We couldn’t resolve to leave this beautiful and vast Canadian province known as British Colombia, without first trying to lose ourselves up the many river valleys, following the tracks of salmons 🐟 and natives 🎣.

We left the coast eastward on Highway 16 from Prince Rupert to Prince George, which is known here as the Highway of Tears. The road is infamous for a high rate of kidnapping and murders of women - since 1970, over 80 women disappeared. Most of them were Indigenous, and they are still very much at risk even today (hence the panels that forbid hitchhiking here).

First detour from Hwy 16 was to the Nass valley, host of the Nishga’a people (since people around here see themselves as belonging to the land and not as owning it). There we discussed with Calvin McNeil, a local artist whose father was Scotish and mother Nishga’a, but was raised by his grandparents. He was on a commission to carve a new totem pole depicting a shaman (with it’s bear-claws hat) and other symbols we didn’t fully understand (or were not supposed to). This was a copy of an older pole, which was itself a copy of an even older one. Often those poles were mortuary ones and had decorated bentwood box in the middle that holds the remains of a great man. As the totem would slowly dissolve back to mother nature, the essence of the man and its memory would also gently fade.

Interesting other things we saw include:

• Polish people pretending to be Ukrainians fishing for halibut by the end of the road in a 3-boat marina.
• A small but great museum with centuries-old artifacts, where bored Indigenous teenagers spend their summer earning money by narrating to excited tourists the diverse aspects of their culture displayed here.
• Nishga’a government and other institutional buildings, as they managed to sign a contract with the Canadian government which gives them various rights and authority over their own land.

Quick side note: Many other native people from elsewhere in America were forced to sign treaties to give up their land, but it turns out the British Crown didn’t care to do that in the Northwest Pacific, which means this land is still “officially” the property of no one, or at least that it could be seen this way…

The Nishga’a people saw their population greatly decline 300 years ago, when a fissure in the Earth’s crust 🌋 caused a huge lava flow to rush down the valley onto several villages, killing at least 2000 people and blocking one of the main river affluent (most recent volcanic eruption in Canada). We stopped several times on the way back to marvel at the lava fields which, due to the fight between the lava and the river, created the most surprising combinations 💧🔥🍀 of water, basalt and vegetation.

A quick rest in a forest on a river island at Terrace, then we headed to another valley, another people. This times the river was called Skeena and the people the Gitxan, famous for their unique totem pole carving style (quite different from what we saw earlier). We visited two villages with historic houses and poles of Kitwanga and Gitanyow. These villages used to trade fish oil and furs with the bigger town called Hazelton, one of the earliest pioneer ⛏️ settlement in the region (around 1863).

From there, one can join the Alaskan Highway via the long Steward-Cassiar Highway which stretches for 700 km with scarce services. This road is parallel to the border with the Alaskan panhandle along the north-west coast, and surely we couldn’t resist crossing the border at Hyder to claim a bit earlier, the milestone of having reached Alaska with our own vehicle all the way from Poland 🌎🤙🇵🇱.

There we saw rivers filled with salmons like the Parisian Periph’ on a busy morning, and grizzlies too full to fight 🐻🚥🍽️🐟🐟🐟.

Video of the Grizzly catching a salmon

Then we pushed our heavy vehicle up to the Salmon Glacier through bumpy dirt roads, and spend a night with a view.

We cannot complain about the roads quality too much, because most of minor roads here are created and maintained only to support the activities of logging 🌲 and mining 💰 companies, which tap on the amazing ressources that fill this land.

Resuming northward, we left BC passing by a succession of nice camping spots along jade-colored lakes.