Victoria, BC

Victoria is the provincial capital, down at land's end on the southeast coast of Vancouver Island, right across from Vancouver (the city) and the Seattle megaplex.  It's the biggest town we've been in for a while, a little crowded, but very scenic and clean.  We spent a couple days there, no where near enough to see all they had to offer, so we'll be back.  We drove took a couple scenic drives, and visited two landmarks: Butchart Gardens and Craigdarroch.  Butchart Gardens was created by the wife of an industrialist within a rock quarry near their home.  What a transformation.  They had before and after pictures from 100 years ago until now and she was a visionary (with help from landscaping architects).  It's one of the nicest gardens we've ever visited.  Craigdarroch (kreg duh roke) is one of those large stone Victorian mansions that were built at the height of the industrial revolution in the late 19th century.  This one reminded me a lot of the Oliver Mansion we visited in South Bend, IN.  He's the guy that got rich inventing a better steel plow.  It wasn't, but it easily could have been the same architect.  Craigdarroch was built by a Scottish immigrant that made it big in coal on Vancouver Island.  He died before it was finished, and when his widow died the estate sold pretty much everything in it.  They're gradually buying back all the auctioned possessions as they find them.  Victoria's waterfront district and China Town looked awesome, but we only saw them as we were driving to the ferry landing.  We took a choppy 1 1/2 hour ferry ride over to Port Angeles, WA.  That's our last boat ride for awhile.  We took 5 total ferry rides with the RV this summer (Yukon River, Haines to Juneau, Prince Rupert, Port Hardy, Port Angeles) after having only done it once before when we crossed Puget Sound back in 2013.  It was an interesting way to travel and it cuts off a ton of miles, sometimes allowing you to go where there's no roads or bridges.  Here are a few pictures from Victoria.

The fireplace in the foyer  at Craigdarroch.  Hand carved stag clock was original.

They let people park too close.  I had to get a close in panorama to avoid them.  Craigdarroch had fallen into disrepair when it was renovated to original condition in the 60's.  It had been used as a wartime hospital in the 20's, a college, the school district HQ.  They did a great job on putting back to close to original condition and putting in a lot of period correct, if not original, furniture.

The Sunken Garden at Butchart Gardens.  This was once a completely barren limestone quarry.

Dancing Fountain

There's a large Asian influence in this area, reflected in the design of large portions of the Garden including this dragon fountain.  We heard more Chinese being spoken by tourists here than English.

Woo pig sooie!  This isn't an Arkansas Razorback, but it might as well be.  Rubbing the nose for good luck keeps it nice and shiny.

Campbell River and Ucluelet

The hits just keep coming.  After Telegraph Cove, we headed a little way down to coast to the big city, Campbell River.  I say big city because they have not only a Walmart, but a Canadian Tire.  We were lucky enough to reunite with new friends Ray and Linda who we had met briefly earlier in the summer in Prince George, BC on Canada Day.  Ray gave me his card and said look them up when we get to the island, so we did.  He'd been feeding me advice on Vancouver Island since before we arrived at Port Hardy.  They very graciously took us for a tour of the local area on Saturday, then came over for steaks on the grill at the RV on Sunday afternoon.  It was so nice seeing them again and cementing our friendship.  After our 2 days in Campbell River, we crossed the island to the west coast to see the Pacific Rim National Park.  It's awesome over here, a lot like coastal Oregon.  Along the way to Ucluelet, we stopped and saw the Cathedral Grove and its ancient Douglas Fir trees.  Over here, the giants are Sitka Spruce, Red Cedar and Hemlock trees, 10 feet thick and some 500 years old.  In the morning we're headed for the provincial capital, Victoria, where we'll catch the ferry over to Washington State on Saturday.  Here are some pictures from central Vancouver Island.

Ray and Linda have lived in Campbell River for years and shared their local knowledge with us.  The first cool thing was taking the free water taxi to April Point Lodge on Quadra Island instead of paying for the ferry.  In the short ride over, we saw yet another humpback whale.  This is Painter's Lodge, where we caught the ferry.

Lunch with Ray and Linda

These are wooden water pipes, probably 10 feet in diameter, carrying water from a nearby reservoir to the power generating stating.  The rings are stays, like they wrap around a barrel to keep it from exploding.  We saw one leak spraying a little jet of water up about 2 feet, so they were full of water under pressure.

