July, 2023
An amazing girls’ trip with my Mom and Sister-in-Law to the Sunshine Coast. What a spectacular getaway in our extended backyard!
Exquisite Egmont
Accessible only by boat from its settling in the 1890s until the road was built 1960s, this fishing and logging community sits in a paradise of islands, coves, inlets and hiking trails.
The beautiful West Coast Wilderness Lodge was our home for three nights. It was hard to leave this perfect deck and view to go exploring, but we did! Incidentally, we witnessed a successful marriage proposal on this deck one evening!
Logging is alive and well up here. Sad to see large swaths of dusty patches on the mountains with sections here and there of newly planted, light green trees.
The warmth of a beautiful sunset from our balcony.
And the serenity of the sunrise a few hours later.
We are headed to Princess Louisa Inlet and Chatterbox Falls. We are ready for the adventure in our very chic expedition suits!
Princess Louisa Inlet is one of the reaches off Jervis Inlet. We travelled through the deepest fjord in British Columbia (732 meters deep). Granite walls 2,100 meters high, carved out by glaciers, tower over the gorge with forests and moss draped trees surrounding us.
Our fabulous guide Charlie is absolutely passionate about his work and this stunning landscape he gets to live in. He told us that the original population of 36,000 Sechelt people living here was decimated by Smallpox, reduced to 106 individuals. We can’t blame this Smallpox epidemic directly on the Europeans. It came from trading routes up the coast in the 1770s, just after arm-to-arm inoculation began in 1768.
Ancient pictographs are nestled in the rock faces. This one depicts an event at Deserted Bay where there was the largest population in all of Sechelt (7,000 people). This one tells the story of seals chasing fish caught in nets of the Sechelt people. Orcas came after the seals and smashed the nets.
This one is of an alien. Shamans lived in these mountains and would interact with beings from another planet, so the story goes. Nobody seemed to wonder, in those days, what the Shamans might have been smoking… Apparently, when a woman from Western Australia saw this one, she said she had seen something almost identical at home. Makes you wonder how far these early peoples travelled and may have been influenced by one another.
And another beautiful painting. The pigment was made from salmon eggs and arbutus bark. They have lasted thousands of years because they were painted in areas where the quartz leeches out of the rock. On this surface, the pigment stands the test of time.
Chatterbox Falls is one of about 60 waterfalls in Princess Louisa Inlet. At 40m high, we were told its flow during this year’s hot summer was about 1/4 of its usual volume. Nearby is James Bruce Falls (which we didn’t get to), thought to be the highest waterfall in North America at 840 meters.
Scrambling around the base of Chatterbox Falls. We were told not to climb the waterfall (as if we would)…everyone is told not to climb it due to very slippery, mossy surfaces. More than a dozen people have ignored the warnings and have died trying to climb it.
Rather than trying to climb where we're not supposed to go, we are scrambling around where we are allowed to go!
Seals on a tiny, rocky island. That’s our lodge in the background. Apparently the orcas call them rock sausages…
These fellas would put up a bigger fight with the orcas. A hundred or more noisy sea lions make this rocky island (and a neighbouring one) their home. There are a few bulls (the huge, light coloured ones) who have a very commanding presence and seem to hold court with clusters of smaller ones that surround them. As we bobbed around on our boat, a number of members of the welcoming committee came to check us out, swimming around us and diving under our boat.
An eight km hike took us to Skookumchuk Narrows that connects the Sechelt and Jervis Inlets. Eight hundred billion litres of water flow in a tide cycle right here. The difference in water levels between one side of the rapids and the other sometimes exceeds three meters in height. Not nearly as high as what we saw in the Bay of Fundy, but this one is quite the playground for pro kayakers from around the world! Here at Roland Point, this is what these fearless kayakers do during the flood part of the cycle. In an extra large flood, which we got to witness, the water flows at 20km/hour, creating quite a ride for these kayakers.
The ebb part of the cycle creates amazing whirlpools at North Point.
And that wrapped our adventure in Egmont. Thanks mom, for a spectacular trip!