2014/06 Haida Gwaii trip - News from Hope |
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Dear All,
This letter is mainly about our trip to Haida Gwaii, but that wasn’t even planned until mid-June, just before we left. Back in 
May we had to finish off last year’s earthworks in the back yard, mainly easy work, putting down landscape fabric and crushed rock for the pathways and river rock for the plantings. Also the fun stuff, planting the shrubs and flowers. It’s a tough environment back there in the shade and battered by the wind from the river; our experience is that plants from the nursery have their leaves shredded within a week, but the new leaves that replace them will survive.
In the front our pears, strawberries, and yellow cherries were doing well, but we had a crow squatting in our cherry tree, just waiting for the cherries to ripen, so we didn’t get many.
The Fraser River was coming up steadily, about four to six inches a day, and the Coquihalla less predictably. It’s an interesting time of the year, with the rivers full of tree trunks and the banks being undercut in places. Over about two weeks we watched a big cedar gradually tip over and finally end up in the Coq, adding to the great dam of tree trunks that’ll block one side of the river until the next flood clears everything out.
Our favourite trail was steadily going under too, and on one of our walks we found an older guy stuck in two feet of water with his electric scooter. We don’t know what he was thinking, as electric motors don’t do well under water! We managed to drag him and his dead scooter out of the woods to the nearest house and luckily the family there was willing to get him and his scooter home. Since then we’ve heard that his family has grounded him.
Walking into town one day we spotted a giant Christmas tree outside the post office, odd for May. It was a crew filming “A Christmas 
Tale” using Hope Mountain as a backdrop. On the last day of shooting, the tree was in bits with a wrecked car underneath it and everything sprayed with artificial snow. Santa was signing autographs – didn’t notice his odd legs until now!
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