Vancouver Island: The Heart of the Raincoast

“And yet, Canadian forests always felt haunted to me, especially by my ancestors, the ones who’d defended the land or conquered it, who came to cut, burn, and farm the trees. It seems the forest always remembers. Even when we’d like it to forget our transgressions.”

— Prof. Suzanne Simard
Finding the Mother Tree

The final week of May 2024. My second trip in as many seasons to the Cascadian bioregion, after February’s road trip down the coast of Oregon. Thanks to my personality, planning style, and philosophy of travel, many of the adventures I write about here are “a long time coming.” But, this tour of Vancouver Island’s southern, central, and west coast regions takes the entire cake, and the candles too. Some of my favorite landscape photographers, the inspirations who pushed me down this path over a decade ago, hail from beautiful British Columbia, and I have long wanted to see their scenes and follow in their creative footsteps. This trip was dreamt of in 2018, delayed by the COVID pandemic, sketched out in 2021, fully booked for May 2022 (flights, hotels, car and ferries, and COVID testing appointments all) before being abruptly cancelled by my leg injury one week before our departure. Now, two years later, I finally pull the trigger and make the trip out alone, “on assignment” to document some of the Island’s beautiful old-growth forests and coastal scenes - before they are changed forever by time, tourism, and the forestry industry that is so central to the provincial economy. Part of me is pained to experience this place for the first time without Jane or Jordan (at least, the first time since a brief port-of-call stop in Victoria during college), but another part of me is glad for the solitude - the freedom to range, get deeply lost in my thoughts, and keep only the mist and rain for company. Solitude is a rarity these days, and I have learned to cherish it and experience it more intentionally than I did in my younger years. Furthermore, this trip was on the bucket list, and the bucket list, I’ve decided, stops for nothing and no one. Although I’d originally sketched out a weeklong trip to include some time on the Lower Mainland, work and home commitments abbreviate things a bit. Instead, I spend four days focusing my attention on the Island. Bookended by air travel days, I drive from Victoria down to Port Renfrew on Sunday, complete the Pacific Marine Drive and head west to Pacific Rim National Park on Monday, spend Tuesday exploring the west coast, and return through Alberni Valley to the south-central Island on Wednesday before flying home on Thursday. It’s a whirlwind - an unforgettable one.

It starts with an exhausting travel day which sees me leaving home around noon on Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, eating a shawarma airport dinner in Toronto, and then boarding a delayed flight to Victoria (oh Air Canada…). We land a couple of airplane movies and indigenous short films later, and I’m surprised to find the rental car counter still open. I head out to find my car, a notably low-slung and sleek Dodge Charger GT, before making the 5-minute drive to nearby Sidney, where I check-in at the Best Western Emerald Isle just past midnight (3 AM Boston time… thank goodness I had the foresight to book a place so close to the airport). A shower, a quick email home to let Jane know I’m safely in Canada, and I pass out.

The next morning, I eat breakfast in the hotel and walk across the street to Thrifty Foods for some basic groceries (bread, fruit, juice, canned veggies) before heading out on the highway. My destination for the day is Port Renfrew, where I plan to spend the night after exploring the beaches and forests along the southern coast and the Juan de Fuca Strait. In the morning, I pass through Sooke and follow the coastline westward, watching the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula rising in the distance across the strait. Along the way, I make stops at China Beach and Sombrio Beach. It’s an impressively rainy and moody day - not great for wide landscapes, but not bad for forest photography, which benefits from atmospheric mist and low-contrast light to provide calm and order in otherwise chaotic scenes. Having gotten a lot of practice in Oregon (and nearly caused the death of my camera screen from being drenched in the redwoods), I stick to a rain discipline regimen that includes mounting an umbrella to my backpack’s shoulder strap so that I can shoot with both hands, keeping my camera tucked safely in my rain gear at all times when walking, and extensively previsualizing scenes and dialing in settings before taking the camera body out of my jacket.

