Jet Boating P.11 | Taste of Portland P.16 Spring Is Moving Season
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UPCYCLING 101 YOUR HOME, AUTO & TRAVEL MAGAZINE TIPS FOR GETTING STARTED GREAT 3DIY PROJECTS TO TRY AT HOME GROW AN WHERE TO INDOOR DEVOUR THE HOTTEST KITCHEN FOOD AND GARDEN DRINK TRENDS PET SAFETY +DOUGHNUTS! ON THE STILL ROAD AWESOME SPRING 2017 bcaa.com FORMERLY WESTWORLD PM40065475 WWB0317_2.indb 1 2017-02-28 11:20 AM T R AV EL Get Packing Northern BC Jet Boating p.11 | Taste of Portland p.16 Spring is moving season. Here’s how to save yourself some headaches, and cash, too A bear dozes at Khutzeymateen Grizzly Sanctuary, a destination often visited on University of Northern BC jet boating trips. Force of Nature “OK, hang on!” warns Rob Bryce as he guns our jet boat, expertly navigating Exchamsiks River’s sinuous curves. We zip past a massive fallen tree, 11 laid out on the gravel shore, as wind whips our June 17 faces and water froths up behind us. All around, 5K FOAM FEST Adult-sized inflatables, a 15-metre waterfalls cascade down carved-out canyon Slip’N Slide and, of course, a blast of walls spiked with Sitka spruce. bubbles challenge your inner child and endurance on this obstacle race by Janet Gyenes at Sun Peaks Resort near Kamloops. 5kfoamfest.ca Dave Hutchison SPRING 2017 BCAA.COM 11 WWB0317_2.indb 11 2017-02-28 11:21 AM Suddenly our ride comes to a halt. Bryce military crew, we set off northward on the slows the boat, and our cadre of six stares morning’s first mission: exploring the historic in stunned silence as a young grizzly swims ghost town of Dorreen, which is only across the river, barely creating a ripple on accessible by boat or train. the bottle-green water. It scrambles up the The Skeena River has always been the embankment and disappears into the brush. lifeblood of this region, as a transportation We’ve travelled 25 km up this branch of the corridor and vital artery stocked with salmon. Lower Skeena River, 56 km west of Terrace, Along the shore, small groups of people are without seeing human or beast – until now. fishing, sitting in lawn chairs; poles planted Yet we’ve barely begun our four-day June upright in the sand. Ribbons and bells dangle adventure, part of a continuing studies from the tops of the poles to signal when a educational travel program offered through salmon bites. the University of Northern British Columbia We spot waterfalls and a pair of bald (UNBC). Travelling in an open-air jet boat – eagles grappling in flight as we skim past a nimble craft with no propeller to endanger the villages of Kitselas and Usk. Bryce finally marine life – we’ll visit ghost towns, a First cuts the engine and ties up in what seems like Fernie Alpine Resort gets up to Nations village and historic canneries the middle of nowhere. Soon we’re nosing 11 metres of snow each season. scattered along the Skeena River from Terrace through sword ferns, past a tree that has to Prince Rupert, where the 610-km-long grown around a rusty fence. A swing set waterway plunges into the Pacific. built from slabs of rough-hewn wood stands Journeys like this one are part of an effort near a cluster of houses, whose layers of to educate travellers about BC’s north, says peeling paint reveal the decades like a tree Bryce, our captain. trunk’s rings. Indigo lupins and yellow-eyed “Most universities offer some form of daisies grow among rusty trucks and beat-up educational travel or alumni travel,” he says. farm equipment. We’ve arrived in Dorreen, “Since we’re a relatively new university, a 1900s ghost town once home to hundreds [in a] small market, we thought we would do of gold miners. It was named for a railway things a bit differently and focus on bringing engineer who resided at this outpost on the people to Northern BC and showcasing the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, built between amazing history, sights and locations that it 1906 and 1914. has to offer.” Remote passage In less than two hours by air we have been catapulted from the urban density of Vancouver into a realm shaped by the forces of nature. Double the size of the UK, the region of Northern BC extends north from Bella Coola to the Yukon border. It’s an otherworldly place that has long seduced gold rushers, loggers and fishers with a mother lode of natural resources; a giant’s terrarium filled with spectacular specimens. Like the rare and elusive white kermode, or spirit, bear (not an albino or polar bear, but a black bear with a double recessive gene), which Bryce tells us to watch for. We leave early on an overcast morning