“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.