Elk Falls

Ray's a hotrod enthusiast.  He built this 427 Cobra kit himself.  What a ride!

Our campsite in Campbell River.  That's Ray's other hotrod, a lowered '49 Ford pickup, in front of our RV.  Nice trees.  We really got lucky with the weather too.

On our way from Campbell River to the coast, we stopped and took a nice loop hike around Little Qualicum Falls Provincial Park.  This is one of the many cascades you see on the trail.

Lower Falls on the Qualicum River

Another stop we made was at a place called Cathedral Grove.  It's a nice loop through some old growth Douglas Fir trees, the oldest and biggest was 800 years old.  Here's one I photographed in vertical panarama mode.  The tree's probably 10 feet thick, I don't know how tall but it was way up there.

This was a cool little pull off.  The attraction was a diving pool in a neat little rock canyon, but there was a fence with a thousand or so locks attached to it.  I asked somebody and they're "love locks."  You profess your love and then lock it away.

http://kaitsquirks.com/2015/love-locks-on-the-pacific-rim-highway/

In Ucluelet, there are a lot of hikes through old growth and wind-tortured trees.  Here's Laurie in a natural archway formed by one of the trees closest to the water.

Giant Red Cedar

Just a nice view through the rocks at Schooner Cove in Pacific Rim National Park

Telegraph Cove

Our next stop down the coast was Telegraph Cove.  We stayed there a couple nights.  It's a tiny protected cove that at times has been a lumber mill, fishing camp, and telegraph station.  They took it over for WWII, like pretty much everything else around here.  All the waterfront buildings were bought by a resort company that uses them either for vacation rentals, restaurants or shops.  There's also a whale interpretive center at the end of the boardwalk.  Their largest display was the skeleton of a fin whale (like we saw in Seward, 2nd largest only to the Blue Whale) that had been rammed by a cruise ship and stuck between that big bulb and the hull.  Killed it of course.  They saved the skeleton for display.  It's a cool little area, great stop for a couple days.  We're now in Campbell River (a Walmart town!).  Here are a couple pictures from Telegraph Cove.

Begonias?  I just thought they were pretty.

A tree tumor from a 500+ year old Sitka Spruce.  They've cut pretty much all the big, old trees on the island.  We stumbled upon the largest burl in the world.  I always thought it was Burl Ives, but I was wrong.

One of many lumberyards we saw.  Some of the trees were 6 feet thick, but they must be way up in the hills because we never saw them.

The RV park overlooking Telegraph Cove.  That's our motorhome at the very top of the park, near the cliff.  Nice view.

I downloaded this picture from the Internet.  It shows a dead fin whale still stuck in the cruise ship. I'm not positive it's the one in the Telegraph Cove museum.   Apparently this happened more than once, I'm seeing multiple stories on the Internet.  Gives you a visual of what happened, though.

Another downloaded picture.  This must have been taken from the air.  Telegraph Cove Resort owns all the buildings to the right.  The whale interpretive center is in the big red building in the lower right corner.  Our motorhome would be just out of frame to the left.

Prince Rupert to Port Hardy

Rain, rain, rain.  Seattle's got nothing on BC.  Prince Rupert is at the end of the road, up a long, sheltered inlet.  We took a couple of scenic drives, but it was pretty gloomy while we waited on our ferry reservation.  The "sunny" point of the trip was seeing a friend we made earlier in the summer on our way north to Alaska.  Kris and her friend Patsy were camped at the park we were at in Kitwanga, back in early July.  We sat out with other campers under their awning, and of course I provided musical entertainment.  Kris lives in Prince Rupert, and we were lucky enough to meet her family and she entertained us on her deck and fed us a home-made dinner.  Thank you Kris (Kerstin) for your hospitality!  Other than that, we drove inland a bit to see the town of Terrace and the village of Kitimat with its grove of giant spruce.  The ferry ride to Port Hardy on the northwest end of Vancouver Island was awesome.  We had to check in at 6am and we didn't disembark until midnight.  Unlike Alaska Marine Highway ferries, which are basically a troop transport vessel, BC ferries are swanky.  We paid a little extra to sit in reclining seats in the Aurora Lounge up at the front of the ship.  We had reclining leather seats right in front of a floor to ceiling window.  The cafeteria was nice as well, and they showed a couple movies in a little theater.  We saw several humpback whales along the way, and stopped at a little village called Bela Bela where they were snagging salmon all around the boat.  We got off the ferry in Port Hardy and stayed for a couple nights.  The north end of Vancouver Island is pretty rugged without a lot of development.  We drove around the gravel roads checking out the scene.  A mother black bear sow and her cub were in the road when we came around the corner.  The mom went right and the cub went left.  I'm sure they reunited in the woods somewhere.  They're still logging old growth redwood trees, and a logging truck as big as a house came around the corner at us.  I pulled over, but the truck's trailer still hung over the roof of the chevy.  Scary.  The biggest logs he was carrying had to be 6 or 8 feet thick.  Not huge by redwood standards, but then again, they've cut all the big guys down already.  We've made our way down the coast a tad, now at Telegraph Cove, a cute little resort and marina with historical buildings on the water.  Here are some pictures of BC so far...

