Fish, Fish, Fish, Fish, Fish

Short Version:
A boat trip, grizzlies, fish. More fish. Fish. A hard night's drive and a spooky forest.

Long Version:
Having lived on Waiheke Island, and having travelled between NZ's North and South Islands, we're quite accustomed to ferry travel. Even so, British Columbia's government-run BC Ferries keep hitting us with unexpected twists: first there was the sheer size and the number of passengers and vehicles on the Vancouver Island ferries, not to mention the spectacular environment through which the boats travel. Now we're hitting the inland ferries - this time the run from Galena Bay to Shelter Bay - and the bit that had us slightly confused was that it was free.
Cars, trucks, RV's: free.
Motorcycles, people: free.
Seems that instead of building bridges across the lakes formed by the hydro dams scattered about the place, the provincial government decided to run ferry services instead. We were happy with that - riding the boat across the water was pretty, and it was kind of relaxing. And it was free.

And then the enormous grizzly bear statues at the gates to Revelstoke were upon us, and then the enormous grizzly bear statues at the gates to Grizzly Plaza. And then the Grizzly Auto Repair sign, then the bike shop and the thrift store and some stolen internets and then we were off again, through Sicamous and Salmon Arm and Three Valley Gap, and eventually to the Adams River, to see some fish.

There were a LOT of fish there. Quite a few people, too, but not as many as the place was set up to receive over then next few days, when the Festival of the Salmon kicked into high gear. The Festival runs every year, on the weekend closest to the start of the main run of the sockeye salmon up the Adams River. Bucketloads of people come from far and wide to purchase overpriced t-shirts and nutritionally-bereft foodstuffs, to queue for overloaded portable toilets, and to look at the fish, of which there are many. We snuck in on the Friday evening, after the infrastructure had been set up but before the crowds. They'd already started charging admission fees at the gate, but the attendant had gone home, or was off having a sneaky fag break, so we didn't bother slowing down - just breezed on through the choke-point and into the parking area, then meandered across to the helpful informational signage.

WARNING: FACTS.
The fish travel a LONG way during their lifetime: spawned in the river, they swim with the current as juveniles, hundreds of kilometres downriver to the Atlantic Ocean. They travel vast distances in the sea as they grow, and then, as near-metre-long adults, they somehow find the river from whence they came, swim back up it all those kilometres they once swam down, to the spawning grounds, where they hang out, and mate, and then die. Every fourth year is what's known as a dominant year, where the fish numbers are far larger than those of other years, and every so often a dominant year goes a little bit haywire and provides extra-vast numbers of the beasties.
[END FACTS]

This year has turned out to be one of those super-dominant years, with fish numbers higher than any other year in the last century. We were there before the run hit its peak - at its height apparently you can walk across the river on the backs of the fish and not get your feet wet - but it was still pretty blimmin impressive. Being kind of color-blind, I'm not sure whether I should be describing their hue as crimson, or scarlet, or as a bright, deep red. Whatever the name, it was similar to the color of a glass of pinot noir with the sun shining through it. Their heads were a green that defies decription, and you could tell the sexes apart because - not unlike humans - the females looked like fish, and the males were ugly; sometimes spectacularly so.

And there were thousands of them.

Swimming upstream had left many of them battered and scarred, and some of the earliest arrivals had already spawned and were in various stages of dying. Corpses littered the stony beaches wherever the current was favorable for casting inert objects ashore. It's hard to imagine what the place will look like in a few weeks, when all of the millions of fish that have made it back have spawned, and died, and been washed up, and are starting to decay. When we were there, though, the living far outnumbered the dead, although it was possible to see at a glance which ones were getting close to that edge; they fade before they die, from the robust, bright red they go at the start of their 21-day odyssey to and up the river, to a pale, pinkish... actually we'd probably call the color "salmon pink." The living thronged in the river, clustered in groups in the shallows ("What's that Jimmy? Oh, they're... ummmm... fighting!") and hung in the main current like a crimson ribbon, looking a lot like a significant amount of blood that had spilled into the water; a liquid thread of scarlet within the river. We got extremely close-up vews in a number of spots, including the official viewing platforms and some precariously-balanced fallen trees we edged our way out on. Awesome spectacle.

In the end, it started getting dark, so we left the fish to do whatever it is that fish do at night and set off in the Reaper for the Frog Falls Recreation Site, miles and miles and miles away. The Reaper is absolutely appalling to drive at night; the headlights are feeble and misaligned, and the harvested bugs and birds and beasties which encrust the windscreen turn the headlights of oncoming traffic into a diffuse, blinding glare. The best views of the night were of a burning silo, which lit up the night like some pagan ceremony. Later research indicates it was probably a sawmill waste burner, although at the time it just seemed weird and a bit spooky, leaving us perfectly mood-enhanced for the Frog Falls area, which was in heavy forest, pitch-dark except where mildly illuminated by the Reaper's running lights, and full of enormous tree stumps which had faces carved into them. Spooky faces at that. And then we got lost in the woods, and found a creepy underground bunker before we found the campground, and there were more faces on the trees, and there were huge cascades of fungi of all shapes and sizes.

We slept well though, and woke to gorgeous sunlight filtering through the trees. The trees looked much friendlier in daylight, so we explored the river and the falls and had a leisurely breakfast before hitting the road back past Revelstoke, east and north to the Keystone/Standard Basin Trail.