Great Bear Rainforest (Part 2)

The next morning it was raining, a steady barrage of drops you could feel through your rain jacket. Of course, it does rain in a temperate rainforest, and all of us were game (nobody stayed behind in the boat), but my camera never came out. The major feature of that morning was the culturally modified trees (CMT); this refers to trees that were altered by the first inhabitants of the area (First Nations in Canada-speak) in ways that did not kill them. For example, inner bark would be harvested from a patch of the tree, not enough to injure it, and then be treated and used for clothing.

The walls of the channels between islands were, for the most part, quite steep. The channels themselves are glacial valleys that flooded when sea levels rose after the Ice Ages -- fjords. Our skipper was able to bring the boat right to the edge, and here are some pictographs we inspected.

If, like me, you need a memory trick, PICTographs are PICTures (painted on the rock), whereas petroglyphs are artwork carved into the rock.

The rain let up in the afternoon, but it had left the waterfalls abundant and full.

The theme of our trip was looking for the spirit bears, blond morphs of the black bear (not albinos), which number perhaps 400 in the entire world, solely in the area around Princess Royal Island. Imagine our surprise when this afternoon, our second day out, we saw a spirit bear swimming across the fjord in front of us. My apology for the quality of the photos, but I cannot pass up documenting this event.

Late in the afternoon we anchored in Mussel Estuary, a well-known location for watching grizzlies.

I'll combine the evening and next morning's grizzly watching in the next post.