East Beach Tracking

After leaving the Haida gathering we travelled north and spent the next three nights just north of Tlell in the southern portion of Naikoon Provincial park. This park takes in a large area on the north east side of Graham island. It is a flat, low-lying area as is much of the Eastern side of the island. We found a nice Shelter spot that included a woodstove and were thankful for the space to dry out our tent and tarp after some wet days in Rennel Sound, not to mention the heat from the woodstove! Here we spent out time hiking the flat sandy beaches and following the many clear tracks let for us in the sand by the local wildlife. It's such a treat to be able to follow these animals in the wet sand. Such detail in the tracks. There were lots of deer and raccon tracks mostly, as well as many birds such as Ravens, Herring Gulls, Stellars Jays and Eagles. I was happy to have all of these clear tracks and was hoping to make some plaster casts to preserve them.

One of the days we spent hiking 5 km out to the pesuta shipwreck. It was a log barge that ran aground on the east beach in the 1920's (I think?). Sometime around that era. There was still part of the ship visible buried in the sand on the beach were it washed ashore. There were many old homesteads on this part of the beach that were abandoned around the second world war. They say that approx. 500 cattle were turned loose and have gone 'wild' in the forests surrounding this area. You could see signs of thier presence in the heavy trail systems and major browse sign on the spruce trees along the shore. I thought that I may have seen some Elk tracks in this area as well, but was not totally confident in this assumption. Later, however a local on the ferry did tell me that there are Elk in this general area. Hard to say for sure?

From here we headed north to Masset and Haida (Old Masset), the most northern communities in the Charlottes.