Great Bear Rainforest (Part 4)

After the morning's grizzly watching we sailed out of Mussel Estuary, and soon passed some Steller sea lions and elephant seals basking on a rock.

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.

 

Scrambling up the bank with the help of the crew, we set out on a nature walk to see the plants and terrain of the estuary. (We weren't wishing for a bear this time.) After beating through bushes and walking through calf-high water, we emerged on a meadow where the naturalists gave us learned discourse on the trees, grasses, and berries in that environment. By the time we got back into the zodiacs it was dark. Jupiter was rising above the mountains to the southeast, and the Milky Way was visible, which always results in slack-jawed wonder among us suburban types. Captain Ian seemed to know where he was going, even though the fog had thickened. At last, we saw the masts of the Island Roamer poking up out of the fog and we descended upon Kate and another scrumptious dinner.

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.

The casts were guarded by Sherry as we zodiacked back to the boat. They made an impressive display in the salon. I wish I had put a ruler next to them for scale -- darn!