Fishing the River of Time by Tony Taylor

Author:Tony Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-77100-058-1
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2013-02-26T05:00:00+00:00

Many more years have passed and I am still writing about things the human species has difficulty with. I have never claimed to know any of the answers, but I think I am getting better at asking the right questions. If we want our planet and our species to survive, doesn’t it make sense for all of us to use less of everything and consider more carefully the way we behave?

7

The Secret Coast

One of the attractions of living in Meade’s cabin in the sixties was the easy access to Vancouver Island’s wild west coast. As the logging progressed so rapidly west of Cowichan Lake it became possible to reach the Nitinat River on logging roads, and possession of a canoe opened up all sorts of wonderful country.

Even today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, there is still no road along the west coast of Vancouver Island and this wildness continues northwards beyond the island for thousands of kilometres. True, a road now runs from Victoria at the southern tip of the island towards the town of Port Renfrew, but that road was not cheap to construct because it crosses numerous rivers that were difficult to bridge. North of there on the west coast there is no road at all to the top of the island. Fortunately Vancouver Island, like most of British Columbia, still has one of the wildest and most unspoilt coasts in the world, and even in the increasingly populous south there are still many lonely lakes and wild rivers to explore.

Today, part of this beautiful coast can be accessed at Long Beach. Wolves and bears are common here. To give you an idea how wild it is, recently a university student asleep in his sleeping-bag on the sand was rudely awoken early one morning by a she-wolf dragging the bag with him in it towards her two hungry cubs. When he wriggled out of the bag the three wolves quickly vanished. They were obviously used to investigating flotsam that ended up on the lonely beach.

Not far from that point there is an isolated luxury hotel where my wife and I were treated to a stay a few years ago. It has to be one of the world’s most spectacularly situated hotels. Recently, I read an essay by Tim Flannery describing his visit to this wild coast and how he was awestruck by the sheer abundance of life. He used the word titanic to describe it, and said it was almost beyond his reckoning. It is indeed a giant world. Go there if you like unspoilt beauty but take only photographs and leave nothing behind.

At the northern tip of the island is the remote and wild Cape Scott, and just to the east is the entrance to Queen Charlotte Strait. Nowadays it is possible to follow the protected Inside Passage south of the cape but Captain James Cook, although he recorded an inlet there in 1778, had no time to explore it. He was trying to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.