Tag Archives: orcalab

Juneau to Seattle

Boats, Busses, and Cougars: My First Journey to Hanson Island. Part: 1

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In the last nine months I’ve learned how to carry three plates of food at once, how to make a passable latte, and how to describe where the hell Hanson Island is in the amount of time it takes to make change for a tall caramel mocha with whip. But since there are no lines or lunch rush on the internet, I’ll happily go into more detail now about the island, the lab you can find there, and the man that started it all. There aren’t that many ways to reach the island, it’s not like Alaska Airlines and Northwest offer nonstop service or anything. So I’ll share the way 18-year old David got there in the summer of 2008:

A flight from Anchorage to Seattle, a celebratory cinnabon and a thirty minute flight got me to Vancouver with thirty pounds of sugar in my stomach and a maze of public transportation between me and my hostel. Three buses and two trains later, lugging a fifty pound Army duffel bag (I had yet to discover the miracle that is expedition backpacks) and I was in the heart of Vancouver. I couldn’t find that hostel again if I tried. My reward was a room the size of a closet, that had last been cleaned sometime during the Reagan Administration, and a broken air conditioner that seemed to welcome in the late June humidity with open arms; I’d never felt better.

The next morning, I boarded a greyhound bus leaving from the most stereotypical bus station of all time. Complete with filthy bathrooms, empty liquor bottles and an abandoned bag of weed under one trash can. The greyhound took me to the ferry and across the channel to Vancouver Island and another seven hours north to the tiny logging town of Port McNeil. The road along the eastern side of Vancouver Island is punctuated by coastal towns; Parksville, Courtenay, Fanny Bay (giggles), Cumberland, and Campbell River. Right after Campbell River though, highway 19 veers sharply inland through the rigid, majestic mountain range that composes Vancouver Island’s backbone. For two hours there are no towns or ocean views, just a never ending tunnel of trees, with whitecapped mountains peaking through the green framed windows. Port McNeil, is the second to last stop on the line, with only Port Hardy further to the north. It’s also the nearest the bus could get me to Hanson Island. With bus to submarine conversion technology still being decades away.

I planned to spend the night in Port McNeil and it was just another mile walk, dragging my duffel behind me to the campground and the campground host who, upon learning that I planned to sleep in a tent, felt it wise to inform me that there were three black bears…. and a cougar prowling about the campsites on a nightly basis.

Cougar? What the hell is a cougar? Black bears, fine. Alaska was filled with the mischievous spry critters. In the trees, in the undergrowth, occasionally in a garbage can. But cougars were a whole different animal, no pun intended. I was one year into a degree in wildlife biology and I had no clue what to do with a large cat. I could explain how it’s muscles received oxygen and how it’s cells had divided as it grew in it’s mother womb, but nothing that would help me if it came knocking on my tent flap at three in the morning.

But I was eighteen, naïve, and feeling invincible. I threw down my credit card and asked for one cougar free campsite. Walking to my site I passed two teenage girls, excitedly reliving their thrilling encounter last night with….. the cougar. I’m sure they were exaggerating its snarling and charging behavior though. My night was cougar free and I fell asleep with steak, potatoes, and rice in my belly thanks to the sympathetic retired couple across the camp who took pity on me after my bowl of cooking ramen fell into the fire. Putting my tent away the next day I happened to look up and found a black bear looking back as he stood near the dumpster fifty feet away. After all the jungle cat talk though a bear felt almost tame, I shrugged and went back to packing my tent.

All I had to do now was catch a ferry to Alert Bay, the miniscule village on the comma shaped island of Cormorant Island, just a couple miles to the east. But that was as far as B.C’s public transportation would take me. Because my final destination was not a city or a town, there is no dock, road, or parking lot. Just a tiny little unnamed cove with a trio of small buildings constructed in homage to the 1970’s back to the earth design.

This is the place known as Orca Lab. Paul Spong and Helena Symonds home and research station. Strategically placed at the mouth of Johnstone Strait, the lab overlooks Blackfish Sound, the highway in which 200+ orcas swim down every year, chasing salmon. I had arranged to meet Paul at the ferry terminal and sat on my duffel bag bouncing in anticipation watching cars drive onto the ferry bound for Alert Bay and realized that I had one small problem. I had no idea what Paul Spong looked like.

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Juneau to Seattle

Nissan Tetris: 20 days to go

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Everything we own has to fit in a 1996 Pathfinder. This includes, one cat (Porter) who feels it is his god given right to move freely throughout the cabin, fasten seatbelt light be damned. A rabbit (Penny) and her cage (excuse me, Brittney insists we call it a house), and the two of us. Our bed is long gone, we’ve never owned a dresser that wasn’t made of cheap plastic, and our entertainment system has been those two fur balls we’ve shared our lives with the past two years.

So when we moved out of our cozy (a nice word for cramped) studio apartment in January to house sit until moving day, I thought decluttering would be a breeze. The mattress and end table were gone within hours of a craigslist post and seemingly bag after bag of discarded and forgotten memorabilia was dropped unceremoniously into the dumpster. So when the day came to move our few remaining possessions from the Mendenhall Apartments into the house we’d call home for the next few months, we were terrified to discover it still took three loads to remove everything. We were over capacity, by a lot. And Penny’s cage house wasn’t even set up when we moved it.

And so we’ve spent the last few months enjoying the luxuries of modern civilization such as electric heat, big screen TV’s, ESPN, and Fred Meyer while trying to part ways with more of our stuff. And yet there are things that, incredibly are just hard to let go of. A stack of birthday cards that spans a decade, a high school basketball shirt, and a pile of text books that weigh half a ton but I kept swearing I’d go back and read some day. But in the past two weeks we’ve finally said goodbye to all of them and the moment of truth is three weeks away.

The pathfinder, dubbed “Tui” after the sweet singing song bird of New Zealand needs a serious cleaning before we can actually test how much she can carry but I’m now confident it’s all going to fit. If not, we have until June 28th to say goodbye to whatever else needs to go, whether we deem it significant or not. We spent last night pouring over the highway between Skagway and Seattle, piecing together campsites, food options, and trying to realistically estimate how many miles we can cover with a hyperactive cat crawling all over us. If all goes to plan, the Seattle skyline should come into view some time on July 2nd, the first 1,731 miles under our belt.

I’ll be in Seattle for two weeks before setting out for what will, ultimately be the final destination for the four of us come October; Hanson Island, British Columbia. Through this website we hope to maintain a link to the outside world, and give people a glimpse at what we’ll be doing on our own little slice of heaven throughout the coming winter. We feel we’ve been blessed with the opportunity to grow and challenge ourselves in a way that we never have before, and I for one, could not be more excited or nervous.

It’s my hope that, with just under three weeks before we board the ferry and say goodbye to the city and people that we’ve grown to love so much in the past five years, I can give some background on the place we’ll call home, and how we came up with this hair brained scheme in the first place (spoiler alert: alcohol was involved). But for now, the words of John Muir, one of the greatest explorers of our time seem most appropriate, “We must risk our lives in order to save them.”

David Cannamore