PWAC Victoria: Peter Grant, Writing Sample

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Kyuquot Sound

by Peter Grant ©

It's a far-flung, hauntingly beautiful world, visited weekly by a passenger freighter. Let it remain so. An eight-page feature about the people of northwestern Vancouver Island, published in Beautiful British Columbia, Spring 2000.

It's a curious group aboard the Uchuck III today, gliding down Muchalat Inlet beneath the western slopes of the Vancouver Island mountains. Passengers watch with interest as cargo is dropped at logging and industrial camps. A fleet of kayaks--gear and paddlers loaded in their boats on deck--is winched over the side and deposited gently in the sea.

We've come from Gold River, on the mid-western coast of Vancouver Island, where Highway 28 expires. It's here that the Uchuck chugs to life, ferrying travellers and goods through a maze of channels and inlets along Vancouver Island's northwest coast. Once a week, the passenger freighter makes a two-day trip to some of the island's most isolated communities. Among them is Kyuquot (pronounced ka-yu'-cut), a remote fishing village where cargo is generally more welcome than tourists.

The Uchuck motors around the inside edge of Nootka Island and through Esperanza Inlet into the rolling swells of the open Pacific, passing rocks and islets where puffins, pigeon guillemots, and other seabirds nest in summer. We bob past the sandy beaches of Rugged Point, a 308-hectare provincial marine park that marks the entrance to Kyuquot Sound.

At Chamiss Bay, the oldest continuously operating logging camp on the coast, we watch logging trucks rumble into a large sort yard from a network of roads that lace the backcountry. Loggers have worked this area since the 1930s, and evidence of their harvesting lines both sides of Kyuquot Sound.

At the village of Kyuquot, on tiny Walters Island, travellers tread the boardwalk to Miss Charlie's Restaurant, in one of the two dozen buildings that comprise Kyuquot. Some overnight visitors board speedboats to cross the harbour to the village of Houpsitas.

The Kyuquot and Checleset people lived here for millennia before fishermen began building shacks on Walters Island in the 1920s. Some newcomers stayed year-round, starting stores, a post office, an elementary school, and a community centre. Through the '50s, six fish camps operated in Kyuquot, each buying from 15 or more trollers. For a time, the Kyuquot Trollers Co-op bought most of the fish on this coast.

Miss Charlie's Restaurant now occupies the co-op's former offices, and there is just one fish camp. Salteries and canneries that operated mainly in the 1920s and '30s have been reclaimed by the rainforest, and the local whaling station, opened in 1907, shut down in 1925.

Today, fewer than 5,000 people live in Vancouver Island's northwest quarter, with about 300 of them near Kyuquot and Houpsitas. The area from Kyuquot Sound west to Brooks Peninsula is isolated from the rest of the island by towering ramparts of rock. The only land route to the outside world is by rough logging roads from Fair Harbour, a half-hour boat ride from the two villages.

Despite its relative inaccessibility, Kyuquot Sound and neighbouring Checleset Bay are becoming a kayakers' mecca, to the chagrin of some locals who cherish their seclusion. Rupert Wong runs West Coast Expeditions, an ecotourism company started in 1974 by his uncle. He takes groups out from Spring Island through Kyuquot Sound to explore the Tahsish River, where they often encounter Roosevelt elk, black bears, and some of the world's largest Sitka spruce.

The lower Tahsish, and all of the Kwois and Silburn watersheds, lie within Tahsish-Kwois Provincial Park, nearly 11,000 hectares preserved in 1995. Despite the protection, which was bitterly disputed by loggers across Vancouver Island in Port McNeill, conservationists have had to remain vigilant. In one incident, four people, including two Danish filmmakers, were charged with firearms offences after being caught in the Tahsish estuary with freshly-killed bears and prohibited weapons.

West of Spring Island, across Checleset Bay below the mountains of Brooks Peninsula, is the traditional territory of the Checleset, northernmost of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations. Beyond the Uchuck's route, this area is much less developed and grandly scenic.