The giant Sitka Spruce in Kitimat.  The top had been blown off by lightening a couple centuries ago, but it's still alive.  I can't believe somebody can look at a tree this size and see dollar signs.

Kris (Kerstin) entertaining intrepid travelers at her home.

The ferries do a great job of taking advantage of the protected waters afforded by all the islands along the northwest coast.  So do smart sailboat owners.  There isn't a lot of reliable wind in the Pacific Northwest, so you do a lot of motoring.  Here's somebody headed south on a nice boat.  Mexico?

One of several lighthouses they still man along the inside passage.

Pretty weird.  This was on a hike Laurie and I took while in Port Hardy.  The stump is about 12 feet thick, probably cut over a century ago.  The tree growing out of the stump was big by normal standards.  You see this sometimes up here.  A tree will send roots down the side of the cut stump or fallen tree.  Then, the old dead tree rots away leaving some crazy looking root structures.  Nature at its best.

Marble River.  We saw at least a dozen 3-5 lbs trout from this bridge.  Whoppers compared to the little trout I've caught.

Just a scenic lake in BC, so calm it's like a mirror surface.  Yes, that was a patch of blue sky.  We had one really nice day in Port Hardy.

Juneau

The ferry ride to Juneau from Haines was a short, scenic 4 hours down the coast.  Juneau is quite the busy community, plenty going on and even a minor rush hour at 5pm when all those government workers come home.  We stayed in a full hookup spot on Mendenhall Lake across from a huge glacier.  Besides hanging out at a nice campfire, we did a little sightseeing traveling the whole 30 miles or so of road they have along the coast.  We also took the tramway to the mountain above town.  Of course, I didn't have my Nikon with me so when a bald eagle came soaring back and forth in front of us, I didn't get a picture.  He was close.  There's something majestic about our national symbol, for sure, but when they're so common you see them sitting on a lamp post it takes a little of the prestige away.  We got pretty lucky with the weather and had a couple days with blue skies.  The hiking trails near the campground were great.  However, all good things must come to an end.  We left Juneau, the last Alaskan city on our 2016 Grand Tour, a couple days ago and are in Prince Ruper, British Columbia waiting on the next ferry ride, over to Port Hardy on Vancouver Island.  Here are some pictures from Juneau.

I don't get a picture of our motorhome like this every day.  Not a warehouse, the inside of an Alaska Marine Highway ferry.

Downtown Juneau from Mount Roberts.  They get as many as 4 cruise ships sometimes, and the little downtown gets really crowded.  Most people live either on the island at left, Douglas, connected by a bridge or north toward where we were camped in an area called The Valley.

Mendenhall Glacier and Nugget Falls, both fed by the 1500 square mile Juneau Icefield north of town.

A scenic view on our drive north of town

Closeup of Mendenhall Glacier

The view from our campground

Haines

Well, this road trip is about to turn into a boat trip.  After Valdez, we headed up the road toward Haines.  It took a few days of driving to get here.  We stopped for one night in Tok, which sort of completed our Alaska circle.  Tok is the town we were in after our adventurous drive over the Top of the World highway.  After Tok, we headed east back toward the Yukon and spent a couple wonderful nights at the Cottonwood campground on Kluane Lake.  We didn't have any hookups, but the view and the folks were fantastic.  Then, it was on to the end of the road in Haines.  This little port town is pretty quiet, only one cruise ship comes in each week.  We took the passenger ferry over to Skagway for the day, and it was a madhouse.  They had 4 huge cruise ships in port, and thousands of people walking around.  It was a bit of a shock.  We also toured Steve Kroschel's wildlife park.  This guy is an animal whisperer like we've never seen.  He has wild Alaskan animals that are so used to him that he can take them out in the wild for filming, and they'll come back when he calls.  It was neat getting so close to so many (mostly) wild animals.  This morning, we get on the big ferry for a short ride down the sound to Juneau, another large cruise ship port, but we have a nice spot at the state park outside of town reserved.  Here are some pictures since Valdez.

