We’ve Been Hyderized!!

On the way down through Canada, we happened across twin mining twins. On one side of the Portland Canal is Stewart, British Columbia. On the other side is Hyder, Alaska.

Stewart is a small town of more than 600 residents. It is tiny, but it has schools, a hospital, an airport, a ferry terminal, a fire hall that also houses a museum, a customs station, several hotels, two RV parks, several restaurants, several grocery stores, and plenty of small shops. Interestingly, the hospital is large and looks new, but there are no doctors.

Hyder is a tiny town of 65 residents. It’s main street is about the cutist, and most authentic I’ve ever seen. It has a general store, a post office, a restaurant run out of an old school bus, a church, and a number of small shops. The tourist items sold in the small shops appeared to be homemade—arts and crafts from people in the community, stickers and postcards printed on home printers. Most shops sold a little bit of everything—some for tourists, but mostly items needed to live in a small community.

Hyder is mostly a ghost town. The area was a large mining area years ago, but when the value of silver, gold, and copper slipped below the cost of mining, the mines were closed. The mines were left in ruins and the town went with it. Some new residents arrived in the 1960s as draft resisters. Today people are coming in as tourists during the summer.

The school recently closed because a community must have at least 10 children for the government to pay a teacher. It seemed reasonable to me that these children would bus across the border to Stewart. Unfortunately, the Canadian government doesn’t allow it. So families in the area must home school. The same was true of the hospital. If people in Hyder needed a hospital, most have to be flown by helicopter to other American cities such as Juneau or Seattle.

The area is amazing in its beauty. Like Homer, Haines, and Valdez, Stewart and Hyder are surrounded by gorgeous glacial mountains with water falling from every crevice. Hyder is famous for its bears. The U.S. Parks Service has built a platform where people can stand and watch bears when they come down to fish on spawning salmon. Unfortunately, we didn’t see any bears while we were there.

Twenty miles from Hyder is Salmon Glacier. This glacier was the largest and most beautiful we had seen in all of Alaska. It swept down the mountain and through the valley.

Beside the glacier is Summit Lake. We didn’t see the lake because it had collapsed a few weeks before. We were told that the lake collapses every year leaving a bunch of ice sitting in water. We hiked down to this area and we able to walk among the ice.

Adolfo and I planned to be in the area overnight. Instead, we stayed four days exploring the towns and the mountains. Again, we fell in love with the area, and neither one of us wanted to leave.