The lure for naturalists here is the sea otter, often seen feeding and rafting in kelp beds. Demand for their plush pelts eliminated them from the B.C. coast nearly a century ago. Today's otters are descendants of 89 transplanted from Alaska in the late 1960s and early '70s. They have multiplied to more than 2,500 now, and spread along Vancouver Island's outer shores from Estevan Point to Cape Scott.

Wong, a biologist, is volunteer warden at Checleset Bay Ecological Reserve. He's concerned about the impact of boaters on the otters, which are easily disturbed. In peak season, they may see more than 100 paddlers a week and as many other ocean-going tourists.

For several years, biologist Dr. Jane Watson has monitored the otters' effect upon the marine ecosystem. Without otters to eat them, sea urchins graze vegetation on the ocean bottom, eliminating kelp beds. But the sea otters are back, consuming a quarter of their body weight every day, and the kelp beds are returning.

"Kelp forests provide critical near-shore habitat for larval and adult fishes," says Watson. "They also enhance populations of animals dependent on detrital food webs. Kelp forests reduce tidal currents and dampen wave height, which may affect the settlement and dispersal of many organisms."

Beyond the scenic Bunsby Islands on Checleset Bay's north side, Wong takes us on a hike through forests dripping with lichen in the Nasparti Valley. We picnic on a sandbar in Battle Bay and walk the beautiful beach on Jackobson Point, at the edge of Brooks Peninsula. Elsewhere, Wong points out a Checleset trading beach where beads and porcelain shards intermingle with the pebbles. Old carved poles are hidden in nearby salal.

Brooks Peninsula Provincial Park: A Glacial Refuge

A mountainous parallelogram jutting more than 15 kilometres into the Pacific, Brooks Peninsula, northwest of Kyuquot, is battered by powerful storms, whipped endlessly with salt spray, and often wreathed in clouds. It is also a botanical oddity.

In 1995, the peninsula became part of a 28,780-hectare provincial park, protecting the Nasparti watershed, as well as streams draining into Johnson Lagoon. Also preserved are the west-facing slopes along Nasparti Inlet, the Power River and Battle Creek watersheds, and the Mount Seaton area, a broad tract of old-growth forest between Brooks Peninsula and the nearest road.

Not a single trail penetrates this natural world. A vertiginous spine runs down the peninsula's centre, with forbidding rocks and shelves forming the shoreline on three sides. According to historian George Nicholson, Cape Cook, the westernmost point, was the only passage between Victoria and Port Alice that could force the Princess Maquinna to turn back.

The peninsula's wild domain of bogs, impenetrable brush, and forest clinging to impossibly steep slopes long separated the traditional territories of the Nuu-chah-nulth and Kwakwaka'wakw people. Today, Brooks Bay, on the peninsula's west side, provides one of the few camping spots.

Peculiarities of flora and landforms here have led scientists to speculate that parts of Brooks Peninsula escaped the ice that blanketed Vancouver Island during the Fraser Glaciation, ending about 10,000 years ago. The peninsula's steep relief may have caused ice to slough off periodically before thickening. The resulting glacial refuge appears to have supported hardy plant communities uninterrupted for millennia.

Paleobotanist Richard Hebda, of the Royal British Columbia Museum, extracted core samples from the area in 1981. From these, he described a succession of plant and tree species on six sites beginning 13,000 years ago.

"In a world shrunken by intercontinental air travel, 'lost worlds' still exist," Hebda writes in his introduction to a report on the project. "One of these, virtually on our own doorstep, is the Brooks Peninsula."

As many as 1,200 Checleset people once lived here, in a territory covering five rivers. Columbia Cove, on Nasparti Inlet's west side, was the site of an ugly confrontation in May 1792. Robert Gray, an American sailing north in the Columbia after discovering and naming the Columbia River, entered "Naspahty" to trade for sea-otter skins. A member of his party wrote that "they were attacked by the natives and they were necessitated to kill a great number of them." However, another account unearthed by historian Frederick Howay, "received by the Spaniards from the natives," alleges that the Checlesets "had been unable to agree with Captain Gray upon the price of their skins and that he had taken them by force and fired on their village."

