Abandoned Railroad Town | Steam Train Found | Destination Adventure

At this point in our season we've been very fortunate to see a good percentage of North and South Island and it's safe to say that there's not really a place on Haida Gwaii that isn't incredibly beautiful, which is part of why I chose this destination. I also chose this because it's very rich in history and there's one more spot that I really want to try and get to before we have to head back to the mainland. Spent the night last night at Grey Bay but we're back here at Mooresby Camp chasing down some old logging and railway history. It's a terrible windstorm today so I can't chance getting the boat out on the water but looking at the maps it looks like some of the old rail grade or logging roads come right here to Mooresby Camp so I'm gonna see if we can get in there with the e-bike. You can see an old road running along there. Maybe a chunk of a bridge laying in there or it might just be washed out. I can't quite tell. Sure is awfully beautiful in here. Look at that stump. Wow would you take a look at that. Now that I have internet via Starlink I am the occasional scroller on the TikTok and I always see people come up on there with balls of rock like this. They bust them open and there's fossils inside. Do you guys think there's fossils in any of these? Fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex egg. Maybe not. Fossilized dino turd. Yeah you know what maybe not. Beautiful specimen Brontosaurus toe bone. You know what I don't think so. Going right to the source. Well I'm gonna be honest with you guys fairly certain they're just rocks. Oh found a relic. Everybody thinks skinny. Well it seems that's about as far as the bike's getting. Gonna be making our own foot. Look at the moss growing on this tree. Those alders were super thick for I don't know maybe less than half a kilometer and the road opens up again. Nice hiking in here. I'll tell you the details of today's location on arrival but I think we are walking along an old rail grade. Look at this. I think these are railroad ties. Not totally sure but they're perfectly spaced. Destination adventure challenge of the day. I offer any one of you 100 bucks to walk across one of these logs right now. I'm going for it. This is totally awesome out here. That one's pretty high. I'm not a huge fan of heights and it doesn't look like this tree's a huge fan of being walked on. I don't think it's gonna break but I think it's gonna be slippery right out there. It's double awesome the second time around. You guys owe me 100 bucks. Every one of you. It's officially confirmed. This whole way in I was walking on the rail line. There you go. So let me tell you a little bit about where we are. I found this actually when Curtis was here. We were out in the boat and there's a whole bunch of pilings out in the ocean here. I kind of thought cannery. Incorrect. This is what is known today as Arrow. Formerly Arrow Camp and before that was Allison Camp. I tried to source an interview for this place. It's a really neat piece of history but unfortunately just being this close to heading home I kind of don't have enough time. So I'll tell you what I know about it as we walk around here. A.P. Allison started this in 1933 and this is the only steam railway on all of Haida Gwaii. In 1936 Allison shipped two steam locomotives here from Ocean Falls and he had eight miles of railway set up. By 1937 he had 150 people living and working here. Then early 1940s with the introduction of World War II the need for aviation grade Sitka spruce was very high so the government actually took over this site. Turned it into Arrow Camp and as you can imagine things expanded incredibly quickly at that point and they ran it right up until 1955 and a huge percentage of the wood for the mosquito bombers came out of Haida Gwaii. By the time they shut down they had 20 miles of rail here and eight locomotives. They ended up taking 800 million feet of timber out of here. When this was Allison camp he was taking only the highest quality logs just because it's so expensive to ship anything out of here. He was doing 30 car loads a day, train cars, and the average load could carry three or four trees only because they were so big. They shut down really because they had exhausted all of the lumber in this area and at that point everyone was kind of going away from steam locomotives and going into truck logging so they couldn't really salvage much of the infrastructure that was here. A couple of the locomotives went to Vancouver Island, Cowichan I think, and there's still actually one there today that's been restored. A bunch of the camp was actually just left out here and a couple of the locomotives were left here. Most of anything that was left has rotted away now to nothing but I know that if we look hard enough there is signs of some of the old locomotives. I don't expect we're going to find a whole lot but I'll dig around and see what I can find for you guys. I did scrounge around and I tried to find an interview for this one. I just am not going to have enough time. My ferry leaves in three days but I had a great chat today with the guy that owns Mooresby Explorers and he's pretty well versed on the location so he educated me on some things I'll talk about as we go around. Not sure what I'm looking at here. A little bit of iron. Another big old chunk of rail right there. I found a great article that had a photo collection from 1971 and there was actually still some of the passenger cars sitting here. 50 years later now I don't expect any of that to be visible but just imagine how much we're going to walk over today that's buried underneath this moss that you'll never see. Never even know it was there. Well this happened awfully quickly. I recognized from one of the photos what is left