A couple of years back we took home the Georgia Straight’s BEST OF award for “Best Navel Gazing Web Site“, and while our non-profit organization that supports our web site (Vancouver Is Awesome, Inc) is focused on celebrating all of the awesome things that make up our city one of those things is it’s proximity to other awesome places. In Super, Neighbours in British Columbia we take you on adventures to other B.C. locales that we think you should check out. ********** In this current series of posts we’re taking you on an adventure to Sonora Resort, a Relais & Châteaux property up in Desolation Sound. In the FIRST post I showed you what it’s like to fly there with their sister company, London Air Services, by helicopter. In the SECOND I showed you our room. In the THIRD, some of the activities outside our room. In my FOURTH post I took you to the trout pond and the fish hatchery and in my FIFTH I took you on an ocean adventure where I ended up catching an 11.5 pound salmon! As promised, this post isn’t about killing anything to eat, it’s about an amazing eco tour we went on with Aaron Nagler, the author of the book, Natural Wonders of Sonora Resort, which you can read an excerpt from HERE.

This is the boat we were taken out on for a couple of hours (if you’ve been paying attention you’ll remember that this is actually the view of it from our room). Don’t be fooled by it’s puffy appearance, this thing seriously hauls. We covered so many kilometres of ocean and saw so much stuff it was incredible. The entire time, Aaron was talking to us through headsets that we wore, telling us about everything we were seeing.

Here’s some of the wildlife that we came across. It was super cool to be taken on a tour by the guy who quite literally wrote the book about the natural wonders of the area… but I will be honest and say that some of the stuff I liked the most wasn’t the wildlife!

And it wasn’t the waterfalls or the scenery either, although both were awe inspiring!

What I found the most interesting on our eco tour were the stories that he told us about man and his effects on the area. Starting with these ancient pictographs done in some sort of copper-based ink that have survived generations because they’re slightly protected from the elements under an outcropping of rocks. See the dolphins pictured on the left? So cool.

More recently, an equally interesting story he told us was about some of the abandoned floating houses we came across like this one below. When white men were settling in the area they relied on forestry for work. But as it’s so remote and there were never roads, the only way to transport the logs was by water. Their tools and vehicles weren’t as monstrous as they are now, so they generally only fell trees that were close enough to the water to be able to drag them into it where they’d then be shipped to mills closer to Vancouver. Nowadays you’ll see clearcuts way high in the forest range but back then they didn’t have the means to transport those trees from deep in the forest, so intead of building houses on the land and quickly depleting the forest closest to their homes, the settlers made floating homes that they’d park at certain locations until they had logged all that they could, then they moved on.

I’ll come back to the topic of forestry in my final post about Sonora Resort, but first I’ll show you the incredible food we were served. Stay tuned!