Exploring Bella Coola (2)
Now to the Hagensborg area and west.
We traversed the 17km between Hagensborg and Bella Coola numerous times, looking up and down the creeks that the highway intersected.
A regular sight was crews trimming back roadside vegetation ahead of winter.
The dead centre of town :). A somewhat unusual cemetery with its ad hoc layout and low lying headstones. While contrasting starkly with the visually rich First Nations burial ground located nearer to Bella Coola, it wasn’t devoid of indigenous references.
In Hagensborg opposite the supermarket is the hulking structure of the Bay Motor Hotel and retail complex which from what I can tell closed in 2010.
War memorial behind the Hagensborg Legion (like RSAs in NZ and Australia).
Hagensborg was settled by Norwegians so there is a Norwegian Heritage House, albeit not open at this time of year.
An abandoned roadside restaurant in the middle of nowhere (its most recent incarnation seemingly Chinese). Would love to know what possessed someone to think a business could succeed here.
A side road exploration located this bailey bridge, another short trail (our first successfully completed pathetically-short walk, complete with the recommended amounts of noise to alert any nearby wildlife) and some punters salmon-fishing.
We intended to go see the Odegaard Falls, 25km up a forestry road. However a quarter of the way in we had to turn back. Logging = road closed!
Memorial on the ancestral land of a Nuxalk man who drowned.
Another side road excursion.
Past the paddock with the moose-that-thinks-it’s-a-cow, near the bear viewing platform, the campground was closed.
Some non-bear photos from our river drift tours: We saw an eagle’s nest…
…and plenty of eagles, like this mature pair…
…and this youngster.
A derelict cabin we noticed from the road near the viewing platform. Evidently it featured in a scene at the end of the Incredible Hulk movie a few years ago.
Quiet roads!
Time for another short walk to see a ‘kettle pond’, a depression left by glaciers. The glacier was also responsible for the massive rock at the carpark. It split a few years ago.
This huge moraine, now consumed into the rainforest, is another remnant from the age when Canada was basically covered in ice.
A slightly more relaxed walk. It helped that a noisy family group could be heard in the distance.
And, drumroll… first squirrel sighting!
It takes a long time for people leaving the valley to get anywhere by road but nevertheless they do have this freedom and it’s all because of two bulldozers. We took a drive up the big unsealed hill that separates the valley from the rest of BC. This signs marks the place where the two bulldozers met in 1953 to help create the road.
The inclement weather decided to clear off the day our time was up in Bella Coola. Our morning flight on the cramped wee plane took us back to Vancouver where we flew on to Calgary. Time to go see the Rockies.
Pacific Coast Ranges glaciers.
tall tales 