On short walks down to the beach at both China and Sombrio, I take my time despite the pouring rain, admiring the tall trees, the coastal scenery, and the flora of the understory (including the ubiquotous salal and a variety of blooming wildflowers). At Sombrio Beach, I take a longer walk down the beach to visit a waterfall that flows into a creek, which drains into the ocean. Reaching the waterfall requires a bit of bushwhacking and scrambling along the creek-bank, and not a small amount of walking upstream in the water. My old, leaky boots get soaked; my feet and socks are destined to be damp for the rest of the day (and indeed, the majority of the trip). But that’s how it goes on the rainy coast of British Columbia.

A little further along the coast, I reach Port Renfrew, a small community on the shores of the inlet of Port San Juan. It’s a quiet little place that barely rises to being called a town — a collection of houses, a gas station, a few hostels, lodges, and diners, where services are lacking and cell reception is spotty at best. In other words, it’s idyllic and it’s utterly perfect. Before I can rest though, I have a long journey to make into the mountains north of town, in the Gordon River Valley. In a way, the entire trip has been built around my desire to see this place - the stands of ancient, old-growth forest that remain on Edinburgh Mountain and its environs, and specifically the parcel of wild climactic forest called Eden Grove, which is being actively threatened by logging interests. I have heard Eden Grove described by photographers and forestry ecologists alike as one of the finest old-growth forests in the world, let alone Canada, and I wanted to finally see it with my own eyes. It is, in a word, the fulcrum of the trip.

After a brief stop at the beach near Pacheedaht First Nation (“People of the Sea Foam”) land, where Scotch broom carpets the dunes in golden flowers, I begin the bumpy gravel drive up into the mountains. It’s only seven or so miles from the asphalt to my destination at the foot of Edinburgh Mountain, but the logging road is atrocious at times, especially in this rainstorm, which has transformed the gravel surface into a series of rutted-out puddles. Not wanting to risk my low-clearance car and not knowing how deep each of these puddles is, I take things nice and slow up the mountain, zigging and zagging and dodging as I go. After turning off from Gordon River Road to the Edinburgh Main, I leave my car just before the bridge across the Gordon River. It’s raging and torrential in the downpour, and water is cascading down the sides of the mountain in braids and rivulets. At the entrance to the bridge, as if to mark the liminal space between the rest of our world and someplace truly special, are three words spray-painted in bright orange by a prior activist: “Defend the Sacred”. In the distance, garguantuan trees tower above the mist upon the mountainside.

Donning my gear, I leave the car and walk through the pouring rain up the mountainside. I am completely alone, and as far as I can tell, I might as well be the only human being between here and seven miles away in the relative civilization of Port Renfrew. Personal safety is paramount. I told Jane in advance that I would completely out-of-reach for at least a few hours, but if anything were to happen, help would be a long time coming. Just past the bridge and around another bend, the road transforms from pitted gravel to a series of blast craters steeply climbing upward - impassable to all but the toughest 4x4 vehicles - but it is not so bad on foot. In a way, I am glad to be taking the last steps in my pilgrimage to this place on foot, in abysmal weather conditions. Just as during my redwoods exploration in February, I find myself thinking that any other weather would have felt totally inappropriate to the ecosystem. The rolling clouds and endless mists also provide a perfect backdrop for photos, accentuating the trees and making their massive size stand out clearly against the distant hillsides and the funeral-shroud-of-a-sky. After a brief uphill walk (less than a mile from road bridge), I reach an open cutblock that has been planted over with young firs, and come face-to-face with the sole survivor of the clearcut: Big Lonely Doug, Canada’s second tallest Douglas Fir. I take a series of verts, panoramas, and telephoto shots here, playing with ways to frame Doug along with the distant trees. To the east (my left), I see my first glimpse of Eden Grove, a disarmingly tall and wild jumble of trees, standing like a monstruous wall over the young fir trees in the clearing. A little further up the road, and past an enormous roadside waterfall, I reach the trail that leads into the grove.

