After a late start we drove back to the town of Terrace and again headed for the Safeways cafe and their free wifi service. Terrace is now very familiar and I was beginning to feel like I was having a 3 week vacation in this town. However Terrace just happens to be at the junction of some interesting side trips and we keep coming back to Safeways because we like/need to have internet access.
While in Terrace we fueled up with diesel and propane, and went looking for water. All the outside water faucets were still turned off for the season. Eventually we found a a helpful guy at the Husky gas station who offered to loan us a brand new plastic 5 gal water container so that we could use his kitchen faucet/tap to fill the container and then transfer water to the RV tank. We got about 15 gals this way and then bought the container from him partly as thanks for his helpfulness.
We left Terrace quite late, about 13:00 and drove up the Nisga'a highway (Hwy 113). This took us to the Lava Beds Provincial Park. About 270 years ago there was a major volcanic eruption that spewed lava into the head of the Naas valley killing thousands of local Naas people. The area is now a big plane of lava which is only just beginning to grow vegetation. We have seen this before but I was more impressed with it this time than I recall on previous visits. Near the lava beds we visited the town of Gitwinksihlkw. To get there we had to cross the Naas river on a bridge that is guarded at each end by a pair of totem poles. In the town, Nina met a couple of the local children and got some photos of them; maybe this is the start of a Faces of the Americas collection.
From Gitwinksihlkw we turned west down a new highway to the town on Gingolx (Kincolith) on the coast. For about 30 kms the road traveled through the forest beside the Naas river. Then just after the town of Greenville (Laxgalts'ap) the road broke out onto the edge of the river and the river became tidal. The remaining 30 kms to Gingolx was a spectacular road perched on the edge of a hugh inlet, with the water on the south and hugh granite rocks and cliffs on the north (just like near Squarmish on the way to Whistler). There were tens of thousands of sea birds feeding in the inlet (we learnt later they were eating a fish called Oolichan or Candle Fish) and the noise they were making could be heard for miles. There were also dozens of bald eagles, and a brown eagle like bird that I don't know the name of. The drive down to Gingolx turned out to be an unexpected delight and certainly one of the highlights of the trip so far.
In Gingolx we went for a walk around the town and met a local man and women who were out for a jog. From them we learnt that the x at the end of the towns name is pronounced like the ch at the end of the word bach - just like in Russian. The older children in this town go to high school in New Aiyansh about an hour away at the head of the Naas valley, but before the road was put in they had to live in New Aiyansh and travelled there by boat via Prince Rupert.
After leaving Gingolx we drove 10-20kms up the inlet and camped in a pullout beside the road. We wanted to have a view of the inlet. We were rewarded for this decision as just before dark while we were out for a walk all the seagulls in the inlet started flying west towards the ocean. There were so many of them they looked like a white cloud over a mile long moving down the valley. Although we were only 3 feet from the highway this was one of our quieter nights as rush hour traffic in this part of the world is 3 cars per hour.
