Gravel roads, take me home...

I did not grow up in the land of gravel roads, exactly. I grew up in a place where roads are extremely challenged, and the culture responds to this by building the very best roads they can, to handle high water tables and extreme temperatures, heavy farm equipment and snow plows.

But not, I think, mountains.

So let me set up the scene for you... it's been a not-unusual high-stress September as the grant application due dates all seem to be in September and March, and Elizabeth doesn't have time to write grants during the school year so she seems to always have one or two coming to crunch in the Fall. But this year there were 6. After they were all finished, Elizabeth decided she needed a couple of stress-free days.

In the meantime, I've been sort of invited to help a group of sailboats who want to sail 'round Vancouver Island. I have to admit I'm pretty tempted, since the time I did this before turned into one of the most enjoyable cruises I've ever taken, if also one of the riskiest. The north end of the island is nothing to sneeze at, being remote and prone to extremes of tide, current, and weather. And the west coast is nearly uninhabited, especially so in the northern half above Clayoquot Sound.

It's also intensely beautiful, with long fjords carving deep into the mountain ridge which make up the backbone of Vancouver Island.

So I'm already thinking about beautiful and remote places in the northern half of the island and Elizabeth needs to take a long weekend and Canada has just voted the conservatives back into power in Parliament (that is only sort of related, but you get the point) and we decided to just go find a hotel somewhere north. Which we did, in Port Hardy. And we decided to make a jaunt over to the west coast, to Winter Harbour, which turned out to be the highlight port of my cruise around the island 3 years ago.

One thing you need to realize is there are three industries on Vancouver Island north of Campbell River - Resources (logging and open-pit mining), Fishing, and tourists. And not much of the latter except in the months of July and August. Furthermore, every human settlement is on the water - either the ocean or an inland waterway - and this has been true for millenia. Many communities do not have road connections to anywhere, except by the crude logging roads the lumber companies build to harvest up the slopes of the mountains and hills.

Which is not quite true for Port Hardy itself. This is the departure point for ferries servicing the northern BC coast and southern Alaska, so trucks of supplies make their way up the only highway on Vancouver Island to this terminus, and those of us in search of quiet remote settings get to trail along with.

And then we strike off on those logging trails that lead to such interesting destinations as Cape Scott, Holberg, and Winter Harbor. Which we did this morning.

I was under the (mistaken) impression that the first leg of this passage was going to be reasonably easy - asphalt county road to Holberg. This is a famous bit of the trail to Cape Scott, which is a major destination for hikers and bicyclists, a national park at the tip of Vancouver Island and well north of 50°. And a half-mile on the asphalt stopped, and the gravel began. The posted speed was also 50kph - about 30mph.

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Weeeelllll, I'm a country boy from Minnesota, have driven my fair share of "tinned" roads. That speed limit is just a guideline, isn't it? No, as a matter of fact, it isn't. Not because I got a ticket, no. Because the damn road is a death trap.

First off, in Minnesota gravel is sifted and graded according to size and how much rock - pebbles really - there is to how much sand. The rock is usually limited to, oh, about 1" or 1.5" size, but at least half of it is fine stuff. Not here. I'd say the average rock was less than baseball size. But the average means there was a fair bit over that size as well as under it.

As for how much fine stuff... that seems to be pretty variable. In some stretches it was pack smooth and hard, a great ratio of coarse to fine. In others it seemed they'd completely forgotten the fine stuff, and in the worst spots spring streams had clearly run down or accross the road, stripping away the sand and silt and leaving banked rock with carved ruts.

The noise and tension have blanked out most of my memories of the trip, but it took about two hours to drive the 40 km (25 miles) to Winter Harbour. The village is mostly deserted at this time of year, the post office was open though. We walked the board walk, which is the easiest way to get around in this town, and talked about possibilities of this being a place to get away from it all. Which it certainly was. After a couple hours of walking about we'd exhausted our curiousity, got back in the car and headed back to Port Hardy.

The car was caked with mud, but the drive back was a bit easier and faster now that I was learning how these logging roads worked. After washing down the car and dinner we came to the conclusion that Winter Harbour would be a great place for us, with either a reasonable truck or going there by boat.