Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/792909
14 BCA A .COM SPRING 2017 Janet Gyenes (top) Relics of river life Over the next two days, we drift past Carlisle, Claxton and Haysport, once- thriving fish canneries that are now just a series of pilings, apparitions rising from murky water. We slip ashore at Port Essington, another cannery town, and slog through the mud to gape at century-old cow skulls and jawbones, teeth intact, at our feet. "They brought in the cows by steamship," says Bryce of the long-gone slaughterhouse. Despite seeing fresh grizzly tracks on the beach, we soldier through waist-high eel grass onto a mucky path. Then we bushwhack uphill to Port Essington's cemetery, where dozens of tombstones are shrouded in moss. Who were these people laid to rest in the woods? Maybe some lived in the managers' quarters at Cassiar Cannery, which opened in 1903 at the mouth of the Skeena River. Now a series of four restored waterfront heritage houses, rented to overnight visitors like us, it was the last operating cannery on the Skeena when it closed in 1983, says co-owner Justine Crawford. Crawford joins us on the boat and guides our visit to Osland, a tiny community across the river, founded by Icelandic-Canadians around 1912. According to records from the Royal BC Museum, the Sakamoto family moved here in 1931 and the five sons established a boatbuilding shop. A wooden boardwalk connects now-chic cottages, ramshackle buildings and other remnants, like old wooden boats beached on the shore. The next morning we awake to a mist- shrouded river and make our way to the jet boat to explore the last stretch of the Skeena. Bryce takes us to another petroglyph near Prince Rupert. "Just walk straight ahead," he says. We scramble over slippery rocks, searching. "Found it!" It's a life-size human figure carved, as if lying flat, into a long slab of stone. Unlike the other petroglyphs we've seen, Bryce says this one has a name: The Man Who Fell from Heaven. In this giant's terrarium shaped by volcanoes and glaciers, where spirit bears roam, such a supernatural specimen doesn't seem odd at all.