North Desolation: hell & high water, again 1/4

alternate title: fool me thrice

It had been raining all day and the tide was rising higher than we thought it would when I traipsed around the grassy flat we’d set up camp on and realized with a deepening sense of dread that the little yellow wildflowers around the tents were marsh marigolds, not an upland wildflower indicative of a camp safe from the high tide.

This was not our first brush with the high tide— in the San Juan Islands we woke to our boats, tied on to a piece of study piece of driftwood, rotated at a 90 degree angle indicative of floating overnight. In the Gulf Islands, a low pressure system, southwest winds and errors in judgement on our part lead to a much higher tide than we anticipated, where we had to go fish our flooded (mostly empty, thankfully) boats out of a mess of driftwood and thigh deep ocean around 3 am. No more tying off to driftwood, and boats always above the high tide line.

This time though, with a fire ring, grasses and wildflowers, and the campsite clearly being in the washout zone for a large creek, it was hard to say if we’d be dry or not.

At this point, upon informing the increasingly uneasy group that those were in fact, marsh marigolds and could totally be submerged for an hour every day, we decided to consult to GPS for campsite coordinates discovering to my absolute dismay that the campsite we’d meant to pull up at was on the other side of the creek.

What followed? The third most unpleasant hours of the trip, superseded only by my heroic battle with violent diarrhea in the Teakerne Arm and our 3 am swim to save the boats.

At 10pm we frantically packed up boats in the rain, racing both the incoming tide and the growing dark to try and get all of our crap to the *real* Lloyd Creek campsite.

By the time it was all said and done, it was midnight. And honestly? It was kind of fun.

Fun in that miserable, this is so ridiculous and my dry clothes are wet with seawater, our tent and sleeping pads our soaked, but hey, here we are and it’s all actually okay way. Fun like this will make such a stupid story you have to laugh; fun like it sucks, but the headlamps and paddling in the dark and the little lights in the water are sort of beautiful, aren’t they?

When we were passing through Desolation Sound the first time, on our way north before a medical delay forced us to reconsider and reroute, we skirted around the edges, peering in at the ragged peaks and low island slopes before continuing north.

The thing about the Inside Passage, a roughly 1600-mile route winding along the mostly protected waters of the North Pacific from Tacoma, WA to Skagway, AK, is that there’s just so much of it. There’s the Vancouver Island side or the mainland side, hundreds of fjord-like inlets spanning hundreds of miles into the mountains, island groups and alternate channels; you could spend an entire summer exploring the San Juan Islands alone and not even leave the United States.

Continuing north toward Alaska by nature means cutting most detours and following more or less the main drag.

In Powell River we had the chance to sit down with our charts and maps and decide what made the most sense— continuing to Alaska and doubling up on mileage in the next few weeks, or charting a different course. Looking at all those charts, Desolation Sound and the fjords & inlets leapt off the page.

Didn’t we all want to see just how far back you could paddle into those mountains? What does it look like where those mountains meet the sea?

From Powell River we paddled north (again) to the Copeland Islands, one of my favorite spots to camp with pretty views and close proximity to small town, old west meets Pirates of the Caribbean, we’ll take tourists so far as their purses are open, Budweiser-drinking, bear-shooting Lund. After living in Grand Marais, home sweet home. Several people have told us we have to get a cinnamon roll from Nancy’s Bakery in Lund— so far they’ve been closed both times we paddled by, but maybe the way back into Powell River will be a third times the charm situation. Will update; stay tuned.

After, rather than continue straight North we took a hard East turn into Desolation Sound, one of the top kayaking & boating destinations in Canada.

Maybe it was just that it was the first hot day of the summer, sunny with clear water, or maybe it was the hype of knowing we were in a place to explore and enjoy it, not smash miles, but Desolation Sound felt like paddling in the Mediterranean.

Or maybe it was the first comfortable swim of the season, in salty blue water. Probably it was that.

Knowing Desolation Sound is one of the more popular kayaking destinations of the area, we opted to camp at Bold Head instead of the popular Curme Islands— the gear carry at Bold Head is a little gnarlier, but worth it for the solitude. Gear carry aside, Bold Head ended up one of my favorite camp spots of the trip.

We woke up in the morning to rain, and headed North, leaving Desolation Sound Provincial Park and with it the more popular routes and other paddlers. From there, we headed up the Homfray Channel, where we made camp in the intertidal zone, frantically moved all our stuff in the rain in the dark, slept in wet tents with damp sleeping bags, and then woke up to this:

and also this:

It had been nearly completely fogged in on our paddle up the southern half of the Homfray Channel, and save misty trees we had no real idea what we were paddling into landscape-wise. Waking up in the morning to this was a treat.

As for the bears, this would be our first black bear sighting of many.

Long trips, outdoors or anywhere, are always a little bit of a balancing act— there’s the moments when a pod of orcas passes by at sunset, and the moments when you have diarrhea on a rock in the ocean for five days. There’s the moments when your gear is soaked and you’re wet and cold and hungry and it’s 12:30 am and you just made it to bed and it’s still raining outside, and then there’s the morning after when you hang your stuff on a line to dry and it does, and you all take a moment to marvel at the fact that you’re here, in this beautiful place, that you get to be here.

Because really, even rain soaked and sore, hungry and cold, the ability to spend a summer exploring the Pacific Coast in a kayak is a privilege and a gift.