Life on the Outer Coast

Went on the first of the Wilderness stewardship trips planned for this summer (May 20-24). Our plan was to visit sites in Slocum arm, Myriads, Khaz head and Leo's anchorage, we managed to get to some of those sites.

I went with Scott Harris and Jay Kinsman (FS archaeologist) aboard Scott's 22ft c-dory, the Alacrity. The idea was to run up the outer coast of Khaz peninsula the first day and slowly work our way up the inside waters of the wilderness stopping in sites of botanical or archalogical interest. The sea conditions turned us around in Fortuna strait, so we anchored in Leo's anchorage and went to shore in the kayaks. Lake Leo supports a run of sockeye that has been utilized by both First Nations and European americans for subsistance purposes.

There is just a short distance between the lake and the beach, the topography is flat and the vegetation relatively open and park-like. There were signs of recent use (camp fires) and of older use (culturally modified trees). Jay suggested that the trees were modified for sap production. We also found a few cedar trees that had been peeled.

We circumambulated the lake, not too troublesome, there was only one steep bit of shore line and it didn't require any scrambling.
A few of the areas of flat shoreline had small pockets of fen-like vegetation: Carex lenticularis and/or aquatilis dives, Callliergon cordifolium, Sphagnum, Sanguisorba and Caltha palustris. No sign of toads or beaver, but there was sign of bear and deer use.

There was a bit of trash and other less annoying signs of camping activity on the northeast side of the lake. Given the short and probably easy portage from the beach to the lake, I'm not too surprised.

The weather was sunny and calmish on our walk around the lake, but seems to have blown up rather fiercely from the south toward the evening. The boat was doing some serious bouncing around, so we opted to eat dinner on the beach . Managed to get back to the boat during a bit of calm weather, but had a pretty bumpy night in the anchorage.