How can I describe Eden Grove in words? If standing among California and Oregon’s coastal redwoods in February was like swimming in a pod of whales, then walking through Eden Grove would be like scuba-diving in a perfect coral reef. I visit other old-growth forests over the subsequent few days, but none of them comes close to the scale and beauty of this little slice of surviving forest. A short boardwalk trail leads through the grove, old and worn enough to blend into the surroundings. Each way I look, I see massive trees - Douglas firs and western redcedars twenty feet or more in diameter and soaring hundreds of feet beyond view above me. The rainstorm is continuing to rage, but the dense canopy shields me from the sky, turning the rain into a fine mist that lands on the understory. The boardwalk ends in a massive redcedar, over thirty feet across and draped in ferns and lichen. A veritable great-grandmother of the forest, whose root system and mycorrhizal networks have likely given rise to more life than we can fathom. I take lots of compositions, mostly handheld, of my surroundings. Scale is totally lost in these photos; the best I can do is to try to capture the mood - the emotional experience of being in this beautiful grove. I feel so utterly surrounded by life and beauty that I I find myself talking - really, for the first time all day since the grocery store in the morning. Talking to myself, talking to the trees. Wanting to thank them for being here, for shielding my steps, for letting me visit their home of over a thousand years, for giving a tiny struggling human being just an hour of perfect peace. It occurs to me that they will outlast us - trees like this. Maybe not Eden Grove, and maybe not many other groves of old-growth forest. But trees like this will outlast us. They will be here - or make their return - when we are gone. They will be fine. It will all be alright. Back above the grove, I walk a mile back down the logging road to my car at the bridge. Along the road, on gravel piles, on concrete barriers, and along the bridge railing, are spray-painted dueling visions of the earth:

“Water is Life”
“Doug Needs Friends ❤️”
“Fuck the Company”
”Defend Our Home”
“Fuck the Blockade”

Long live the blockade.

After a steady and peaceful if incredibly bumpy drive back into Port Renfrew, I check into my accommodations for the evening - a hiker’s bungalow located just off the road. After unpacking and unfurling my wet clothes, socks, and boots in the bathroom to dry (a blower fan is provided, thank goodness), I make dinner (ramen of course…) and eat and rest while my camera batteries and mental batteries recharge. I check in with Jane, who has just put Jordan to sleep on the other side of the continent. After a brief liedown on the bunk-bed, I head back out for a late sunset loop hike at nearby Botanical Beach. The skies are still morose and cloudy, so golden light is out of the question, but I nevertheless have an enjoyable time on the beach, shooting the tidepools, the distant Olympic Peninsula, and the windblown pines and rocky islets in Botany Bay. On my way back into town, I exercise a bit of spontaneity and stop my car at the nearby marina, walking out onto the water to photograph the inlet at blue hour, along with the lights of the town diner in the distance against a backing of misty trees and foggy mountains. It is a mesmerizing scene, and a perfect way to cap this day of exploring the heart of the raincoast - a day that I am in no hurry to forget anytime soon. I’m back at the bungalow just after 9 PM, and off to sleep before long.

Vancouver Island: The Pacific Rim

“On the Northwest coast, there is no graceful interval between the ocean and the trees; the forest simply takes over where the tide wrack ends, erupting full-blown from the shallow, bouldered earth. The boundary between the two is unstable… from the beach you can see as far as height and horizon will allow, but turn inland and you will find yourself blinking in a darkened room, pupils dilating to fill the claustrophobic void. The trail of a person, or the thread of a story, is easily lost in such a place. Even the trees, swaddled in moss and draped in ferns, appear disguised.”

