2014/06 Haida Gwaii trip - Gray Bay |
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Friday June 27th
We were heading out into the boonies and needed to fill up with propane and diesel. The latter was a surprise as there’s less than a hundred miles of road in Haida Gwaii but I guess we’d driven most of it several times. We went back to the terminal in Skidegate, this time to take the Kwuna ferry across the channel to Moresby Island. This is a typical island-hopping ferry, drive-on-drive-off, holding a dozen or so cars.
It should have been a scenic trip but heavy rain stopped us from getting out or even opening the windows. The ferry lands at Alliford Bay, where there’s nothing but a logging road and six miles of highway leading to the only village, Sandspit, with a population of a few hundred.
We wanted to find out more about camping possibilities, and found the visitors centre at the far end of the village, inside the airport. This is appropriate as most visitors fly in there from Vancouver and then have to get themselves across to Graham Island. As you might guess from Sandspit’s name it’s a good place to land aircraft.
There they gave us a good map of the logging roads and some pointers on where to camp. They also pointed us to an outfit that runs boat trips out to Skedans, one of the abandoned Haida villages, on a nearby island. It’s not the best one; that’s Ninstints, a multi-day trip far to the south. But the outfit didn’t have any vacancies until after we were due to leave.
It was still raining heavily so we postponed looking at Sandspit and took off along what turned out to be a rough logging road, very narrow in places so we thought it was 
probably not currently in use. We passed Copper Bay, a Haida fishing camp, and eventually reached the Gray Bay recreation area and this rather pretty access road, with its hemlock curtains. This is reputed to be the best beach in the islands. It certainly wasn’t crowded; nobody there and we had our choice of about twenty campsites, all on the beach/forest boundary.
By now it was just breezy so we walked to the north end of the beach where a creek formed a natural barrier. All this time the tide was going out a long way, revealing acres 
of sand. A fishing boat was dropping off crab pots, close enough in for the crew to wave to us.
Saturday June 28th
It was a bright sunny day until we got up and clouds and showers rolled in. This time we walked to the south and found that the bay was divided by a low rocky outcrop with 
miles more of sand beyond. The sand had these odd little crabs every few inches, millions in all. They would have been crab nuggets for the gulls, but there weren’t any, just a constant eagle patrol, looking for larger fare. We saw humans in the far distance but never met anyone.