The Galapagos of the North

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Today, I thought I would kick off a series of posts about life in the Queen Charlotte Islands. I spent fifteen years there, and was fortunate enough to remain ’stuck in the sixties’ until 1983 and the time I spent in that magical place still defines a great deal of what I am.

To explain the title of this post, galapagos of the north is a term often used by naturalists to describe the islands because there are many lifeforms there that are not found anywhere else. The Charlottes was a glacial refugium, which means life continued to develop there while the continent was ice-bound, so many pre-glacial critters still exist there.

Human beings have been on the islands for a long time. Presently the Queen Charlotte Islands is the home of the Haida nation. It is certain, though, that there were people here before the Haida. There is a small sea cave on the west coast of Moresby Island that has an old fire pit in it. When archaeologists excavated the pit and dated it, it turned out that that little cave had been in continuous use for the last three thousand years. That means that there were people of some description hunkered down in that cave when Tutankhamun was pharoh of Egypt. Long time.

There were originally six main Haida towns: Skidegate, Masset, Cumshewa, Ninstints, Tanu and Skedans. The Haida population was decimated by smallpox around the turn of the century and the remnants of the tribe congregated in the two villages still in use today: Skidegate and Masset. I lived in Queen Charlotte City near Skidegate.

My summer employment for several years was working for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans as a stream guardian. This meant living at the mouth of a spawning river and protecting the salmon runs from poaching, as well as evaluating the runs that went up the river. One place I guarded was Skedans.

This was the view we woke up to each morning. The dark lump on the right of the picture is either a small island or a helluva big rock, I could never decide which. There was a beautiful bed of pinto abalone at the deep end of it. We usually had a couple of zero tides while I was there and at those times it was possible to pick the abalone right off the rocks and barely get your feet wet. A couple of years later, commercial abalone fishermen came in with hookah rigs and wiped them out. Abalone are pretty much extinct on the entire west coast now.

(Click for full size)

This is the shack we lived in. The previous picture was taken from the front porch. Hardly seems big enough for two people, does it? In fact, it was two people, two dogs and two cats. But we mainly kept the critters outside so it wasn’t too cramped.

One of the coolest thing about Skedans was that you never knew what you were going to trip over. It hadn’t been that long since the village was inhabited and there were still two or three poles left standing. This one didn’t make and the cedar is in the process of being returned to the earth.