Prince Rupert and Port Edward, BC

We decided to camp in a private park at Port Edward, a few miles from Prince Rupert. The weather forecast was for cool and rainy weather and we had a discount park (Passport America) that we could access in Port Edward. We arrived on Wednesday night and got set up – it was drizzling with low clouds. Even though most of BC is under a fire ban, the campground manager said they had been exempted because it was so wet there, but with the weather as it was, we weren’t even interested in having a fire!

The next morning we headed out to the North Pacific Cannery – a National Historic Site. Established in 1889, it is the oldest remaining salmon cannery on the West Coast of North America and operated continuously for nearly 100 years. At its peak, it employed hundreds of men and women of Chinese, First Nations, Japanese and European backgrounds during the months the salmon were running up the Skeena River.

We arrived in time to join a guided tour that had just started. The many buildings from the cannery are still intact and many have machinery that was used for the canning process. We saw how they initially cleaned and canned the salmon all by hand and then how they were able to use machines to cut down the manual labour.

This is the machine that replaced the many workers that butchered the salmon. A skilled butcher was able to butcher up to 2000 salmon in a ten hour shift – they were paid by the piece. This machine replaced up to 30 skilled butchers with one operator and a couple of assistants. It even adjusted to the different sizes of fish!

It was an interesting tour. We were told there are no longer any factories canning salmon here today but that the salmon is flash frozen and sent overseas to Asia for processing!

One of the buildings was the general store for the cannery. Workers could get anything they wanted here. Initially, no money changed hands – there wasn’t even any price on the items. The worker would simply select what he wanted, and the storekeeper would write the items down along with whatever price he felt like the item was worth. The problem was, that many of the workers ended up at the end of the canning season OWING more money than what they had made in the whole season. This then became an incentive for them to return next year to pay what they owed! Eventually this practice changed and items began to have prices on them.

After the tour finished, we headed to Prince Rupert. We drove through and saw the port, but left fairly quickly due to the weather. We had more rain Thursday than what we’ve had the whole of our trip. It rained right through the evening so we had a quiet evening in the trailer, catching up on some reading.

Tomorrow we head northeast through Smithers, enroute to Vanderhoof on Saturday night. We also have been fortunate to get 3 nights of camping in Jasper National Park and 2 in Banff next week!