Day 14 - Campbell River

Campbell River is a very nice town of of about 35,000 people on the Inside Passage shipping route. The downtown is clean and vibrant and there seems to be plenty of shopping there and in the big box stores surrounding the downtown core.

We took a short drive to Elk Falls Provincial Park to walk some trails. This park adjoins the BC Hydro site of the John Hart Hydroelectric station, a newly constructed underground power plant that replaced an earlier one constructed in the 40's.

There are well maintained trails that led to a suspension bridge over the river gorge that provided spectacular views of Elk Falls. The falls are a bypass to the generating station that have a regulated flow that is conducive to the fish habitatat in the gorge. We just missed by a day, and 12x increase in flow that was flowing for the past month to permit an inspection of the tunnel feeding the power plant. That would have been spectacular!

The trails wind along the riverbank and through some old growth forest. A really nice place to spend a few hours.

And then I saw an ape in a tree....

From here we ran some shopping errands and ended up at the fisheman's pier and did a dock walk. A surprising number of wooden fishing boats still in operation.

Each summer, they have a chainsaw sculpture event on the waterfront. It is over now but the pieces remain in the Rotary Park. Some really great wood sculptures!

We went to dinner at a really nice pub situated on the 50th parallel. They were very accommodating and seated us in front of the TV that had the Bill's opening game (started @ 5:20 pm here). We went back to our room at half time and watched the second half and the moon rise over Cape Mudge on Quadra Is.