We cruised by Swanson's Bay, an abandoned and now mostly overgrown lumbering town. The BC coast has a number of defunct lumbering and canning towns that thrived before resource depletion set in, and before the timber industry learned to hide the worst of its clear-cutting.
There followed a spectacular afternoon of cruising, visiting waterfalls and pictographs, and we reached our anchorage in Khutze Inlet, near the mouth of the Khutze Estuary. The zodiac cruise departed as the sun grew low in the sky, and fog began to gently settle above the water.The next morning we departed before the fog had completed lifted. Looking back, we were treated to a fog-bow.
A bear was spotted, headed downstream along the bar. He/she crossed over a small tributary and began foraging, bending branches to get at the berries, digging for tasty roots, and generally ignoring us. The photographers went wild. After a while, we went slightly further up the bar and landed. We found the bear's pawprints in the sand.
And we continued to watch the bear. Those of us with telephoto lenses continued to snap the bear.
We explored the bar, upstream, away from the bear's dinner table. Here yours truly provides scale for some of the large items washed down.I loved the appearance of some of the algae-colored rocks exposed by the low tide.
As we returned to the zodiacs, bald eagles circled overhead, gaining altitude to cross over the mountains to the next inlet, and Ian hurried to take a cast of the bear's paw prints before the rising tide took them away.
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