Tuesday, July 29

The last leg of our trip on the Alaska Marine Highway took us from Ketchikan to Prince Rupert, BC . One of the largest ice-free natural deep-sea harbors in the world, it serves as an important shipping port; coming in we saw our first large grain elevator since Saskatchewan, although the grain in it could not have been grown nearby, and an enormous facility for loading containers onto ships. The town itself is charming; we particularly liked the city hall, combining art deco with Northwestern Indian motifs. Beside it stands a statue of Charles Melville Hays, the railroad magnate who planned the city but did not live to see it because he went down with the Titanic. We had dinner at a restaurant with a panoramic view of the harbor, with its many small boats.