When I was a young fella, we had family friends who were homesteaders at Grassy Bay up in Loughborough Inlet. I would go up there a few times during the summer months and spend time with them. There was no electricity, cooking was done on a big old woodstove under the light of oil lamps. In the family room was this piano that the mom would play after supper; she was pretty good. There was usually a rowboat that I could use, and fishing was always good. I was between the ages of 8 to 12 during this time. I enjoyed those visits.
When I was 15, I was dating a girl who was pretty, adventurous and maybe a bit wild, kinda like me. I thought her dad had a dislike for me until he offered me a job as a camp watchman at Darcy Point, up in Loughborough Inlet. After we got the gear offloaded, He took me up a trail along the creek to show me where the water line was located and how to keep it running. Then he loaded his daughter onto the plane and off they went. Think he had found a way to keep me away from his daughter.
When we flew in, I noticed an old cabin about a mile down the beach from camp, so one day at low tide, I took a walk to investigate. It was an old logger’s shack, out back was a wooden logging road that headed off into the forest with a very old logging truck sitting on it. It was so old that it had solid rubber tires. This truck was being taken over by nature. It was a GMC from around 1910-1920.
There was a door in the back of the cabin that I had trouble getting open, as I dragged it through the duff, it rolled up a grizzly skull and bones. It was then that I saw that there were a couple of bullet holes in the door.
In the cabin, you could see stains on a counter where sandwiches had rotted right beside a couple of old leather lunch kits, There were cross-cut saws and other logging tools scattered about. Looks like they were having grizzly problems and had to shoot the bear through the back door, then just left out the front door and never returned. Looks like I was the first person to visit the cabin since this event.
About 15 years later, I was back at Darcy Point working for the BC Forest Service. It had been logged where the cabin once stood, and there was no sign of it or the truck now. A coastal story that almost remained untold.
Over the years, I worked at Towry Head, Apple River, Darcy Point and Wilkinson Creek. Back in those days, the inlet was pretty busy with plenty of logging going on and quite a few homesteaders who worked in the logging industry.