Forget the name. Desolation Sound is Canada’s best-kept secret.

If you sail into British Columbia’s Desolation Sound Marine Park on a slightly smoky afternoon, as I did recently (there were still more than 900 wildfires burning across Canada), make sure you watch out for the huge tides and the weather. B.C.’s largest marine park might have the warmest water north of Baja, but here nature still rules.

As if I needed a reminder, an hour after we’d anchored, a large seal slapped its tail alongside our boat, sending a shower of saltwater down through the hatches onto my laptop. The next morning, a mass of kelp morphed into a gigantic humpback, who exhaled spectacularly foul breath. Rafts of sea otters floated past, warming their toes in the sun.

I’ve spent months exploring B.C.’s coast with my husband aboard our sailboat Heron, and even wrote a book, Uncharted, about our adventures (and misadventures). Of all the remote, watery places we return to each year, Desolation is the most dramatic.

Recently, there has been an astonishing resurgence of life in Desolation’s Salish Sea—more humpbacks feeding, dolphins leaping, and masses of seabirds. Mountain peaks loom over forested fjords where environmental laws have noticeably led to cleaner water and, after decades, more abundant wildlife.

The Pacific Northwest boating set flocks to Desolation’s granite-cliffed coves in summer, but fall is our favorite time. Salmon return to spawn, and the air turns crisp. Here’s what to know and how best to experience the quieter off-season.

The real secret of Desolation Sound

Desolation emerges from the northern end of the Salish Sea just 90 miles north of Vancouver. Since the nearest road is 20 miles south, where the Pan American Highway ends in the tiny fishing village of Lund, the marine park is only accessible by boat or floatplane. Most boaters migrate south after Labor Day, and nature reclaims itself as migrating birds arrive, blanketing the sea. In the off-season, Desolation Sound’s thick forest of cedar, fir, and honey-barked madrone feels once again like the traditional territory of four First Nations, which it’s been for thousands of years.

The real secret of Desolation, says Captain Colin Griffinson, owner-operator of classic 1943 expedition yacht Pacific Yellowfin, is to come in the quiet months if you want to see wilderness and wildlife. “My ideal times are September into October, and May through early July. We have one of the biggest bald eagle shows in the world then and nobody knows about it.”

“At low tide, a beach in Desolation Sound is full of food,” he continues. “Because of the temperature of the water, mussels, mollusks, and oysters thrive. This place was a huge food source for Indigenous people for 10 thousand years. The bears know all about it, too.”

(Explore the Oregon coast—but don’t touch the “dragon toes.”)

How Desolation Sound got its name

When Captain George Vancouver and his crew sailed through these waters in 1792, they were astonished to find that the water was remarkably deep even close to shore. They had no way of knowing that Desolation Sound has the most dramatic drop in altitude from mountain peak to ocean floor in all of North America, with glacier-carved fjords that are a repository of deep geologic time, falling to nearly 2,000 feet.

“Vancouver was looking for rolling hills to farm and good pastureland,” says Griffinson. “The soil here is so bad you can’t grow crops; of course he found it desolate.”

But George Vancouver’s desolation is today’s thriving wilderness, especially in spring and fall when it’s peak wildlife season.

Return of the whales and other wildlife

Whale sightings were rare in Desolation 20 years ago but are now relatively common. The humpback population has seen a massive recovery in the past decade. Orcas have also seen a return, with the exception of the endangered southern resident killer whales. The whales’ return is primarily due to the end of harmful whaling and orca-capture practices.

(Whale watching is booming. Here’s how to do it responsibly.)

“Bears were being trophy-hunted in B.C., and now they’re not,” says Maureen Gordon, co-owner of expedition cruise company Maple Leaf Adventures, “so their behavior has changed as well, and we see all these animals feeding in fall and spring.”

We noticed the sea otter population is also booming. In the 1970s, 89 sea otters were reintroduced to the outer coast of Vancouver Island after having been hunted to the edge of extinction by 19th-century fur traders. This year, for the first time, we saw great romps of them in Desolation and the inner coast.

Desolation draws people who want to disappear—from 1960s Vietnam War draft dodgers to today’s summer boaters, who cruise up the coast in July and August, drop anchor, and hide out. It’s sought after because almost nothing changes, except the tides and the weather. There is a new restaurant in Refuge Cove; a two-year-old Indigenous lodge in Toba Inlet; a cool new glamping outfit on Kinghorn Island. Aside from that?

A northwest wind blows tumbled clouds through the sky. Rain patters the cabin at night. You peer out the next morning as mist lifts off the water, and the sky at the edge of the continent is rinsed blue again.