Leadem - Hiking the West Coast of Vancouver Island

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This guidebook just kept growing. For many years, I edited and later authored a guidebook to the West Coast Trail. Over the years, though, I have hiked many other trails on the wet west coast of Vancouver Island (including all of the ones in this book) and I have long wanted to share them with others who enjoy exploring the wilderness.

For me, the question is always how to do this responsibly. I realize that by broadcasting the physical appeal and beauty of a place, something of its wildness may be lost as more people are attracted to experience the same landscape. However, I also understand that by promoting remote areas, they are more likely to be protected from development. That is the paradox: to conserve an untouched place, it must often be opened to human scrutiny in order to obtain the will to preserve it. Too often, though, some of the wild is rubbed away in the process.

I am a firm believer that people need untamed places for their souls. The sense of the spiritual that is in all of us is touched by these scenesthe swirling of the sea as it shoots up surge channels, the liquid emerald of a stream as it runs through a rocky gorge, the glint of the sun as it shines off a tiny fern in the dank humus of the forest floor. Perhaps we need these wild places just to be and not necessarily to be there for us. The many species that make up the forest ecosystem can survive quite nicely without us. There should be places on this globe where humans do not dare to tread.

Enjoy these hikes. Take in their incredible beauty and inexhaustible wonder, but leave these sacred places as you find them. Better still, do your part to ensure that we may know other wild places in our hearts if not with our eyes.

Hikers who enjoy these trailsand I certainly include myself within this groupowe considerable thanks to the conservationists who had the foresight and fortitude to fight to preserve the lands upon which we walk. Humphrey Davy, Jim Hamilton, Hugh Murray, Karen McNaught, Ric Careless, John Willow and Gordy Price all pioneered the West Coast Trail and the hikes around Nitinat Lake in order to promote the area and conserve it. The Juan de Fuca Trail benefited from similar efforts from Sierra Club members Bruce Hardy, Chris Nation, John Newcombe and Greg Darms. The preservation of the Carmanah Valley is due largely to the hard work of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee. A large chunk of the Walbran Valley has been saved from clear-cut logging through the combined efforts of several environmental groups, including the Carmanah Forestry Society led by Syd Haskell.

INTRODUCTION

The west coast of Vancouver Island is a special place. It affords the hiker some of the most beautiful and secluded beach walks anywhere in the world. The terrain varies, from beaches of white sand that stretch as far as the eye can see to sheer rocky cliffs to flat-as-pavement sandstone shelves that extend far out into the sea at low tides. Hikes along this coast, particularly the longer treks, are events to be savored.

This book was written to serve a number of purposes. A certain amount of planning is involved in any long hike. People who wish to walk Vancouver Islands west coast trails will find some tips and hints here. Many users of this book will not have experienced coastal hiking before, so there is some advice on making your hike an experience to be treasured rather than a disaster. Chapters on the specific trails include detailed information about access, trail features and historic points of interest. At-a-glance highlights at the start of each chapter or trail description provide distance breakdowns, time estimates, difficulty ratings, and other useful information. Finally, it is a rare hiker who is not interested in the natural history or human history of an area. This book is not meant to slake that thirst but rather to whet the readers appetite for more knowledge.

> about the maps

Relevant topographic maps for a trail are listed at the start of each chapter. The 1:20,000 maps are Terrestrial Resource Inventory Management (TRIM) maps produced by the Government of British Columbia and are available from Clover Point Cartographics in Victoria, www.cloverpoint.com. Unless otherwise noted on the maps that supplement the text, these are the base maps used to depict the location of trails. The 1:50,000 maps are produced by the federal government as part of the National Topographic System. For information on obtaining these maps from map dealers, visit the Natural Resources Canada Centre for Topographic Information website, maps.nrcan.gc.ca.