This 7-Day Haida Gwaii Campervan Trip Felt Like Another World

Nora O'Malley

May 5, 2026

I couldn’t sleep with a dragon breathing outside the campervan. As a fast-dropping tide raked Agate Beach’s pebbled shore, the June night echoed with deep wheezing. Back and forth, back and forth.

No wonder they say that Supernatural Beings inhabit all corners of Haida Gwaii (which translates to People Islands). My body was feeling possessed; possessed by something otherworldly. I snuck out of the rental Delica called Daisy, slipped on shoes and followed the moonlight to the sea.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t a dragon I heard breathing down my neck, but the Hulk green Sasquatch-looking creature known as Gagiid. According to Haida mythology, Gagiid was lost at sea and delirious from cold water and starvation, he eventually transformed into a supernatural wild man, often depicted with sea urchins’ spines protruding from his mouth. Some people say he stalks the shorelines and haunts the forest collecting the souls of the drowned.

It was Day 4 of my weeklong campervan adventure on Haida Gwaii. By sheer luck, Daisy, my travel companion Eagle Eyes and I had nabbed the last available site at Agate Beach Campground, a first-come first-serve oceanfront campground with a $18 nightly charge.

Sublime.

This was the most we would ever spend on accommodation during our trip. In fact, it wasn’t difficult to live parsimoniously after buying groceries since Daisy was kitted out with all the camping essentials I would need. Part of me was unsure I’d be able to sleep in a van for a full seven nights, but to be honest, even though there were bouts of daily rain, vanlife just got better with time.

“Staying in an Airbnb is not staying in Haida Gwaii,” says Kyle May, owner of the van rental company Gwaii Adventures. May offers the opposite of most vehicle rentals: unlimited mileage and the freedom to explore most backroads. Plus, he provides a shuttle service to and from the Sandspit or Masset Airport.

My flight to Sandspit or K’il Kun Xidgwangs Daanaay Airport cost roughly $1,000, which was a little over the average cost for a ticket from Vancouver at the time because I needed to tack on the flight from Nanaimo too. Eagle Eyes was waiting for me at the airport with Daisy when I landed because they had just wrapped a work week with a yacht tour of Gwaii Haanas (which translates to Islands of Beauty). We stopped at the Sandpit Super Valu for groceries before hitting the Copper Bay Mainline logging road for 22 kilometres to Gray Bay | Diinal GawGa campsite. We saw two black bears en route to the most secluded stretch of hard-packed, wavy gray sand, textured with seashells and pebbles, I’ve ever seen in my life. The campsites at Gray Bay were all free and had a fire pit, picnic table and pit toilet. It was divinely quiet; no one else was there. (No cell phone reception or potable water either, so keep that in mind when you go.)

After a lazy morning by the fire and beach stroll, we continued driving Daisy down the Alliford Bay Main dirt road, passing Skidegate Lake and breaking for lunch and a quick cold plunge in Mosquito Lake. Mosquito or “Mossie” Lake isn’t named after the insect, but after the Second World War aircraft, the “De Havilland Mosquito,” because much of the wood used to build the fighter-bombers was harvested from the surrounding area.

We parked Daisy at Moresby Camp on Cumshewa Inlet for our second night on the archipelago that had nearly 70 percent of its old-growth forest decimated by decades of industrial logging. In the 1900s, Moresby Camp was the site of a logging camp—currently it stands as the launching point for boaters heading to Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site. Today, about half of Haida Gwaii’s land base is protected.

We looped back to Skidegate Inlet the next day and caught a 12:30 p.m. ferry to Daajing Giids (formerly Queen Charlotte). The first thing I noticed was the Haida Watchman pole outside the small RCMP detachment and ambulance station.

Haida Watchmen are protectors of the community, land, air and sea. The Watchmen are seen all throughout the Islands and they are also real people who protect Haida’s ancient village sites.             Land title agreements with both BC and Canada legally recognize and affirm that the Haida Nation has Aboriginal Title to Haida Gwaii—the region is ahead of others when it comes to reconciliation efforts. President of the Haida Nation, Gaagwiis Jason Alsop, states in the Go Haida Gwaii print travel guide that, “this act of respect acknowledges historic injustices and shows the transformative possibilities of working together for what is right.”

I’ve always been drawn to Haida Gwaii and now that I’ve experienced its magical powers, I think I’ll forever long for that stretch of road, Highway 16, driving north along the rocky shoreline from Skidegate, past Tlell, through Port Clements and up to Masset. 

From Masset, Agate Beach, Taaw Tldáaw | Tow Hill and the Haida Gwaii of my dreams was just a half-hour drive east on a gravel road lined with tall trees.

Dinner at campsite #30 was pan-fried pesto gnocchi with red pepper, red onion and vegan sausage, followed by a thwarted attempt to spark wet wood into fire and story time from an old book about Northwest Coast fables called Mouse Woman and the Vanished Princesses I found at the Sitka Studio in Tlell. We played crib under the comfort of Daisy’s awning as a steady mizzle carried us into the night.

On Day 6 and on the way back down Highway 16, we parked Daisy at the trailhead of the Golden Spruce Trail and went on a quest to find the stump of the majestic fallen tree. It was an enchanting yet melancholic hike (found in the book The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed by John Vaillant). I think we might have even seen the fallen golden spruce after bumping into the former Mayor of Port Clements Dale Lore on the dirt road shortcut back to the van. It was an unassuming dead spruce splayed out on the bank of the Yakoun River, on the opposite side of the trail’s end.

Lore pulled up his truck up beside us and before we knew it he was telling us the story of his life on Haida Gwaii. He tells us that Haida Gwaii is like no other place in the world.

“The only mistake you guys made is coming to Haida Gwaii too young because everywhere else just won’t have the same impact,” he says.

We burnt the last of the firewood and ate all of our food on the last night as the tide went down at Kagan Bay, on the western end of Daajing Giids. The water was so still that evening. It made it easy to drift off to sleep and dream.

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