skin when I heard a burst of air come from the ever broadening reach of the cove. My heart leapt. I spun around in time to see the tiny fin of a humpback whale break the water—grey on grey — just beyond where I had shouldered with the kayak. It surfaced and blew again. My heart leapt. I was not so alone. The whale seemed to be a prize for setting camp straight. Things were turning around.

Back at the log, I made sure everything that couldn’t got wet went into a dry bag. I lined everything I owned up inside a long notch at the highest point on the ancient log. Paddles, computer, clothes, dop kit. The notch was about 8 feet off the ground. I covered it with a tarp, anchored with two sticks and six rocks, three on either side. I had a plan. When the water approached the tent, I would grab my sleeping bag and scamper onto the log myself. I would throw the tent itself, taut, poles and all, onto the log’s sprawling roots. I would stay there until the tide receded. It was 10:45 when true dark fell.  I crawled out of my wetsuit, threw it under the tarp, and crawled into my damp sleeping bag.

Unbelievably, I slept. But as the sounds of the approaching water changed from distant slaps to what sounded like waves, lapping at my feet, I woke up and listened and wondered what time it was. The watch was on the boat, where it usually is. I got up to get it so I’d know the time of the tide. I had set the kayak parallel to a long tree that was itself parallel to a busy creek, rushing out of the snow-covered mountain behind the cove. I had tied it at the bow; it was nestled in grass. When I reached for the watch, I stepped into 8 inches of grassy water. The tide had exceeded the stream bed. It was starting. I grabbed the watch and used my throw rope to  secure the stern of the boat, giving it room to play, but holding it from rushing headlong down the stream, which was growing wider and higher.

With about 45 minutes to go, it was unclear whether the tent was more at risk from the streamside or the bay side. The water was creeping up the side of the ancient log, about a foot from the roots, my safety ladder. I threw my sleeping pad and bag into another long split in the trunk, and heaved the entire tent onto the roots. Then I scrambled up the back side of the roots, wriggled into my bag as it slumped into the nook, just the width of my hips.  I looked down. By the light of my headlamp, I saw water was everywhere. Under the giant log and rising. Rising up the beach. Spilling from the stream. The kayak, which has reflectors on the bow, bucked, but was secure.

For the first time this trip, I lay back and looked at the night sky. It was blurry with clouds, and I gave thanks that it was not raining. And then I heard it: The great exhalation of the humpback. It was in the ever-filling cove, now, much closer than my kayak had been on the rocks. It was too dark to see, so I snuggled into my notch and just listened as the whale glided back and forth over the stumblesome rocks I had raced across just hours ago. Reminding myself I had no room to wiggle, I leaned back into the log, listened to the whale and watched the blurry stars until I was supremely happy and my eyes closed and I slept.

Posted on June 19, 2012 - by Nadia

A ferry ride into darkness

A wet exit: The ferry will drop kayakers off in the sea along the way.

Sunday June 17, 2012

Hose Harbour, 8 miles around the bend from Bella Bella

Posed from Klemtu, 40 miles from Hose Harbour

At 4:30 in the morning the bow of the ferry lowered into the water, in the middle of the ocean and revealed a predawn sea. Two tandem kayaks were lowered onto a platform, their heaviest gear stowed, and the paddlers pushed away from the ferry. They call it a wet exit and the BC Ferries – maybe  this  BC ferry – is one of the few ferries anywhere to do it. The paddlers in this case were four recent grads of Olin School of Engineering who somewhat whimsically decided to paddle the coast about 40 miles south of Bella Bella after attending a competition in Seattle. I’m not sure they were prepared for their adventure, but I sure give them credit. It takes guts to push away from a huge boat and head toward  distant island in the near dark dawn.

The wet exit sure seemed attractive as I hustled to get my gear reloaded as the icky, oily tide rose around the boat at the Shearwater ferry terminal. I had never heard of a wet exit or I might have requested one. Or not. The huge tandem boats the kids were paddling loaded in a snap. Mine, with its small volume pretty well maxed out, loads with a shove here, and a tug there. I pushed off at high tide and headed for a cove that would set me up for a fairly significant crossing the next morning. The crossing should set me into the Inside Passage proper. I look forward to beginning that part of the journey. As usual, it was raining when I packed the boat, raining when I set up tents and is raining as I type.

There is no cell service here and little service expected as I wind my way toward Prince Rupert. I’ll post a this series of shorter entries and photos when I get service. I expect this section could take 10 days to two weeks and should give me the opportunities to get used to camping with bears all around. Be nice, bears.

Klemtu postscript: Dramatic breakers yesterday as ocean swells crashed on shoals that guard the Inside Passage. Rain has let up, made for nice camp to let things dry out. Highlight today was a humpback whale showing its flukes as it dove.

Hiding behind Calvert

by Nadia on June 16, 2012

Passage deferred taunts on curiously calm day

by Nadia on June 14, 2012

A walk around Alert Bay

by Nadia on June 13, 2012

Stalled by the opposite of wind

by Nadia on June 12, 2012

A grace-ful water stop

by Nadia on June 10, 2012

A little fight, a little fright

by Nadia on June 8, 2012