Allow Me To Introduce Us

Haida Gwaii is a collection of more than 150 islands located off the northwest coast of British Columbia, although some of those so-called islands barely register as rocks poking themselves out of the water at high tide.  It is the most remote archipelago in Canada, a 7 hour ferry ride from the town of Prince Rupert across the notorious Hecate Strait, just south of the Alaska Panhandle.

There it is highlighted in red
Ignore other colours and letters unless
you are a Western Canadian and can translate 

Only two of the islands have any sort of settled community of the human variety: Graham Island to the north and Moresby Island to the south.  And if it wasn't for the airport at Sandspit it is quite probable that Graham Island with its 6 communities would be the only source for a cup of coffee and on-land human interaction.

There is open Pacific on the west coast (next stop, Japan), with a range of mountains forming a small spine of definition.  There's no continental shelf to rest your wine glass on here folks - the mountains plunge deep, deep, deep in the ocean.

op-art topographic map
far out man

There is flat bog here, especially in the upper middle reaches of Graham Island, with scrubby little trees and swathes of peat.  Rivers and lakes abound.  The beaches in the north and especially in the east are spectacular, with long stretches of sand and surf.  The rest of the space, particularly in the southern bits, is deeply forested with red and yellow cedar and Sitka spruce and pine and alder and hemlock, and even deeper mounds of mosses and ferns on which the most persnickety of fairy tale princesses would be thrilled to lay her weary body and drift into a hundred years sleep.

 shallow water off east and deep plunge off west

Which all means there is an enormous variety of plants and animals, both land and sea, some of which are unique.  As the islands emerged from the last Ice Age earlier than did the rest of the province, some escaping glaciation altogether, it's no wonder that these plants and animals adapted and evolved differently than those of the mainland and even other islands further south.  This supports use of the moniker "Galapagos of the North" which has been attached to describe Haida Gwaii freely in travel brochure and scholarly journals alike.

I guess it is pretty clear by now that I like maps
(wait until I get to charts!)