Twenty years ago, when I first began leading commercial sea-kayaking journeys on British Columbia's West Coast, there was an unspoken hierarchy among the locations that a young guide could be assigned. At the foot of the totem pole were weekend trips to the Gulf Islands, where fancy homes peppered the coastlines and Vancouver was never far from sight or mind. Orca-viewing journeys in the busy waters of Johnstone Strait, while somewhat commonplace, represented a step up. More tempting were expeditions to the central coast's Haika, or Kyuquot Sound on western Vancouver Island. But towering over all – the object of every guide's innermost desires – was an assignment to Gwaii Haanas, or simply “the Charlottes” as we referred to the area back then. Only the most experienced were sent north, and they returned with whispers of verdant glory and savage seas.
Ludicrous, in retrospect, to scoff at any of those guiding opportunities, for every environment – Gulf Islands to the Gulf of Alaska – is blessed with its own beauty and magic. There is no “better” or “worse” in the nature, only different. But such wisdom comes with time, and as young guides we had no patience for the nuances of familiar landscapes. We wanted to be smacked over the head with the most rugged and primal land imaginable. We wanted trees the size of skyscrapers, dripping with slabs of moss as thick as mattresses. We wanted wind in our hair, and cold jagged rocks underfoot, and camps that faced the howling eternity of the cold Pacific.
To be fair, we had that much right. If wild is what you want, in more than 25,000 kilometres of British Columbian coastline, you would be hard pressed to pick a wilder or more spirited place than Gwaii Haanas National Park and Haida Heritage Site.
Perched on the southern tip of the Haida Gwaii archipelago, Gwaii Haanas is a land of superlative beauty and rich environment. The park's 130 islands are blessed with rain, five days each week on average, which leads to lavish growth. Everything, it seems, is bigger. Temperate rain-forest giants – cedar and Sitka spruce – tower overhead, casting spells of reverence (and creating sore necks). Banana slugs swell to the size of, well, bananas. No roads penetrate these realms – the park is accessible only by boat or seaplane – and a journey to the misty and mysterious archipelago becomes a trip back in time, a view of what the wild West Coast once was.
Millions and millions of seabirds bob offshore; some nesting, others passing through on long migrations. The nutrient-rich waters are awhirl with grey and humpback whales, Steller sea lions and salmon. The intertidal zone is productive beyond imagination: Picture headlands and kelp forests festooned with turban snails and mussels, sea cucumbers and bat stars. Isolated from the mainland for millennia by the inhospitable waters of Hecate Strait, it is no wonder these islands are oft referred to as the “Galapagos of the North.”
While the western coast of Gwaii Haanas is exposed to the full fury of the Pacific, its eastern shores are sheltered behind the high spine of the San Christoval Mountains. Here, a maze of islets and inlets creates a kayaker's paradise. There are hot springs to soak in, fish to catch, quiet beaches to explore and history around every corner.
Haida Gwaii is the homeland of the Haida, the West Coast's most prosperous first nation, a people renowned for their artistry, their seamanship and their ferocity. Wander in the woods and you are likely to stumble upon murmurs of this past: moss-covered canoes, cedar with strips of bark removed, middens (heaps of discarded shells). Most famously, at SGaang Gwaii, near the archipelago's southernmost cape, is a grove of hauntingly beautiful cedar mortuary poles, slowly but steadily decaying. Consumed by the elements, in Haida tradition they are being left to return to the soil of their birth.
