The Tug Trip

Chasing grizzlies and pushing deep into coastal British Columbia aboard a uniquely Canadian touring vessel.

- By Steve Russell

Like almost any small commercial marina, the one in Kitamat offers a vista of bobbing prawn boats, orphaned trailers and jumbles of rusting mystery equipment. Sprawled on the opposite shore is a multinational-owned aluminum smelting plant. As my conveyance and home for the next week, the touring tug Swell, chugs away from the dock under a chilly rain, I assume more such sights lie ahead. But when the smokestacks dwindle in our wake, a gaze off the bow reveals miles of deep, choppy channel flanked by steep forests and exposed peaks blanketed in melting snow that produces waterfalls gushing through the evergreens down to the craggy shoreline. From high perches, eagles pause their hunting to sternly eye our progress.

This swift, full dose of coastal British Columbia will define a journey intended to transport us via increasingly remote waterways north of Vancouver through the Great Bear Rainforest on the way to isolated Kitlope Lake, if weather and water levels cooperate. There will be shore-tromping excursions, and we've all but been promised up-close sightings of a variety of local wildlife. Some of my fellow passengers are card-carrying, telephoto-toting birders, but frankly, unless a feathered creature is the size of a pterodactyl, I can't be bothered. I'm intent on an encounter of the megafauna kind, as this region boasts more brown and black bears than you can shake a stick at-not that I hope to find myself shaking a stick at either.