Travelogue: Vancouver Island
Orcas, Lonely Doug, and Canadian Candy.
We continued our West Coast travels by spending a week on Vancouver Island, a 300-mile-long island off the coast of British Columbia. I tried to convince my family to watch one of the 3 seasons of Alone that were filmed on the island, but I settled for the new Netflix documentary called Island of the Sea Wolves.
I spent hours watching the water with my binoculars in hand, and managed to spot sea lions and harbor seals every day, as well as river otters and sea otters, plus I got to see two ORCAS together! That was a big thrill and I still marvel at how big they are, and how odd and yet majestic they look. Out of the water, we saw lots of gulls, cormorants, a bunch of waterbirds that I couldn’t confidently identify (but I think they were baffleheads or ruddy ducks), and regular bald eagle sightings. We also saw bear scat, full of berries. I accidentally stepped it in on the way out… whoops.
Oct 26: We arrive in our little cove on southwestern Vancouver Island, just outside of Sooke. Two orcas come swimming by and I feel like every choice we made to get here was the right one.
Oct 27: We drive up to the end of the road in Port Renfrew* to go visit Botanical Beach. The tides were not on our side during this trip - all low tides were over night, and they just aren’t very low this time of year. No tide pools for us, but we got to enjoy the wild coast.
Oct 28: We go back to Port Renfrew, stock up on some Canadian candy bars at the general store, and then venture forth on logging roads. These are not bad as far as logging roads go - they are a reasonable pitch, relatively maintained, and pretty wide.
The bridges… well, the bridges are maintained and solid, but they are narrow and have minuscule guard rails - like 8 inches on some of them. One of the bridges had a generous 18inch high rail on the sides, which was good because it was over 100 feet long and high up over a river chasm. We walked it the first time we went over, since another car was stopped on the other side (backing over the bridge? Nope.)
The car moved on, and we determined the the road was still drivable here, so Jim went back to get the car and we drove onward. We hit the impassable stretch about a kilometer later, and headed out on foot.
Traveling through logging territory on foot is a really fascinating experience. We were far from the main road, far from the nearest town, and it feels remote. But it is completely shaped by human hands.
This is where we found Lonely Doug, the second tallest douglas fir in British Columbia. He does look very lonely. He was spared about 10 years ago when this area was logged, and the surveyor marked it for preservation based on it’s size (which might be a rule coming from elsewhere, unlikely that the logging company is preserving trees). It is now officially protected.
Farther down, we got to Eden Grove - an unprotected grove of old growth trees - mostly western red cedar. A boardwalk has been installed by volunteers to let people see the trees without damaging their roots (which can easily get their bark stripped when people walk on them). It was magical and other-worldly. And depressing to see giant stumps like those along the logging road. We had a lot of discussions about logging and preservation and local economies and the way industry has sped up so much over just the last 75 years and the conditions for growing such big trees and our own use of lumber…
Oct 29: We visited the Sooke River to see the sandstone rock formations (potholes) and try out hand panning for gold. We did get to see a ton of salmon - dead and alive. They die after spawning, and are a food source for wildlife, which we knew from the Magic School Bus salmon episode (and other sources), but never really thought about what that would mean to have so many salmon carcasses on the river bank. Fragrant.
Oct 30: An “atmospheric river” arrived that evening and we had a day of strong rain and wind, so we drank a lot of coffee and hot chocolate and played board games on Sunday.
Oct 31: Halloween! We spent the day in Victoria, drinking tea at Murchies and visiting the natural history museum. The BC government building, right next door, was hosting an afternoon of trick or treating, so we collected candy from political staffers and one woman was still working while she had a bowl of candy in the middle of her office. She was my favorite.
Then we tried to figure out where to trick-or-treat, but couldn’t find any kids out. We knew that neighborhoods did celebrate with trick-or-treating (essential pre-travel research), and we saw families decorating their houses, but no one was trick-or-treating. My kids started to get stressed. In New York, where the youngest kids are always out around 4pm.
Around 5 we started to see people gathering on lawns to take pictures. We pulled over in a random (and very new-looking) neighborhood. We saw another family getting their costumes on in the parking lot, and I went over to ask about trick-or-treating. While I started with “We’re not from around here…” we soon got to chatting, and they invited us to trick-or-treat with their friend group. The kids got a surprising number of bags of chips, and I have only eaten 75% of their Coffee Crisp bars. So far.
* Port Refrew is not actually the end of the road, but the road turns towards the interior of the island, and it takes nearly 5 hours of driving to get back to the coast, up in Ucluelet. My mother went there in the 1970s on a big, meandering roadtrip, and I hope to get there someday, too. Why? I don’t really know, it just looks like an interesting place to wander.