More Canada photos...

This is Derek, our guide on our Grizzly tour.  He was absolutely great!  He's a biologist who travels the globe studying bears...summers here on northern Vancouver Island with the grizzlies, then on to Churchill, Alaska to study polar bears, and then to Antarctica, also to study polar bears.  He was very personable, very likable, and very entertaining...and has a great love and respect for the bears that he studies.  Here, due to the low tide, Derek is pulling our boat further up the estuary, to get closer to the lone black male grizzly that is feeding on the sedge grass.

Seals sunning themselves on the rocks during out whale watching excursion.

More seals...the splashes are the ones who were a bit less tolerant of having us watching them.

OK, this is Glendale Cove, an uninhabited cove off of Knight Inlet.  This is the grizzly sanctuary.  In this picture, you are looking at the estuary, and to the left of the picture is where the river flows.  It is very low tide, and Derek actually had to get out and pull our flat-bottomed boat as we made our way closer to the tree line.  Amazingly, within an hour or so, this will all be underwater.  We saw 2 big lone male grizzlies by the tree line, but due to the low tide could only watch them through binoculars.  One was a big black male, the other a huge cinnamon-colored male.  They were gorgeous!  

Last picture was looking up the estuary...this one is looking from the estuary back toward Knight Inlet.  The flat land you can see is rapidly disappearing as the tide comes in.

Blackfish Sound.  Many of the humpbacks we saw on our whale-watching excursion were seen in Blackfish Sound.  The sound was host to fishing vessels, a couple of whale-watching boats, kayakers, and is the main shipping route for larger vessels, like the tug, making their way on the Inside Passageway.  It was a gorgeous area, sheltered a bit by large mountains, hosting numerous islands with picturesque channels.

A group of kayakers looking at some First Nation pictographs on the rocks.  I love how green the water looks!

Telegraph Cove is a beautiful little cove that hosts a marina, a restaurant, a small market, an information center, a whale museum, several guest cabins, and our Tide Rip Grizzly Tours.  

This is Alder Bay Resort, our campground.  This view is from our whale-watching sailboat, as Maureen and Dave were returning us to the dock after an absolutely spectacular day.  If you look just above the boats and below the first row of RVs, you can see Dad's red truck, and the dome of our tent.

The store and dock at Alder Bay.

Our campsite.  Dad BBQ'd daily...it was wonderful!

Dad, lounging at the camp site.

The view of Alder Bay from the ferry to Alert Bay.  In the trees surrounding Alder Bay, we were blessed with bald eagles, herons, ravens, crows, and seagulls.  It was a wonderful thing to be in camp and listen to the chatter of the bald eagles, and it was a treat to be able to look up anytime and find one, two, or more scanning their territory from their perches high up in the trees.

Our campsite view from the beach.  You can see the dome of the tent, and Dad's truck.  During high tide, the beach all but disappeared, and the water was just feet from the campsite.