The latter story squares more with the modern image of Gray as one of many unscrupulous traders who employed "force and fear" to obtain pelts. But other historic records note the Checleset were formidable warriors. British blacksmith John Jewitt, enslaved by Yuquot Chief Maquinna from 1802 to 1804, related that a Checleset group, visiting Yuquot after a raiding party, "informed our chief that they had been to war with another tribe and killed 100 men and women." The Checleset were known to display heads of the vanquished before their villages, boring holes in the skulls and stringing them together. The Kyuquot, by contrast, had a reputation for pacifism. "Their hearts are like little birds," scoffed Maquinna.

The Kyuquot, perhaps 2,000 in all, were once the largest of Nuu-chah-nulth nations, occupying 14 river-mouth villages during salmon runs and four winter villages. Populations of all West Coast natives declined drastically after Europeans arrived to spread smallpox, tuberculosis, and measles. The much-diminished Kyuquot and Checleset nations, former enemies, finally amalgamated in 1963. Soon after, much of the community moved from the old Kyuquot summer village on Aktis Island to Houpsitas, a Kyuquot winter village. Today, the confederation numbers about 400, including off-reserve members.

In Houpsitas, I meet Hilda Hanson, 76, proprietor of the village's one store. Hanson was born on Aktis. At 9, she was sent to Christie Residential School on distant Meares Island. She remembers policemen coming into the village on the Princess Maquinna to take children to the steamer. At the residential school, says Hanson, "we were punished for speaking our own language." She is still angry about the traditions her people lost.

I also meet Hatsa (Robert Peter), 84, a Kyuquot elder. When police came for Hatsa as a boy, he hid in the forest. Hatsa now is a living repository of traditional language and culture, one of a handful of Kyuquot people who speak the Wakashan language. Such elders' knowledge of river ownership and inheritance may prove important to Nuu-chah-nulth treaty negotiations with B.C. and Canada, which involve land claims and rights to resources and self-governance.

Beside a weathered boathouse in Kyuquot, the Courageous II points to Lucy and Esko Kayra's home of nearly 40 years. Born in B.C. of Finnish emigrants, Esko first visited Kyuquot as a child in 1929, then settled here after the Second World War. Lucy, working as a nurse in nearby Zeballos, met Esko the winter he came to the hospital with a broken collarbone. A cold snap and a broken heating system froze the water in bedside glasses. "It was so cold the nurses had to get in bed with the patients," jokes Esko.

One of their two daughters, Sandra, is proprietor of Miss Charlie's. The restaurant's namesake is actually a loveable old seal whom locals encounter on various docks. Miss Charlie has been mooning over Esko for more than 30 years; it's an odd story.

Fishermen used to collect a bounty of $5 a nose on seals. The men who took Miss Charlie's mother noticed her pregnant condition, and, fixing to get an extra $5, they delivered her by Caesarean section, explains Lucy, who offered to pay the bounty to save the pup.

"Then it became Esko's seal," Lucy recalls. They kept Miss Charlie in the bathtub and bottle-fed her. She was later moved under the shed, and taught to catch fish. Ever faithful to Esko, she never had pups of her own.

Miss Charlie still manages to catch fish, but local fishermen haven't been so lucky lately. Overfishing and clearcut logging have taken their toll. By the late 1980s, many of the surrounding hillsides were stripped clean.

But some locals have begun to reclaim degraded streams. I accompany Rupert Wong up the Malksope River, where he is working with a crew from International Forest Products, rebuilding salmon habitat with funds from Forest Renewal B.C. In one creek, they've built rock riffles by hand. Today, in a larger channel, they position a large deadfall over a holding pool and anchor the tree to bolts set in rock. At a third site, a backhoe operator is removing material from a channel choked with alluvium from upstream bank erosion.

I catch a ride to Houpsitas, passing new greenery in a valley. Many young First Nations people now make a seasonal living at silviculture work, says Tom Pater, the area's regional director. Besides watershed and forestry work, Pater sees hope in other sectors, like aquaculture and tourism. The area supports four fishing lodges, despite uncertainty about the salmon fishery. A Chinook catch-and-release rule came into effect a month before my arrival, and sport fishing dried up overnight.