— John Vaillant
The Golden Spruce

In the morning, the world is still and blue outside my bungalow off the main road. I’ve deliberately slept in past the 5 AM sunrise (ugh…). The early hour at this northern latitude is a deterrent to any sunrise photography, as is the rainy, misty weather that continues to roll in off of Port San Juan. After a simple breakfast of bread, fruit, juice, and trail mix, I gather my belongings and head back out on the road, leaving northeast from Port Renfrew along Pacific Marine Road. My first roadside stop of the morning is at nearby Fairy Lake, to photograph an iconic subject of Vancouver Island: a shapely, bonsai-like miniature Douglas fir growing upon a rock just offshore. A family of sparrows is nesting in the Fairy Lake Tree this morning, dodging the light rain that continues to fall across the mountains. Doing my best to keep the camera dry, I set up a mix of long and short exposures with the bonsai tree framed against the blue waters of the lake.

Past Fairy Lake, Pacific Marine Road crosses the mountains of southern Vancouver Island, passing over numerous one-lane bridges along the Gordon River and Harris Creek drainages. Although there are road signs warning drivers to watch for logging trucks, I see hardly any traffic as I wind through the mountains on this early Monday morning. I make a stop at the Harris Creek Spruce, a massive Sitka spruce standing amidst a small grove of second-growth forest, wedged between the highway and the creek itself. It is an incredible specimen, thirteen feet in diameter and reaching 260 feet toward the sky; using my tripod, I take a selfie with the tree before taking a walk down to the creek and returning back to my car via a short trail through the forest.

From here, I drive about an hour northward, crossing the mountains to Lake Cowichan and the Cowichan River Valley. Today will be the longest driving day of my trip, as I have to extricate myself from the southern island, return eastward to the Trans-Canada Highway, follow that northward past Nanaimo and Parksville, and then turn west along the Alberni Highway and ultimately reach the coast along the steep and winding Pacific Rim Highway. All-in-all, five hours on the road before I can rest. At the terminus of the Pacific Marine Road, I make a slight detour through the sleepy town of Honeymoon Bay to visit Gordon Bay Provincial Park. It’s just after 8 AM, and morning mist is still rolling off the lake and across the distant mountains to the east. I spend some time photographing at the lakeside, and walking a short trail onto a rocky headland that juts into the bay. With plenty of time to spare, I also turn my camera to smaller details in the forest: the ubiquitous witch’s hair lichen that clings to the trees, and the clusters of wildflowers and fruiting plants that carpet the trailside, including western starflowers, large-leaved avens, cascade oregon-grapes, and western columbines.

Back at the car, I settle in for a long drive to my next destination: a lunch pit stop at the Old Country Market in Coombs, outside of Parksville. Leaving the Cowichan River Valley behind and joining the main highway that courses northward along the Island’s east coast, I come across an incredibly Canadian (or perhaps Vancouver Island-specific) road phenomenon that drives me and my inner Masshole bonkers: They actually use the left lane only to pass. In no place else in the world have I ever driven a 2-lane road where 95% of the drivers hugged the right lane, regardless of level of congestion, content to go for miles and miles (or is it clicks and kilometers?) hugging bumpers well below the legal speed limit. With silent apologies, I zoom/weave along the left lane, unable to bear crawling along the highway at a snail’s pace while there is an absolutely open and usable travel lane. Fascinating.

In Coombs after nearly two hours on the road, I arrive at the Old Country Market, a complex that includes, among other things, a bakery, a donut shop, a farmer’s market and nursery, a sizeable gift shop, restaurants, and an ice cream parlour. The market is famed for having goats grazing on its turf roofs; alas, with the steady rainy weather, today there are no goats to photograph. I settle for buying a few sausage rolls, a Portuguese egg tart, and a generous scoop of stracciatella and mango gelato. Then it’s back on the road again, continuing westward toward Port Alberni.

Heading further down the road past Cameron Lake, my next stop is at Cathedral Grove, a well-known and well-visited section of old-growth Douglas fir forest abutting the highway in MacMillan Provincial Park. The trees here are large and the forest is marvelous, but after yesterday’s near-spiritual experience in the silence and solitude of Eden Grove, Cathedral Grove feels more like shadow of what it could be - a pale, Disneyfied imitation of old-growth woodland, replete with walking paths, crowded roadside parking, and a highly calculated yet insufficient number of portapotties. Perhaps it’s just me. Or perhaps it’s the fact that I still have two hours to drive before reaching the coast, and I am growing increasingly sleepy post-lunch after being on the road since 6 AM. In any case, I take a quick walk along the loop trails on either side of the highway, photographing the stately trees and their surroundings as best as I can. The section south of the highway, in particular, is notable for some excellent examples of nurse logs, and a lovely riparian environment adjoining the Cameron River.

