Alaska or Bust: Revisited: Prince Rupert to Burns Lake, BC Part 1 (7/18/2017)

Day 35
Tuesday, July 18, 2017
After disembarking with our car from the MV Matanuska at midnight, we had a long wait in line for Canada customs. Only one booth was open, yet many customs officers were milling around. What is going on?
When it was our turn, there were the usual questions, then the officer asked if we knew about the BC wildfires. Uh, no! He suggested we find out if our route was going to be closed.
We drove into Prince Rupert, passing a closed gas station with several police vehicles lying in wait. Waiting for what?
We found the local WalMart, joined other cars and campers in the parking lot, reclined our seats, and slept.

WalMart campers lot in Prince Rupert, BC

This WalMart was part of a strip mall

A Tim Horton's that opened at 5:00 was our restroom as well as breakfast spot.
While I was living in Buffalo, NY in the 1970s, Tim Horton was ending his NHL career with the Buffalo Sabres. Earlier, in 1964, in his native Ontario Horton had founded his first Tim Horton Doughnut Shop. Now, Tim Hortons is a multinational fast food chain known for coffee and donuts. Most of us in the northern US border states know Tim Horton's, but the presence of their shops is trickling farther south. They are the go-to coffee shop in Canada.
Prince Rupert is the marine "Gateway to Alaska." Another ice-free harbor, the area has been home to First Nation peoples for 10,000 years. The 18th century saw the arrival of fur traders, then the Hudson Bay Company. Prince Rupert was established in 1906 as the terminus of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad. Now it is a center of fishing and fish processing.
I prefer the designation of First Nations for the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Whenever possible, I try to use the specific clan or tribe name. But I have been using the term "Native" peoples for Alaska and the USA.

Kwinitsa Railway Station (1911, one of four surviving identical stations)
was moved to the Prince Rupert waterfront to become a museum
of Canada's northern railway, the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad

Mother Grey Whale and Calf (1985,
by Hans and Naida Siniarski)

Museum of Northern British Columbia (in a building styled as a
traditional Northwest Coast First Nations longhouse)

Cow Bay, once a cluster of canneries and boatyards,
is now a marina with shops and eateries

Cow Bay Café was not open for us to have a substantial breakfast

Entrance to the Sunken Gardens (1913, as the foundation for the
Provincial Courthouse, but construction halted during WWI;
plans changed and the courthouse was built at a site farther north)

Sunken Gardens is on two levels

Sunken Gardens (KSS)

Sunken Gardens with a view of the Provincial Courthouse (1922)

Kasu Maru Memorial in the Pacific Mariners Memorial Park (KSS)

An interesting story of Kazukio Sakamoto going out to fish in his local waters in 1985, in his fishing vessel, the Kazu Maru. Tragically, neither he nor the boat returned home. A year and a half later the Kazu Maru was found in a channel between islands off the coast of Prince Rupert. The boat was taken to Prince Rupert where she was restored and put on display. It was learned that the Kazu Maru belonged to a man from Owase in Japan, and coincidentally Owase and Prince Rupert had been sister cities since 1968. Sakamoto’s wife said the Kazu Maru was "the love of his life" and indicated he would have been happy to know his boat was part of a park honoring mariners, recognizing the danger of a life at sea.

A whale fluke bench (2016)

Channel marker buoys (KSS)

We Are Out There (by Elek Imredy), a sculpture
of a mariner at the helm of his fishing boat (KSS)

We followed Yellowhead Highway/Trans-Canada Highway 16 E. (The Zero Mile Marker of Yellowhead Highway is not in Prince Rupert, but in the village of Massett on the Haida Gwa'ii islands/Queen Charlotte Archipelago.)

Foggy shore of Kaien Island, on which Prince Rupert is situated

A short detour on BC 599 west towards Port Edward.

North Pacific Historic Fishing Village, an 1899 salmon cannery village
that reached its peak between 1910 and 1950, then closed in 1968

Another view at the cannery village, which was one of over 200
such villages in British Columbia

A cloud-clogged cleft

Here the Yellowhead Highway/TC-16 follows the misty Skeena River

George Little House (1914) in Terrace, BC; George Little
is considered the founder of Terrace because he donated the land
for the the new railway station that was the catalyst for the town

Logger statue (2014, by Joerg Jung, modeled on
Harry "Slim" Wesley Varner) in Usk, BC,
at the memorial to fallen loggers (KSS)

The Usk Ferry is an on-demand cable ferry on the Skeena River;
the ferry uses the river current as "power" for the crossing

A detour on the Stewart-Cassiar Highway/BC-37.

Kitwanga or Gitwangak, BC, a First Nations village with
St Paul's Anglican Church and its original belltower (1893) (KSS)

The totems of Kitwanga, erected between 1840 and 1942, included
these 11 standing poles and one lying on the ground, representing
the story of Nekt, the warrior leader of Gitwangak Battle Hill

Farther along on Stewart-Cassiar Highway/BC-37.

View down on Gitwangak Battle Hill, a lage
mound on which the village of Kitwanga/
Gitwangak originally stood

View of the Seven Sisters Mountain from the hill

Farther along on Stewart-Cassiar Highway/BC-37.

Gitanyow or Kitwancool, BC: with the oldest stand
and the largest collection of totems in BC

The house next door

As we now know, totems were not meant to be
preserved, but allowed to fall and rot back into nature;
however, many of the poles from Gitanyow have been
moved to the Royal British Columbia Museum
in Victoria, BC and replicas made (KSS)

We returned to Yellowhead Highway/TC-16 to continue east.