from one of the early steam locomotives. This is the boiler sitting here. Well I mean what's left of it and then this would be kind of the body of the car left. Wow that's crazy. There's still some wood with paint on it. That's unbelievable. Not much left over. It's just crazy how little is left of this thing being above the high tide line but the wind blows so hard here all the time. All that ocean spray blowing up here would be almost just as bad. And if I remember from the this is the passenger car. It's supposed to be very close to the boiler there and there is actually some wood left. That's crazy. What do you think? Could that be a smokestack? I'm certainly not an expert on old train stuff so I don't know if they would have built some of these cars with wood but all of this iron used to be mounted to this wood. I do not know but if you know let me know. I know what this one is thanks to the gentlemen at Mooresby Explorers. This is a big old oil tank and supposedly there's two of them here. One is damaged from an earthquake. This one doesn't look damaged. Look at the size of this thing. Holy. Hey Bert. There's a bed frame. I would not assume they would put the town that close to the oil tank but you never know. Take a look at this. There's this rail line coming up from the beach and then that last chunk we were looking at that I thought was a train it's just up there running in a perfectly straight line. All this iron and then if you look through the trees in a straight line here is more iron. I can't identify any of it but I bet this was an entire train sitting here still on the tracks 70 years ago. I've never seen rail attached like that before. You can see it running along here. Look at that. Looking pretty steam train-y to me. It's not a train but it is a car. Found some train. Look at that. The rail line used to come out and then run straight across here. All those pilings were for the log dump and the train go out just dump the logs right off the side and then they would get shipped out from there. I'm gonna have to backtrack. I can see I'm walking by a whole bunch of stuff up here but look at that. Imagine a big steam train sitting out there. Very cool. So this is definitely the damaged oil tank. Heavily damaged. Not that. And a very rusted out car. Look at this thing. I often wonder if the human population came to an end how long it would take before there is nothing recognizable. Oh she's seized. What do you think? Another hundred years? Be nothing left. Just speculation here but the rail line should have continued out along the pilings. Then there's a big flat spot here and I see a bit of wood, two pieces of ridge cap and an insulator. I'd be guessing this was maybe a town site. Looks like a ground. Can you guys see it? A little Sitka blacktail there. And a very odd discovery. There's power lines here coming down from a live tree. You know what I think happened? I think this tree got hung up on that when it was small. It's growing all the way up there. Yeah you can see it. Stuck in there. That's pretty cool. That got brought back up when this tree fell over from the Hudson Bay Company. I'm not sure what it's from. Good spirits. Liquor of some kind. Found something very cool. Not an expert on it but I'll tell you at least the basics. This is a diesel engine electric generator. A Fairbanks Morse. It's a single piston diesel engine and then a big old flywheel. This is the generator end of it. This would have had copper spooled all through it. Maybe the copper would have went here. One of the two. And then this would attach to there and be another bearing on this side. Maybe a Babbitt bearing by the looks of it. I know the rail line used to cross there and then continue through to the other side. We're already over here so we may as well do the walk over. Look at this. Found some more train stuff. That's a knuckle right there. That's where the two trains would connect. Like that. Take a look at this. Just grass there. I don't know if this is clover or what this is. No it's not clover. Yeah. Poison oak. Just kidding. Don't know what it is. Sure is beautiful though. Certainly not the best idea I've ever had. This is the end of the line and there's nothing over here. And I am a long way from the e-bike. I think the plan is try my luck at some bushwhacking. See if I can get directly over top to the road and then backtrack to the bike. Welcome to the bushwhack segment of the episode. Destination apparently the friggin moon. Oh I can see why they didn't take the train up here. Things are looking up. Good thing too because I was hungry. It's delicious. Bowner Creek. What I was shooting for is an old cut block which I'm now running parallel beside. I'll have a road at the end of it that I can follow out but I found this road and it's going in a better direction. It's a bit of a risk but it's easy walking. I'm gonna try it out for a couple k. Holy smokes I can hardly believe it. The road. Friggin bear better not be trying to steal my e-bike. Dang it. I make a conscious effort not to get grumpy and it doesn't happen very often but today it almost happened and then I just looked down and I see that the e-bike has 94% battery because I pedaled almost all the way here. I am not turning a pedal all the way back and it's going to be awesome. Oh that ride back was just awesome. It was going so fast I don't think I even got wet. You know what? Upon closer inspection it seems I may have gotten a little bit wet. It's too bad this story came across my radar so late in my Haida Gwaii adventures but nevertheless it was cool to see what was left of the old steam train and aero camp. So I hope you guys enjoyed it too but most of all thanks for watching everybody. As always take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints, and I'll catch you on the next one.