Continuing west, I pass through Port Alberni and continue along the highway toward Ucluelet and Tofino. The road now follows the north shore of Sproat Lake; past the trees and across the water, I can see tantalizing glimpses of still-snowbound peaks in the mountainous interior of the central Island; alas, there is nowhere to safely pull over aside from a small rest stop along the Taylor River, so I continue to drive along, a bit distracted. Past Sproat Lake, the highway narrows and winds into the gorge of the Kennedy River, following the contour of the nearby hillsides before emerging on a clifftop overlooking Kennedy Lake, the Island’s largest lake. Here, I see tantalizing glimpses of the fjordlike landscape that characterizes the west coast: curving, steep-sided inlets that join and flow into each other, dotted by an archipelago of tree-covered islands large and small, backed by rounded peaks and rolling banks of mist. To escape a particularly slow driver who seems totally daunted by the highway, I pull away from the caravan on a whim and park beside the Kennedy Lake boat launch, where I take panos and far shots of the lake at eye level. Then, it’s back onto the (now much emptier and more-pleansat-to-drive) road an south to my next stop: the Willowbrae Trail near Ucluelet.

It’s mid-afternoon now. The Willowbrae Trail leads through stands of second-growth pine forest, to the edge of the sea at Florencia Bay and Half-Moon Bay. I walk along and the climb the steep staircases down to both beaches, which are beautiful against the shining afternoon sun and the pounding of the surf at high tide. I seem to have left the gloomy weather behind on the other side of the Island; the tradeoff is that it is fairly hard to get anything but washed-out, white-grey skies on my photos, thanks to the harsh light and high contrast setting of the beach and the surrounding forests. The plant life remains stunning, however; here on the coast, I photograph spruce trees, trilliums, ferns, and flowering dwarf dogwoods - all admixed with the the most common shrubs of all: the salal and its accompanying evergreen huckleberries, both of which are fruiting at this time of year. Along the highway and in clearings throughout the forest, I also see amazing, tall bushes of rhododendrons and azaleas. It’s quite a feast for the eyes. After returning from the beaches, I take another stroll starting from the nearby Ancient Cedars trailhead, which winds through stands of old-growth cedar forest, past beautiful examples of culturally modified western redcedars. I follow the trail as its splits onto a section of the Wild Pacific Trail, which paralllels the coastline, before returning to the car and entering Ucluelet proper. In town (“Ukie” for short), it’s early dinnertime now, and I stop by Cedar Grill for a delicious meal of seafood chowder and pasta with a pesto sauce of sautéed smoked salmon, mushrooms, and onions. Next door at the Reflecting Spirit Gallery, I purchase the obligatory trip magnet before the proprietor closes up shop for the evening. Then, it’s further south to the tip of the peninsula, and my final destination of the evening.

As I drive down to the lighthouse at Amphitrite Point, just a few minutes past Ucluelet, my heart lightens as I realize (with mixed emotions) that the coastal fog is rolling back in, and the chance of a brilliant sunset is all but none. Rain - inches of it - is in the overnight forecast. What this means is that the photos will stink a little more — but I’ll get to GTFO and check in at the hotel a little sooner. A welcome thought after a long day that would have been a 6 AM - 9 PM marathon involving five hours of driving and four or five different walking trails. Out on the headland, I fire up the Alltrails app for the final time today, and proceed in a counter-clockwise loop around the lighthouse. This segment of the Wild Pacific Trail is quite beautiful in the grey light of early evening. To the east, buoys clang and seabirds soar along the Carolina Channel. This stretch of wild water is dotted with islands and rocky reefs, and is loosely known as the northern edge of the Graveyard of the Pacific, for the shipwrecks that have happened along this coast. It’s a beautiful sight, the various islands of the Broken Group skimming the ocean’s surface, with the mountains of the Carmanah region rising statuesquely behind them, faraway and nearer to my starting point earlier this morning. I continue around the coast before cutting across the road to the other side of the peninsula, where there are equally pretty west- and north-facing views. Sunset is patently going to be a nothing-burger (the clouds are quickly moving in), but I spend some time composing images of the wave-dashed shoreline, sometimes with foregrounds of tidepools, salal, and forest.

