Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Flores Island Travelogue (BC)
My summer plan this year has been all about mini-adventures. A trip to Hornby, a wedding, a hiking trip, some kayaking, another wedding. I’m about halfway through the summer itinerary now, this last week being spent on Flores – launched by water taxi out of Tofino to land in the small community of Ahousat. This is where the the “Walk the Wildside” trail begins. Although I had read a handful of resources about this trail, I wasn’t sure what to expect or whether the slightly epic adventure of getting out there (6 hours of driving, water taxi etc.) would be worth it in the end. I am glad to report that it was, and gloriously so! Brian and I spent four days on pristine white sand beaches, scrambled through much overgrowth and enjoyed daily creek-bathing in total seclusion at the Cow Bay end of the trail. I would highly recommend this trip to novice and experienced hikers alike and have included some tips below for those of you interested in taking it on.
Getting there: Although we heard rumours of multiple water taxis, we only found one with regular service. This is the Ahousat Pride which is run twice a day and leaves from the First Street dock in Tofino. It’s $20 per person each way and leaves at 10:30 and 4:30 heading to the island. If you are leaving a car in Tofino, park in the municipal yard across from the RCMP station at a rate of $10 per day or $40 per week. It’s four blocks away from the dock, a five minute walk.
The Village: Once you get dropped at the government dock in Ahousat, head up the hill and take a right at the top to reach the band office. The Ahousat First Nation requests a $20 fee per person to hike the Wildside trail, which helps to support their role as first responders in the event of any emergency on the trail. This is a very friendly community and pretty much everyone you pass will ask you whether you are hiking the trail. Do not expect to find anything in the way of supplies in Ahousat, though there is a small restaurant overlooking the bay if you’ve got a hankering for a last-minute grilled cheese sandwich.
The Hike to Cow Bay: The Wildside trail is a combination of long sandy beaches and boardwalked headland scrambles – so if you have any control over the timing, go at low tide! This seriously cuts down on the number of headlands to hike up and over. In either case, the first several km of the trail is quite easy and the beaches are just incredible – camping is permitted along any of them though you won’t get a good water source until 7 kilometres.
At kilometre seven you will be confronted by a choice of fording the creek or taking a trail up the creek 700 metres, crossing a bridge, and then hiking back down to the beach to continue the trail. Should you choose the trail option you will discover two things: 1) This is the roughest section of the “trail” and there are parts of it that were never cleared in the first place, and 2) Some stunning old growth, not to mention an important first nations historic site (watch for the lookout post in the burned out tree). It took us almost an hour to traverse this 1.2 km section which had its frustrations (I had to take my pack off four times to scramble over fallen logs) but was worth it in terms of both natural and cultural history. This would be much more enjoyable without a pack so my suggestion would be to ford the creek, drop your pack, and then cross back over and check out this section of the trail if you are so inclined. The creek can only be forded at mid-tide or lower. Past this point the trail gets rougher than the first patch, but only goes on for another 2.5 kilometres before you reach Cow Bay which is the major campsite with a pit toilet and fresh water source.
Camping: Although there are plenty of beautiful camping spots along the way, I recommend pushing on to Cow Bay (10.5 km from your start point) and making base camp there. It has pretty much everything you want in a west coast spot: a choice between forest or beach camping, a fresh water supply, a good food hanging tree, and an amazing view from a protected cove. Not to mention it’s been spruced up by other campers along the way who have used beach debris to create tables, benches etc. Lucky for us we were in there before the fire ban and so scavenged driftwood daily to have evening fires on the beach.
Definitely plan to hang your food at this camp spot! Although we were not bothered by the wolves, we saw plenty of evidence of their existence during our time on the beaches – footprints by the dozen, and we even heard one let out a startled bark not too far away from our camp one evening. We also saw cougar prints in the mud around the watering hole on our way out. Practicing animal aware camping greatly lessens the chances that harm will come to either party in the long run – which means cooking away from your tent, washing up and dumping grey water in the ocean, and hanging all food and garbage high up and out of the way.
More Hiking: Once you’ve set up camp at Cow Bay, there is lots of exploring to do further on. Follow the beach to the end and if the tide is out you can explore the tide pools around the rocky headland and then follow the beach around. If the tide is in, head up through the narrow rock grotto – a historic trapline that once belonged to a First Nations elder and will take you through to another pristine beach. At the creek outflow here you will find another trail which supposedly takes you to the peak of Mount Flores, but we only made it about a kilometre and a half in before we were blocked by some serious deadfall. The trail has not been maintained and should only be attempted by those who have strong navigation skills and are very fit. Just before the deadfall we found a trail flagged with pink tape leading out to Siwash Cove with a couple squatter cabins and Cow Creek flowing into the bay there. Be warned that these trails are poorly marked, barely maintained and quite rugged. This is real ungroomed oldgrowth which is truly amazing and rare to find, but also incredibly easy to get lost in. You will want to bring in your own flagging tape and a compass if you wish to do any real exploring here.
