Wednesday – Friday July 16th – 18th:
The next couple days were spent either hanging out on the boats relaxing, hiking and exploring on shore, or swimming and exploring the Inlet by dinghy.
A very good portion of the first of those next couple days was actually spent in the hammock. After 3 days of getting up early and covering sorta long distances it felt good to do very little but drink some cold beers and lay in the hammock or dive overboard for a swim then back up in the hammock.
One of the things we wanted to do here was to hike up to the “Trapper’s Cabin”. All the guide books say that to hike up to this cabin is a suicide 3 hour one way mission up hill fighting bears the whole way. Me and Tawn say bullshit! So did scotty. The main reason we called bullshit was due to the fact that most of the “Cruising Guidebooks” are written by old people that don’t hike much past the docks. The rest of the information in the books are spot on, but when it comes to stuff like the condition of a hiking trail, I’m not going to heed the warnings of someone that is worried about breaking a hip.
So…off we went. Granted the hike was strenous, doubly so since we had spent the last 3 days sitting on a boat. But we made it up there in less than an hour and a half. And what did we get as a reward:
Basically an old pile of logs. You could make out the rough outline of a the old cabin, but it’s been here since the 1920s or 30s, so I guess it’s in pretty good shape considering. It was still pretty cool the have made the hike and check it out. Plus right next to the cabin was an awesome waterfall with a very cool view of the whole inlet about 2000 feet below.
You can just feel the excitement of seeing that cabin in the expression on my face.
But the waterfall and view of the inlet more than made up for it. While Scotty, Tawn and myself were hiking up to the Trapper’s Cabin, Angie, Curtis, Cynthia and the Kids all took a dinghy ride back up the the entrance of Princess Louisa Inlet to the Lodge that sits right at the Malibu Rapids. The lodge is a Christian Summer camp and they will give you tours of the place if you show up. Those religous folks are so nice!
The lodge was actually started as a very fancy retreat for hollywood stars way back in the 1940s, but it’s a Jebus camp now.
You can just make out the Lodge way off in the distance in the picture below we took from the falls:
As unbelievable as it seems, the water tempatures here are actually up near the 70 degree mark. So we did a lot of swimming. Which is not something we can do off the boat back home, not without risking hypothermia at least. It was pretty nice to be able to just dive of the boat into the water or take the dinghy to a giant cliff and climb up and then jump off into warm water.
All things considered, Princess Louisa was probably our favorite spot on the whole trip. The rest was awesome, but Princess Louisa Inlet really topped them all.
On one of the nights Tawn, Scotty, Curtis and Myself jumped in two dinghies, tied them togather, tossed in a couple bottles of scotch and drifted down the bay telling stories and jokes as the current pulled us towards the rapids. We were’nt moving very fast of course and we just hungout watching the moon, which was full and very bright light up the inlet by reflecting off the granite cliffs on the North side of the inlet. We could not see the moon it’self because of the mountains to the south of us. What a cool night.
And as hard as it was to leave, we still wanted to see all the other places north, so we planned on leaving on Saturday morning. Early, since we had to time the tides once again to be able to get through Malibu Rapids again. Curtis had the idea to pull up anchor and move the boats a few miles closer to the rapids so we didn’t have to get up as early and could sleep in at least alittle longer. So Friday afternoon we all pulled up the anchor and moved down to McDonald Island and grabbed a Mooring ball for the night.