Report on the north Vancouver Island trip in August

[Paulette Egeli]

Terry and I headed north only after discovering that the usual places to stay were filled with engineers working on the Port Alice pulp mill.  We ended up in a "not suggested" older hotel in Port McNeil - the Dalewood which was clean and cool (windows opened) and had the best food in town.  We drove every day in a different direction, back roads map book in hand.    This book is both useful and not useful in equal parts.  The current logging companies have renamed (or unnamed) all the mains so the book and where you are doesn't jive.  Bridges are gone, roads closed and old roads re-engineered.  The off road logging trucks - still working in August due to record snow packs and spring rains - are 16 feet wide.  My husband can back up at about 50 klics per hour.  I now know that as a fact.

We found "dirty marble" - some Picasso like with streaks of magnetite and pyrite.  We went back to an old iron /magnetite mine and brought back more pyrites and crystallized magnetite.  We found two other magnetite failed mines and collected various small garnets.  We lost and found again our GPS unit and I managed to step on my glasses and knock a lens out (sorta fixed till we got home).  We saw Canada's largest sinkhole/cenote - the Devil's bathtub is in that area and if you fell in you would NOT climb out again.  Must be full of animal skeletons.

 

One mine, The Merry Widow, is now a "walking trail" and we tried it in four wheel drive and found the road to be crumbling away off the mountain.  I lost my nerve and we turned back. 

We saw black bears (happily from the vehicle) and met nice people camping in isolated places in big rigs that they got in after the logging trucks stopped hauling for the night.  Both couples that we met had worked in the area before retiring and one retired logger had actually built the campsite (on Bonanza Lake) that they were in.  His wife said she caught trout in the morning and had them for breakfast.

I did find the mystery picture rock and I will post a picture soon.  Picture stone from the Hope Slide and Haida Guai is actually a fine silt or sandstone.   This has been metamorphosed so that it has crystals and some pyrite in it but with the characteristic fine iron staining.  It is being used as road fill (as is the marble) and is for the moment plentiful.  Since we didn't find a roadside quarryful - I don't know its source.  Some blocked off road no doubt.

All in all, a great week of hunting and finding.  Nice people and the logging companies on that end of the island are still allowing people on their roads. 

 

Paulette