from Yellow Cedar Lodge, our riverside base for two nights, and don our daily uniform: chest-high waders topped with waterproof jackets. Looking like anglers or a motley 12 BCAA.COM SPRING 2017 Janet Gyenes WWB0317_2.indb 12 2017-02-28 11:21 AM jet boating TRAVEL We meet up with Stewart Young, part-time resident and self-appointed caretaker, for a tour. Young cuts the grass and raises the flags here to make sure there are signs of life amid the ghosts. Inside an old, one-room library, dusty books line the shelves. Antiques fill the former general store. The train still picks up passengers at the tiny white station, but only if an orange-vest-wearing scarecrow is placed next to the track as a signal. Written in stone In days gone by, if you needed a ride on the river, “you’d wave a white flag and a sternwheeler would stop and pick you up,” says Bryce. We’re having lunch (hefty sandwiches on cranberry-studded bread, followed by chewy cookies large enough to sate a giant) on Ringbolt Island. Bryce points out rusty iron rings, the island’s namesakes, once used for tying up sternwheelers like the Hudson Bay Company’s Mount Royal and rival Robert Cunningham’s Hazelton. During the late-1860s Omineca Gold Rush, the sternwheelers routinely crashed in the churning channels, and survivors were rescued via canoe by members of the nearby Kitselas First Nation, whose community is our next stop on the Skeena. “I’m a ganhada, a raven,” says Webb Bennett, a local guide at the Kitselas Canyon Interpretive Village National Historic Site. He’s referring to one of the four main clans of the Kitselas Nation (which is one of seven Tsimshian First Nations). The others are gispudwada (killer whale), laxgiboo (wolf) and laxsgiik (eagle), each represented by a newly carved totem pole where we’re standing. Local archaeological remains show that these peoples’ history here dates back more than 5,000 years. Bennett takes us up a hilly track to the village. Inside one of the longhouses, he regales us with legends, lets us try on woven cedar hats and shows us a rubbing of one of Ringboat’s five petroglyphs, or prehistoric rock carvings. This one is so large the rubbing had to be made on a bed sheet. It depicts two animals with two humans in headdresses, (clockwise from top) A vital transportation corridor and salmon source, the Skeena River has long thought to be shamans because of their been the lifeblood of Northern BC; an eagle hunts for its supper; a totem pole depicting a beaver represents a sub-crest of the Kitselas Nation eagle clan; UNBC jet boaters take a break; circular mouths, which can symbolize a wildflowers push up among forgotten structures in former cannery towns along the river. spirit entering or leaving the body. iStock, Janet Gyenes SPRING 2017 BCAA.COM 13 WWB0317_2.indb 13 2017-02-28 11:21 AM Relics of river life Over the next two days, we drift past Carlisle, Claxton and Haysport, once- thriving fish canneries that are now just a series of pilings, apparitions rising from murky water. We slip ashore at Port Essington, another cannery town, and slog through the mud to gape at century-old cow skulls and jawbones, teeth intact, at our feet. “They brought in the cows by steamship,” says Bryce of the long-gone slaughterhouse. Despite seeing fresh grizzly tracks on the beach, we soldier through waist-high eel grass onto a mucky path. Then we bushwhack uphill to Port Essington’s cemetery, where dozens of tombstones are shrouded in moss. Who were these people laid to rest in the woods? Maybe some lived in the managers’ quarters at Cassiar Cannery, which opened in 1903 at the mouth of the Skeena River. Now a series of four restored waterfront heritage houses, rented to overnight visitors like us, it was the last operating cannery on the Skeena when it closed in 1983, says co-owner Justine Crawford. Crawford joins us on the boat and guides our visit to Osland, a tiny community across the river, founded by Icelandic-Canadians around 1912. According to records from the Royal BC Museum, the Sakamoto family moved here in 1931 and the five sons established a boatbuilding shop. A wooden boardwalk connects now-chic cottages, ramshackle buildings and other remnants, like old wooden boats beached on the shore. The next morning we awake to a mist- shrouded river and make our way to the jet boat to explore the last stretch of the Skeena. Bryce takes us to another petroglyph near Prince Rupert. “Just walk straight ahead,” he says. We scramble over slippery rocks, searching. “Found it!” It’s a life-size human figure carved, as if lying flat, into a long slab of stone.