Salmon Run in Chase, BC

This past weekend I went on a spur of the moment roadtrip up to Chase, BC, which is about 5 hours from Vancouver.

My coworker Tom and I stayed at a roadside motel that could have easily been called the Bates Motel a la Psycho. We snagged a snazzy room up on the 2nd floor.

Check out how remote it was.

The reason for all this? The Sockeye Salmon festival, of course.

Adams River is where the Sockeye Salmon come to spawn and then die, and every four years there's a big run, with this year being one of the biggest runs in history. So, we had to see it for ourselves!

The photos don't do it justice because it's so hard to capture an entire river that is teaming with salmon, trying to shove past each other in an effort to swim upstream. It was like a giant salmon traffic jam.

There were also plenty of dead fish everywhere too.

We found out that the reason they leave the dead fish laying about is that they get washed away back out into the Pacific Ocean and serve as food/nutrients/minerals. The smell was pretty bad, but completely bearable we thought.

This must have been the "couples only" section of the river because here, all the salmon were paired up.

A gorgeous weekend getaway and an experience of a lifetime!

Art Exhibit for Hoarders

The current exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery, titled Waste Not, is by Chinese artist Song Dong, who has amassed a collection of artifacts from his mother over her lifetime. This collaborative effort between mother and son was a way for the two to grieve over the death of Song's father, but spoke to me on a number of levels.

Sure, there's the whole "hoarder" thing, which seems to be a common catchphrase these days that people apply to anyone who has a messy house. (Thanks a lot, A&E.) But maybe Song's mother was not a hoarder? She grew up in rural China, and from the stories my own mother tells me, everyone lived in poverty, so why wouldn't you want to hang on to every little item that you could? Maybe this exhibit is about the struggle of the poor in China? Or maybe it speaks to the notion of having more stuff = higher social status? It's all rather interesting.

The exhibit even incorporates parts of the house (walls, structure, beams) that the artifacts come from.

It was a pretty cool exhibit to see, but I was hoping it would be bigger than it already was. Perhaps when the Vancouver Art Gallery moves to its new location, they'll have more space to do bigger installations, etc. For now though, this is worth a visit!