Back at the car at 8 PM, I am exhausted. I clamber back in and make the drive from the peninsula back north past Ucluelet and through Pacific Rim National Park, which I will be exploring on the morrow. I check into the Hotel Zed Tofino not a moment too soon, as the night’s rainstorm has begin to come down in earnest. With still an ounce of adventure left in me, I first check out the tiny path behind the hotel’s parking lot, which leads to a deck with a view of the Tofino mudflats (rain-soaked and zero visibility) before heading up to my room for the next two nights. After provisioning my food, drying my clothes and boots, and taking a hot shower, it’s time to watch some TV (Oh god, such a luxury…) before going to bed.

Vancouver Island: Long Beach Wild

“I loved every bit of it — no boundaries, no beginnings, no end, one continual shove of growing — edge of land meeting edge of water, with just a ribbon of sand between. Sometimes the ribbon was smooth, sometimes fussed with foam. Trouble was only on the edges; both sea and forests in their depths were calm and still. Virgin soil, clean sea, pure air, vastness by day, still deeper vastness in dark when beginnings and endings join.”

— Emily Carr (1871-1945)
Growing Pains: An Autobiography

I wake up after a night of restful, quiet sleep at the Hotel Zed Tofino. It’s a relatively new joint - built in 2020 and opened (post-pandemic) only a few years ago - new enough that it wasn’t on my radar during original trip planning in 2022. The whole building has fresh decor and a cool, retro-70’s vibe. After a relaxing rain-shower and breakfast, I head out in the early morning. Again, I’ve intentionally slept in past sunrise, as the rain has only finally let up in the past hour. The rest of the day, though, promises, to be clear and sunny until nightfall - a welcome change after several days of wild and moody weather. In stark contrast to the previous day, drive time will be minimal; most of the day will be spent on-foot exploring the trails of the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve and the environs of the Esowista Peninsula, including the surf-town of Tofino. This fragment of the northwest coast - a jumble of sounds and islands, forests and mountains - is an ecologically and culturally significant place. The Clayoquot Sound was the focus of the “War in the Woods” in the early 1990s, a series of blockades that saw indigenous and Anglo-Canadian residents of the area joining forces to prevent logging on nearby Meares Island. To this day, the UNESCO-recognized Clayoquot Sound Biosphere Reserve protects nearly half a million acres, including ecosystems as varied as temperate rainforests, lakes and estuaries, and alpine peaks. It is a beautiful place to spend time on the ground, photographing the region’s diverse flora and fauna in the context of their living landscape.

My first stop of the morning is the boat launch at the end of Grice Bay Road, which faces out on one of the winding inlets between the forests, and features a stunning panoramic view over the mudflats east of the Esowista Peninsula. It’s a serene morning: clouds rolling across the sound and obscuring the view of distant peaks beyond Indian Island, mist rising from the trees on neigboring islands, a squad of fishing boats quietly loading up and setting off across the water. I make use of the long lens of my camera, zooming in to capture distant features in the landscape. I’m spending part of the morning scouting for potential sunrise locations for the fourth and final full day of my trip, in case the weather tomorrow will allow for golden light (spoiler alert: it will not). Grice Bay, for the moment, is one of my top candidates. I next backtrack to Radar Hill, where a short paved walk leads to a hilltop vista overlooking the entire peninsula, from the open Pacific Ocean to the west, to the mountains and sounds to the north and east.

