placeholder photo Heritage · since 1910
Premier Creek Lodging has stood on this waterfront since 1910. It has worn three names, watched a mill town rise and change, and outlasted almost everything built around it.
The oldest hotel in Haida Gwaii
In 1908 a sawmill was built on the shore of Skidegate Inlet, and a town grew up around it almost overnight. Workers kept coming, and they needed somewhere to stay. So in 1910 a hotel went up on the waterfront and opened its doors as the Premier Hotel — named, simply, for Premier Creek, the little creek that still runs along one side of the property today.
It was, and is, a working person's hotel: plain, sturdy, and built to last on a coast that tests everything. Over the years its name changed — for a time it was the Haida Hotel — before settling back to Premier Creek Lodging, the name above the door now.
The town's name changed too. For over a century it was Queen Charlotte; in 2022 its ancestral name, Daajing Giids, was restored. Through all of it, the hotel stayed put on the water — and stayed open. Today it is the oldest hotel in Haida Gwaii, in the care of Lenore Lawrence and Peter Cook.
A century on the waterfront
1908
A sawmill is built on the shore of Skidegate Inlet, near Spruce Point, and a small settlement begins to grow around it.
1910
A hotel is built to house the workers arriving for the new mill town. It takes its name from Premier Creek, the small creek that still runs along one side of the property.
Later years
Over the decades the hotel is renamed the Haida Hotel, before the name returns to Premier Creek Lodging a few years on — the name it still carries today.
2022
Known as Queen Charlotte from 1891, the village has its ancestral name of Daajing Giids restored — the hotel’s home town changes its name while the hotel keeps its own.
Today
More than a century on, Premier Creek Lodging is still open and still on the waterfront — the oldest hotel in Haida Gwaii, run by Lenore Lawrence and Peter Cook.
Dates and names above follow the lodge's own published history. The exact years of the name changes, and who built and first ran the hotel, are worth confirming with the owners — a fuller heritage story is exactly the sort of detail a new site can carry well.
The setting
The hotel sits right on the waterfront in the centre of Daajing Giids. Straight out front lie the islands of Skidegate Inlet; to the right stands Spruce Point, once home to a sawmill that ran around 1910. Below the hotel is a dock that fills with fishing vessels — most of them slipping out before dawn to fish the west coast of Haida Gwaii.
Getting here & what is nearby
placeholder photo A hundred years of guests have come through these doors. Book a room and stay in the oldest hotel on the islands.