2018/07 Arctic Part 3 - Gitanyow |
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On leaving Hyder we had to go through Canadian customs and immigration, thankful that we’d accidentally left our passports in the truck. There must be dozens of Canadians who accidentally enter the USA at Hyder without even owning a passport. Before 9/11 all that was needed to get back into Canada was a driving licence, but I doubt if it’s that simple today.
The border guard asked where we were headed and I had to admit that we didn’t know. We settled on east and south.
We climbed back up the Glacier Highway towards the Bear Glacier. The cliffs are even more impressive from this angle. Those tiny white lines in the picture are just a few of the waterfalls that drop from the hanging glaciers. The toe of the Bear Glacier looked different too, more textured and with a deeper blue tinge in the crevasses.
We saw a black bear eating grass on our descent and then Sandie spotted another at the roadside. We came to Meziadin Lake and turned into the provincial park to have lunch but found that all the space is used for camping and all the slots were occupied, so we had to do with a less scenic lunch spot.
We were headed for Kitwanga Junction and Highway 16, but had read about a village with totem poles along the way. We turned off the 
highway and found the Gitxsan village of Gitanyow and its array of poles, some with unusual features.
Totem poles are not religious; they are more like a European coat of arms. They tell the story of a family and their place within a clan. Unfortunately this was a weekend and the interpretive centre was closed, so we had to guess at the meanings. We got talking to a local who’d lived near Hope as a child, but he was short on local information; he was pumping me instead for news about Hope and the Rambo connection. It’s just occurred to me that he was probably there in a residential school, separated from his family by the government’s attempts to eliminate native culture.
The unusual features, to us anyway, were the bird and the hole. The bird is a gigantic woodpecker, reportedly the bird that once ate up all the wood in the world. Perhaps it’s there to scare away the real birds, deadly enemies of totem poles.
I’ve since found out that the hole represents a fishing hole in the ice. It’s very unusual to see a hole this big as it weakens the pole. This shows how much I know; the pole dates from around 1850!
Most of the cemetery’s family plots were protected by picket fences. I particularly liked this memorial to a man devoted to his boat.
Unfortunately, the property between the poles and the cemetery is the most run-down in the village; a dilapidated house surrounded by discarded cars, furniture, and rubbish. Walking around it was hazardous with broken glass underfoot.