Zigzagging my way back across the peninsula, I next take a long walk at Long Beach, a massive, 10-mile stretch of sand that spans the length of the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, and is the very heart and soul of the park. Despite the early hour, there are a few surfers catching waves out beyond Incinerator Rock; I sneak some shots of them as they walk back up the beach, in order to convey some human scale in this enormous place. Turning south down the beach, I set off, walking over a mile across the sands. The coast seems to stretch to infinity, the distant forests always receding no matter how far I walk; in the gloaming and the half-light of the shrouded sun, the boundary between sea and sky seems blurred to my eyes and to the camera lens. I walk along slowly, following the wrack line, admiring the tangles of driftwood and kelp - lost in my thoughts, once again. It occurs to me that, here in the park, with precious few signs of civilization, this incredible beach must appear quite similar to how it did a century ago, or a few centuries ago. A truly timeless place - the wild, western edge of the country. I find myself wondering how it must have felt to be a Anglo pioneer here, a world away from the aristocratic trappings of Victoria, long before the asphalt highway and the logging roads, the beach resorts and tourist towns. In a land inhabited richly by the First Nations, the sea wolves and the black bears, the orcas and the salmon. I find myself full of gratitude, that places like this can still exist, and hopefully will for some time.

Further to the south, I park at a trailhead within the national park that leads to two stands of old-growth cedar rainforest on either side of the highway. Although the environment does not approach the magic of Eden Grove, these forest groves are nevertheless quite dense and lovely. I take photos from throughout my walk - including a selfie along the boardwalk - before returning to my car and driving back to Tofino. On the way into town, I stop a second time at Grice Bay to see if the clouds have lifted at all across the water. The mountains remain invisible, but the inlet appears strikingly different at low tide. I take a few shots of the braiding estuary channels across the mudflats, before moving north into town.

Tofino is a surf town through and through. There is something magical about the place, surrounded as it is by multiple bodies of water, across which sit mountainous island peaks that peer down at you from beyond the clouds. It can get pretty crowded in the high months, but I manage to find easy parking in a pay-lot just off the main street, and set off exploring on foot. Things are quieter this week than they will be for the rest of the season, as I am visiting one week after the Victoria Day holiday week in Canada. Several shops and restaurants in town are closed today - giving the staff a midweek break before the frenetic activity of the summer months. I wander the waterfront, photographing the distant islands, the boats in the marina, the floathouses in the inlet, all the while looking for a bite to eat. Eventually, after dodging around town and into both a grocery store and a bookstore in rapid succession, I settle on grabbing a patio seat at Shed and ordering a burger and fries. After lunch and a bit more wandering back along the road for different views out onto Tofino Inlet, I return to the car and head back to the hotel for an afternoon rest break. Along the way out of the town, we are halted for road construction - preparations for the summer, no doubt. Everywhere along the roadside, rhododendrons and other summer flowers are in full bloom.

In the late afternoon, after a good bit of relaxing in the hotel room and a brief nap, I head back out to Chesterman Beach, just a few minutes away. This L-shaped stretch of sand covers one elbow of the Esowista Peninsula, connected at low tide by a tombolo to nearby Frank Island. I walk the expanse of sand from South Chesterman Beach to the tip of the sandspit - an enjoyable walk with lovely views of the distant mountains rising up over Tofino and its inlet. Along the way, I run into other beachgoers: a raven picking apart a mussel, a flock of sandpipers scurrying between intertidal channels, and a friendly goldendoodle dragging its leash behind it, who brings me a frisbee to throw. I look around for an owner, but they are nowhere to seen; the frisbee is thrown. Along my way up the beach, I photograph the action of the waves crashing on nearby Pettinger Point, and beyond them, the forested knoll overlooking Cox Bay, where I will be spending the sunset golden hour. The beach is expansive and beautiful. I reach the rocks below Frank Island before turning around and making my way (slowly, gradually) back toward the car.

