Haida Gwaii has one giant hippy festival per year, and we scored the last campsite by the water before the rest of the hippies descended. Set up camp then walked over just in time to see the lantern parade, lighting up the night as the last rays of sun shone over the Tlell river. The…
Category: Haida Gwaii
Unexpected magic: Leaving Haida Gwaii (for now)
All my friends have left the island, both my housemates and my local friends, and I embrace my alone time with a hike up Tow Hill. Despite there being no service on this side of the island, from so high up I get a signal from the mainland 80 km across the Hecate Straight, and…
Cape Fife and Sleeping Beauty Hiking
I pick up my housemates visiting from Calgary and we leave immediately for a 10 km hike out to Cape Fife, locally reputed to be a vortex, a place of high energy and myth. The logged forest looks so different from the places I hiked down south, small trees filling the gaps of long gone…
How to Relax: Shifting Plans and Moonlit Canoeing
I climb back to the rocks (no barnacles!) and a meditation enters my mind.
Inhale: Sun fills every cell with love and light
Exhale: All worry flows into the rocks
Inhale: Thank you for filling me with love and light
Exhale: Thank you for taking all my worry
Once again, learning to accept things as they come, not pushing to have things go the way I planned or imagined. Open to the flow of easy come, easy go, relaxing into the river of abundance without expectation or a white-knuckled need to control how it looks or when. (Ahhhhh what an easier exhale. SO much pressure taken off!)
My daily mantra this year (no matter how I fight it): I trust your process, and I trust your timing.
Haaw’a (thank you): Kayaking Day 8 – Leaving
I’m itchy and everything smells wet and gross…yet I’m not ready to leave at all. I would happily stay, given the chance. Once again, like leaving my house full of climbing best friends in the middle of a perfect summer to come here, I feel like I am leaving in a perfect era that won’t…
What New Alien Life is This: Kayaking Day 7 – Stormed Out Explorations
The rain that’s been predicted all week has finally arrived, and it is an outpouring from the skies. We sleep in, a welcome chill day after many days of early mornings and windy paddling. I read my moss book in bed and look out my tent window at the giant cedar, so happy to relax…
Hot Springs on the Edge of the World: Kayaking Day 6 – Gandll K’in Gwaay.yaay (Hot Spring Island)
Now that all the sightseeing and tours are finished (the good weather and hard paddling we’ve done in the first half of the trip means we hit all our itinerary points ahead of schedule), this is basically just a sweet camping trip with my new friends. We have a chill sleep in (waking at 7:30am…
Real Relaxation: Kayaking Day 5 – Windy Crossings and Nap Beach
Blustery and chilly and tired but still surrounded by water and huge trees, so still happy. I’m sitting beside a massive cedar that must be at least 800 years old, its base as wide as my car. Though it’s a blustery day and I feel creaky and depleted, I am so happy to be here…
Ruckus Raven
I am reading on my porch when the quiet is broken by the heavy flap of raven’s wings. He settles in the tall tree above the chicken coop. The nine hens and single rooster are silent as usual in the morning; they amble around, lazily pecking the ground. But then the raven starts. His CAW…
Thousand Year Trees and the Protests that Protected Them: Kayaking Day 4 – Hlk’yah GawGa (Windy Bay)
How did I forget? Yes I love paddling and am so stoked to learn about the ocean and the Haida culture and history, but as soon as we went walking through this ancient forest I remembered…I just love the trees. They are the real reason I came here. I lay against their massive trunks or…
Mind Blowing Haida History Lessons: Kayaking Day 3 – T’aanuu Llnagaay (Tanu)
Our schedule has shifted to an efficient one: 6:30am wakeup call (ethereal flute played by Devjeet), 7am coffee and breakfast, then pack up tents and belongings, carry the boats to the water, load them with our stuff, and start paddling by 9-9:30. Paddle a few hours, taking advantage of the calm waters that always arrive…
Geology of the Edge of the World: Kayaking Day 2
How a “transform boundary” is really a transformational boundary between worlds, plus paddling through giant kelp and eating Moroccan food on the beach in the middle of nowhere.
