A Short Trip to Bella Coola

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There aren’t a whole lot of corners of the Province that I haven’t at least passed through, but the Central and North Coast are definitely areas I’ve always wanted to visit and never had the opportunity. I had an opportunity to travel to Bella Coola for business and so here I am.

Don’t you just love traveling to smaller, out of the way places? The trip up here was shorter than I imagined….by plane of course. Only 75 minutes from Vancouver. Now driving would be another story altogether! I’ve heard about “The Hill“. Apparently the drive down into Bella Coola is so steep and frightening that many people hire a driver to bring their vehicle down, particularly in the winter.

The Bella Coola valley is a glacial valley, carved out and worn down by ice and water over millenia. Oddly enough, it doesn’t feel alien if you are from the Lower Mainland….in fact, looking up you would be excused for thinking you were looking at the Chief in Squamish. The valley is steep sided and the snow topped mountains tower above you. The river and the inlet are bright green from the glacial silt that is washed down from the melting behemoths.

I flew up here on Monday morning and what a flight. Clear and sunny, looking down over the glaciers and snow covered peaks. Landing was exciting. The plane does a spiral and then heads down into the tight valley. Not for the faint of heart.

I was picked up by the owner of the Brockton House Inn and given my room and a rental van. Van…here I am in wonderful back country area….and I have a van…not a truck…but a van. That just sucks. Oh well. I sign my forms, hand over my credit card number, initial and sign that I will not take the van out of the valley or onto any gravel logging roads. I head the the hatchery. After work…I decide to drive up the gravel road out of the valley.

As I am heading up the valley I see a couple of chipmunks, a black bear and a grouse. The grouse is far and away the most entertaining…simply because of its inherent stupidity. As I motor towards it standing at the side of the road….its defence mechanism is to freeze. This always makes me laugh. It actually stretched its head out slightly further as I closed in on it. If I had swerved even slightly towards it I would have clipped its head right off. Sometimes, as much as I am an evolutionary believer…I think Darwin might have been off a bit….how do these birds stay in existence?

A little farther on and I reach the end of the pavement and begin to climb.

What a drive!!! They don’t call it the hill for no reason! This road is most definitely NOT for the faint of heart either! In many places is it barely wide enough for one vehicle…..I breathe a sigh of relief that there are no logging trucks to encounter. And on the next tight corner I am face to face with a monster motorhome towing a small car. I am on the cliff side…the outside, so technically I have the right of way….but this guy looks so frightened and I have room to squeeze close to the edge and let him pass. I’m obviously in a better mental state than he is.

I stop once or twice and check out the scenery. Finally, I reach the top and everything flattens out. I’m not really interested in driving all the way to Anahim Lake so I stop and decide to check out the devastation wrought by the pine beetle. I stop, turn off the van and get out. I walk around the other side and peer out over the landscape. The trees are a sea of read.

Tragic.

I snap a couple of shots and turn around. As I am getting back into the van I see some motion in the bushes across the road from me. Munching away and keeping an eye on me are two black bears. How did I miss them !?!? I turn the van around and pull to a stop next to them. I roll the window down and am inundated by a wall of flies and mosquitoes! The bears don’t take much notice of me, they are too busy having their own argument. They don’t seem to want to share the same “table” and one chases the other into some bushes. There is some muttering, huffing, grumbling and charging before they both head off into the trees.

My trip back down is uneventful and I meet no further cars or wildlife on “The Hill”.

Back on pavement again, I round the corner at Firvale and a small animal dashes across the road and stops…so do I (I love small places like this where you can stop in the middle of the road and there is no one around to care). The small black animal pokes its head out again, then another shows itself. A pair of black foxes…something I’ve not seen before in the wild. They are skittish and take off quickly.

The rest of the drive back to the Inn is uneventful.

What a neat place.