Back at Miss Charlie's, I mention to Sandra Kayra the article I'm preparing for Beautiful British Columbia Magazine. The air cools perceptibly. She's not sure Kyuquot wants or can handle the visitors this coverage could attract. "We're slowly building up the facilities for tourism, and attitudes are slowly changing."

Visitors to Kyuquot increase every summer. While I'm there, a group of Gore-Tex-swathed kayakers climbs up to Miss Charlie's for pie and milkshakes and soon paddles away, contributing $20 to the local economy. But do the meagre benefits of tourism in Kyuquot repay the costs? In addition to their impact on local marine life, many ocean tourists arrive unprepared for the rigours of West Coast tides and weather. Five weeks before my visit, two Seattle-area anglers went missing in a 5.5-metre aluminium boat. Rescuers found the boat capsized in Checleset Bay with lifejackets still stowed aboard. One body was recovered.

Advice to people determined to visit Kyuquot anyway? "To be prepared," says Kayra. "And in July, not to come on Thursday," she says, bustling off.

Today is Thursday, the Uchuck's regular day to arrive in Kyuquot. The little freighter hoves into view. Stepping aboard the next morning, I offer a silent wish that mountain and sea continue to insulate Kyuquot from the popularity that transforms quaint coastal villages, and that Kyuquot remain an outpost on the edge of nowhere.

Notes on Kyuquot Sound/Checleset Bay

1. Getting There

MV Uchuck III departs for Kyuquot from Gold River, on Vancouver Island, every Thursday morning, returning late Friday afternoon. Gold River is 90 kilometres west of Campbell River on Hwy 28. Cars may be left near the dock. Travellers with kayaks can be dropped anywhere along the Uchuck III's route, but note that summer cargo space books up months in advance. To reserve space on Uchuck III, contact Nootka Sound Services; phone 250-283-2515 in Gold River, 250-283-2325 on the ship, or the fax-phone at 250-283-7582.

Fair Harbour is the usual approach to Kyuquot for people with their own vehicles and boats. Take Hwy 19 north of Campbell River, and logging roads west from Woss Camp in the Nimpkish Valley, through Zeballos to Fair Harbour on Kyuquot Sound. Fair Harbour is half an hour by boat from the villages. Visitors should be self-sufficient, competent boaters and navigators, and prepared for sudden storms.

2. Accommodation

Gold River has several lodgings. Ridgeview Motel provides transport to the Uchuck III dock; phone 250-283-2277.

The Uchuck III's overnight package provides accommodation in one of two bed-and-breakfast establishments: one in Kyuquot, the other in Houpsitas. The First Nation establishment offers a full breakfast; the one in Kyuquot village is do-it-yourself. Both will prepare evening meals at extra cost.

3. Registration

The Checleset and Kyuquot nations ask that visitors register at the band office in Houpsitas before venturing into their traditional territories. Call 250-332-5259 for information about travel in the Kyuquot Sound/Checleset Bay area. Visitors are asked not to trespass in graveyards.

4. Guide Services

West Coast Expeditions offers six-day exploration packages from June to mid-September: novice, advanced, and women-only kayaking. Most trips are all-inclusive from the Artlish River (extra charge from Campbell River). Base-camp trips on Spring Island include all meals, tents with mattresses, and kayak outfitting. Write to Box 3733, Courtenay, B.C. V9N 7P1; phone 1-800-665-3040 or email nature@island.net.

5. Parks and Protected Areas

B.C. Parks manages six area parks here: 308-hectare Rugged Point, 234-hectare Artlish Caves, 639-hectare Big Bunsby, 51,631-hectare Brooks Peninsula, 156-hectare Dixie Cove, and 10,829-hectare Tahsish-Kwois. There are also four ecological reserves: 34,650-hectare Checleset Bay, 37-hectare Clanninick Creek, 8-hectare Solander Island, and 70-hectare Tahsish River. Ecological reserves are established for science and education. Some sites, including the seabird nesting site at Solander, are closed to the public; all require visitor permits for other than casual use.

For more information about these parks and protected areas, contact B.C. Parks, Strathcona District, Box 1479, Parksville, B.C., V9P 2H4; phone 250-954-4600.

Peter Grant
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Last updated: October 19, 2000 http://www.islandnet.com/pwacvic/grantp01.html