Kroschel's porcupine

The Bald Eagle Preserve.  We saw several flying around, but in October they gather by the thousands to feed on the late Chum Salmon run.

Rainbow Glacier from Chilkat State Park, just outside of town.  That waterfall is a couple hundred feet tall.  Again, pictures don't capture the majesty.

Our campsite on Kluane Lake, YT.  Beautiful views, nice weather, and great folks.

Visitor's center in Skagway.  That's all bleached natural wood cut into cool geometric patterns.

The White Pass and Yukon Railroad tour.  We spent the majority of the 3 hour trip standing on the platform outside.  The stove inside the car was keeping it a little too toasty.  Great views, and hard to believe men used to hike this canyon to get to Whitehorse to catch the paddle wheeler up to Dawson City.  Seeing Skagway was interesting, in no small part because we'd heard so much about it being the port that the gold rushers came to prior to starting the epic journey to the gold fields in the Klondike.

Kroschel's wolf.  He gets in there and plays with the thing.  Respectfully.

Steve Kroschel.  He's all over YouTube.  The most amazing animal interaction I've ever seen.  This is a wolverine.  He's been raising them for years.  The problem is that they're really just a large weasel, not all that smart.  They don't know their own strength.  Their bite has been known to crack the jawbone of a grizzly, for example.  This thing wasn't declawed or defanged at all.  He's got on several layers of clothes but the kiss is something else.

Valdez

The only context I had for Valdez, AK was the Exxon Valdez disaster.  It's a lot like the other port towns we've visited up here, rugged and more about work than tourism.  The drive down to Valdez is a spur, so we have to retrace our path for about 115 miles to get back on track, but it was worth the drive.  From our campsite, you can see at least a dozen separate glaciers.  We hiked up to the base of one, awesome.  Here are some pictures from the area.

Bridal Veil Falls in Keystone Canyon, AK.  About 10 miles outside Valdez.  It's a couple hundred feet tall or so, hard to tell in the picture.

This makes the scale of Horsetail Falls a little easier.  That's Laurie standing right at the base in the bottom left corner.  This is right across the highway from Bridal Veil Falls.

So we were told, an eccentric old woman kept bunnies as pets and when she died, they were turned lose on the town.  They're everywhere, blond, brown, gray.  They're not exactly scared either.  Reminds me of the chickens in Key West.

Worthington Glacier.  I turned up the blue color a little, still doesn't look as good in pictures as it does in person.  We hiked right up to the base.

Intrepid travelers, glacier side.

Don't try this at home!  I'm sure the ice from this glacier never breaks off in huge chunks and crushes tourists...

A pretty canyon by the salmon hatchery.  They were trying to return to this stream, though they were actually born at the hatchery just to the left out of frame.  More on that below.

The group campfire at our campsite.  It's a cement truck back end with big holes cut into it to make a fireplace.  That's our motorhome in the background.

These salmon are also from the hatchery, trying to make it back up an impossible waterfall from the stream they think they were born in.

These 2 eagles were at our campground the whole time we were here.  I caught them in an interesting pose here, cool reflection in the water.

This is the hatchery.  When they started the process, there were some salmon spawning naturally just upstream on the right.  They have a fish ladder so that some salmon climb into the blue building.  They take the sperm and eggs from some of the fish to breed a few million little salmon every year that they grow in pens just offshore until they're big enough to survive the ocean, then they release them.  The hatchery is close enough to the original natural stream that they think that's where they're supposed to go.  It might have been able to hold a few hundred, maybe a thousand salmon originally.  They grow so many roe now and release them at a maturity level where hundreds of thousands, millions now return to the area every year.  Most are caught in the bay, but these "left overs" are still trying to repeat the natural cycle.  There were dead salmon everywhere, and still thousands trying to cram their way up stream.