Exploring British Columbia
Just after 7:00am the sun began to spill down the granite walls, slowly warming the cool air and illuminating the beautiful fiord around us. The Sea Bird moved ahead slowly, adding barely a ripple to the glassy calm waters. Deeper and deeper into the mountains, we rounded one point after another, revealing new vistas of dark stone and bright blue skies as we made our way slowly into the head of Kynoch Inlet. Kynoch is one of the two main waterways of Fiordland Provincial Marine Park, a specially protected part of British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest. Cut off by the soaring mountains of the Coast Range and accessible only by boat and floatplane, this park is home to black and brown bears, dozens of salmon runs, wolves and seals, eagles and herons and much more, truly a hidden gem of the Inside Passage.
Kynoch Inlet and all the waterways around it are fiords: steep-sided valleys carved by glaciers and now flooded by the sea. We could see evidence of this geologic past clearly written on the walls in the form of glacial striations, the great gouge marks left by the glacier as it ground its way down the valley. Looking up, three thousand feet above the sea, we could see the tops of the walls and the rounded summits closest to the fiord. And from some angles, looking up the tributary valleys, we could make out the higher, much more jagged horns and arêtes rising behind them. This neck-stretching view gave us an astounding feeling for the enormity of the ice age glaciers; the closer, rounded summits had been completely covered by ice, more than half a mile above our anchorage, while the distant horns were left rugged because they had stood just above the high tide of that incredible ice sheet.
Altogether the fiord was an amazing vantage point, a deep cross-section into the heart of the Coast Range. Around us were the roots of the mountains, ribboned with waterfalls, cloaked in evergreen forest, rich with life and glowing in the September sun.
We made the most of the beautiful morning. Colorful kayaks explored up into a tidal lagoon, Zodiacs zipped here and there, carrying photographers from one lovely scene to another, and we donned our faithful rubber boots for one last delightfully squishy hike through a trackless meadow of golden grasses. By the time the Sea Bird hauled anchor we were all ready for a relaxing afternoon, sunning on the decks and reviewing our images and memories.
