High above Sechelt Inlet



Business today took me up the coast a little ways to Powell River, to do some work with the Tla'Amon First Nation. Powell River is about 100 miles north of here, on the mainland, opposite Texada Island.



To get there I first jumped on a ferry from Snug Cove to Horseshoe Bay and made an immdiate connection to the ferry to Langdale. This ferry cuts through the Collingwood Channel, which wraps around the north end of Bowen Island, and ends up on the other side of Howe Sound. Once there, my partner Chris Robertson picked me up and we drove to Sechelt.



Sechelt lies up the Sunshine Coast a little ways and is a town nestled between a long inlet and the Gulf of Georgia. At the head of the inlet, which lies only 500 meters from the sea, is terminus for Pacific Wings Airlines, a float plane charter service. We chartered a Beaver (whimsically registered as C-FOCQ) out of Sechelt Inlet in perfect weather and, never flying above the mountain tops, we dipped and doodled through wide glacial valleys, long lakes and fijords for 45 minutes to Powell River.



The weather was perfect. Not a cloud in the sky and no wind to speak of. The mountains around here are really something else, huge jagged chunks of rock rising straight up 6000 feet from the surface of the ocean, topped at their highest peaks with snow, scarred in the lower slopes by logging. I find myself utterly failing to conjure up words to describe flying among them.