East Beach & Rose Spit

As we left the Cape Fife area we headed North on East Beach towards Rose Spit. It was a beautiful sunny morning, just right for walking on a sandy beach on Haida Gwaii! There were numerous sets of tracks on the beach. The wet sand afforded some fine detail and I took a little time to make some plaster casts. I managed to make some good track casts of deer, mink and raccoon. I could have easily spent all day examining each of these tracks and learning some of the many lessons that they had to teach.

Walking north we could see Rose spit which 'curls' out into the ocean from the tip of Graham island. It separates the East and North beaches and travels quite a distance into the sea. We could see the waves breaking way offshore where they must have been hitting part of the sandbar that is the 'Spit'. We ate some lunch where the trees stopped and again gazed across the water to the Alaskan islands in the distance. At this location we also began to notice many large Scallop shells, unfortunately they were only half shells and did not contain the tastey 'scallup' part. The locals told us that during a north wind many of these large bivalves wash up on the beach and are collected and eaten. We did pick up a few shells that will make a good decoration or perhaps a smudge bowl. From here we changed our direction and began walking down North beach.