Amelia Bikes

August 26

It was really windy last night and I woke up early in the morning. I was just thinking to myself that I was happy that there was no condensation inside of my tent and I was going to have one day where my tent was totally dry, and then it started raining.

The rain didn’t last too long though and cleared up after we got going. We only had to hike 7 km to a place called Cougar Annie’s where we were going to stay in a cabin for the night before catching the airplane to Gold River the next day.

We had to go over more rocks and through some bypass trails around some Rocky points where you couldn’t really walk along the shore. The trails weren’t really marked super well and they were very overgrown and we were basically hiking up tree roots from these giant trees, but they were usually short bypasses and then we were back on the beach.

The dog kept following us and we kind of just gave up trying to get him to go home because he clearly wasn’t going to. He slept next to my tent and I did hear him bark in the night so there must have been something out there. Good boy.

The bears finally did me wrong and I ended up in the grass and slipped on a rock and then fell in a swampy marsh. I’m glad it wasn’t a bog of eternal stench, but I didn’t smell very good and I joked that I had literal swamp ass now.

We got to Cougar Annie’s, and Peter, the owner came out to greet us and show us to our cabins. We had a tour scheduled so we would get a full tour of the property later in the afternoon. We hung out and dried out our clothes and gear. I washed my shorts and sun hoodie which were full of swamp water smell. There was a sink that had running water that came from a lake and there was soap!

At 2:00 p.m. we got a tour of the property and it was so much cooler than I ever expected. I really thought it was just going to be some old cabin that a woman named Annie lived in back in the day, but she had a really interesting story of how she was a homesteader and moved here with her husband and then built out a post office, a garden and a business selling different types of plants. She was also famous for shooting cougars, hence the name. One of the more interesting pieces of information we learned was that one of her husbands died of a gunshot wound while cleaning a gun, but decades later, while researching a book, it was found out that he was shot in the groin by a long rifle which would have been impossible to shoot oneself that way.

But what was to me, even more interesting was what Peter had done to the property once he bought it from Cougar Annie in I think he said the 1980s. He had built out all these amazing buildings, cabins, and boardwalks in the forest and had arranged so many deals and things with lumber companies to get all the beautiful cedar wood that he had used. He had built a water system that went from the lake down to the cabin where he lived and used the sediment at the bottom of the lake to actually filter the water itself, and he even built classrooms and invited various schools to have educational programs on site.

I can’t even really describe how cool the property was and do it any kind of justice but I’m really glad that we came here. What a dream to live in a place like this.

Peter gave part of the tour and then handed us off to a couple who had worked here last summer and were just visiting for a few weeks, and they gave us a tour of the rest of the property. We mentioned that the dog had followed us and they got so excited because they weren’t sure if they’d get to see him ever again. We found out that the dog’s name was Whitaker. He had once followed hikers all the way here, and the coast guard actually picked him up and brought him home one time, and they had to bribe him to get on the boat with a hot dog. We made her day so I guess it’s good that it worked out.

One of the funny things we found out during the tour was that 100 years ago. It was actually far easier to get out here and there was more communication than there is now. It’s actually more remote now than it was back then because of all of the logging that happened. So there were actually logging roads that came out here and they had wire systems to communicate that don’t exist now. Today, there’s no phone service. No Wi-Fi, nothing and the only way to get here is by boat or seaplane.