My final stop of the day is only a few minutes away down the road: a walk down Sakurai Lane, along Cox Bay Beach, ultimately climbing to a hilltop overlook of the bay and the entire peninsula. It’s 7 PM now - I’ve budgeted plenty of time until the 9 PM sunset, as it seems almost a certainty that the scramble up and down the hill will be quite an adventure. Before getting there, I photograph the sidelight falling between the trees along my walk (a easy gravel stroll shared only by a few surfers returning from the beach), and the driftwood and tidal channels on the beach itself. Reaching the foot of the hill, I clamber up a stone ledge and begin a steep climb up the hill.

Maybe it’s just me, or maybe it is the recent rain, but while this trail is a known quantity and a well-visited sunset spot, I would classify it as, at best, “barely better than a bushwhack,” and, to be frank, “the muddiest thing I have ever done.” In some places, I cross through shin-deep mud to find my way through the tree roots and up the mountain. The way up is not so bad, as there are plenty of roots and branches to grab ahold of and pull oneself up. It’s the way down that I fear; even though I am carrying a headlamp, I mentally make a note to myself to get back down to the beach before the post-sunset twilight gets too dark. One wrong move could lead to nasty slip and fall down the slick, muddy slope - messy, if not injurious. Secondly, I make a mental note to myself that this trip will be the final hurrah for this pair of hiking boots, which have accompanied me since our final year in Baltimore, and gone with me to places as varied as the Mid-Atlantic, the Adirondacks, the desert Southwest (three times), Oregon (recently), and throughout New England on multiple backpacking or foliage trips. A cheap pair from an outlet store, they sprang a leak almost immediately when I first began to wear them in 2019. That I’ve worn them for this many years after must be a reflection on either my laziness or my cheapskate tendencies - unflattering either way.

The scramble, thankfully, is not a long one. With socks damp yet again and each boot looking fully like its own chocolate ganache cake , I arrive at the top (sort of) of the hill, which offers expansive views over the windblown pines, to an breathtaking vista that covers the Pacific Ocean, Chesterman Beach and Frank Island in the distance, the waves crashing upon Cox Bay, the distant islands in Tofino Inlet, all rimmed by stunning mountains rising above the forest. After catching my breath, I take a moment to explore the hilltop, which involves some sketchy bushwhacking to reach a true summit viewpoint that faces east and south (perhaps a lovely sunrise location, but too adventurous for my taste, in the wee hours before morning). After confirming I am where I thought I would be, I move back to the northwest-facing slope. From this viewpoint (a false summit of sorts), there is not much room to maneuver, so I set up my tripod and patiently wait. Two other hikers and another photographer (carrying medium-format gear, of all things) reach the top shortly after me; we trade some disbelief about the bushwhack before they move on, returning back down to a lower viewpoint out of sight from me. I am alone up top for the next hour, watching the light gradually change and getting eaten intermittently by some sort of biting fly (the bites don’t itch immediately like mosquito bites do for me, but the next few days prove that my skin is just as horrifically reactive to these as they are to any other insect bite; I return to work a few days later with hilariously large welts on my face and neck). For the moment, I am too caught up by the landscape to care about anything else. I take a mix of long shots and panoramas, using my circular polarizer to bring out the best of the sunset light. We never quite get the fiery skies of a genuine, low-horizon sunset (the sun dips into a marine layer half an hour before setting, an oh-so-common occurrence around these parts, as I realized in Oregon), but the photos below are still quite pretty and hopefully capture the evening’s mood.

As the sun sinks into a bank of clouds, I resolve not to stick around until dark, which turns out to be a wise decision. I get a headstart down the mountain; there is a decent group gathered on the ledge below mine, but I hardly see anyone once I descend into the trees and begin making my way down the muddy slope. After what seems like an eternity (in reality, just 15 minutes or so of carefully lowering myself down some very slick surfaces), I re-emerge onto the beach and begin my walk back to the car. At Sakurai Lane, I turn around and take a final shot of surfers stepping out of the waves and preparing to leave for the night. All in a fine day’s work (and play).