Klemtu and Bishop Bay Hotsprings

We just keep moving ever further north. 

That’s Klemtu, a little Indian Reserve about 100 miles south of Prince Rupert.  It was ….. pretty laid back.  We’d been told that we had to stop there because the lodge/big house was worth seeing.  So we found our way to the band office and asked to see the lodge.  It turned out that there’s both a lodge AND a big house and further that the lodge is just a hotel.  So once we got that sorted out we waited a long time and finally Shane showed up to give us a tour of the big house.  It was definitely worth the wait but unfortunately it was so dark inside that we couldn’t get much for inside photos.

The guy Marilyn is standing next to is some kind of “greeter totem”.  Apparently he is positioned so as to be the first thing you see when you come into the bay and the last thing you see as you leave. 

Inside the building there are totems like this at each end, a fire pit in the middle and cedar bench seating around the outside.  The building smells wonderful

From Klemtu we headed pretty well straight north in Princess Royal Reach, up the east side of Princess Royal Island.  The island is famous as the home of the spirit bears but we didn’t see any.  We did meet up with a couple later in the day at Bishop Bay who had been fortunate enough to see a spirit bear.  They said it was no big deal – just kind of a dirty yellow bear.  They saw the bear at the old Butedale cannery which is the ruins in the picture below.

Evidently someone has bought the junkyard that once was a cannery and plans to convert it into a tourist destination.  Time will tell – I’m sure there’s a lot of those dreams that quickly turn into nightmares.  The location of the cannery ruins is spectacular – the waterfall below is about 200 yards south of the cannery ruins.  At one time the cannery generated hydroelectric power from the waterfall.

After Butedale it took us about another 5 hours to chug our way up into Bishop Bay which is where we are now.  Bishop Bay is another natural hot springs.  This one is a little more developed and, unlike Eucott, we have had company here every day since we arrived.  That’s not all bad either but we did enjoy having Eucott all to ourselves.