Heading out: We hiked out at low tide which cut about 1.5 km off the total trail and made for a lot less scrambling. The Ahousat Pride will pick up at either of the docks and leaves at 8:00 and 1:00 – so if you have time you can stop for an end of trail snack at Cathy’s restaurant. We were intrigued by the halibut special, but since it was only 11:30 in the morning we each opted for grilled cheese and fries. Good fries!
In all we spent four days out there – one heading in, two full days doing day hikes and laying on the beach, and one heading out – and saw almost no one the entire time. Three nights at Cow Bay and we didn’t have to share the campsite with a single other group, we chanced upon two hikers on day 3 and otherwise didn’t run into the “hordes” until our hike out when we passed by the campsites of kayak groups on other beaches. While I’m sure that Flores is busy on summer weekends, we had timed our trip for Monday-Thursday which provided the most idyllic conditions one could hope for. I suspect that after the labour day long weekend this trail would be virtually empty and quite beautiful during that interval before winter storms start rolling in.
This ranks as my favourite coastal hike to date, if you have any interest in doing it let me know and I’ll happily share the guidebook resources that I have for it. All trip photos can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/redcedar/sets/72157621689921129/
Vacay.
Not that I’ve been posting much here anyways, but I’m on holiday from now until the 27th or so. May post intermittently but probably not. Will return with lots of photos though. And hopefully some stories!
Nothing missing.
One of my favourite “children’s” stories by Shel Silverstein, and an anthem shared in my current relationship. Only when you are ready to roll on your own are you available for someone to really roll with. A little parable for Monday morning.
Breaking it down.
I am definitely ready for a holiday. A real one too – the kind with more than a week off and no cel phone or computer access. Work is driving me batty, the house is an untidy mess, and all I can think about is getting food and gear organized for our hiking trip that starts in ten days. Between now and then is another few days of work, travel to Victoria, family visiting and my brother’s wedding. Lots going on including all the drama that attends such things, but at least I’ll be off work from next Wednesday and not returning to the office for eleven whole days. Wow.
Okay, so it’s not a huge break, but at least a few days without the natter of this office going on around me, not to mention an overwhelming workload. Thank-pete for headphones, I can tune out enough between now and next Wednesday afternoon to get through it.
I’m now on the third day in a row of being back at writing in the mornings and had a realization over breakfast that if I just added 600 words per day to this book project, by the end of 52 weeks I would have the rough draft of a novel. Which was heartening because writing has been feeling slow lately. I manage at least 500 words in my forty-five minutes per day, sometimes as much as 1000 (but not often) which I guess isn’t bad but have been feeling like at that rate I’ll never finish anything. After doing the math I guess I was wrong and if I persist I’ll have something to edit into a second draft in a year’s time.
I’m not sure if my process for writing these days is “right” and I’m a bit torn about trying to write in a linear fashion (start to finish) or experimenting with individual scenes. I decided to start with a few individual scenes for the sake of practicing both my character’s voice (I’m writing in first person which I find difficult but much more involved story-wise), and to see if there really is enough material for the story to be novel-worthy. I’m in the middle of the second of these practice scenes at the moment and I’m not disappointed that I started out this way. At the very least it allows me to break aspects of the story and my character down into manageable chunks without having to worry about 150,000 words all at once.
So that’s been the right place to start but I’m starting to think that after about three of these scenes I’m going to want to start at the beginning and work my way forward. We’ll see. Or this could become yet one more idea for a book that goes nowhere. I’m not really sure yet, but at least I’m writing and I’m interested in the characters I’m writing about (or “as”). I do recognize there is no single way to do this sort of thing, but I would like to figure out the right way for me to proceed so as to ensure that I actually maybe get a whole first draft written as opposed to abandoning it part-way through.
Which is why doing the math on how many words per day times 5 days per week times 52 weeks in a year made me feel a bit better about things. When you’re only at 5000 words, 145,000 more words seems a long way off. But broken out bit by bit, scene by scene, it starts to look more possible. I mean, people do this all the time judging from the number of books that make it into print, surely I can do this too?
A little check-in.
I have been all sorts of internal weirdness lately, none of it particularly bad, but not entirely motivated to write about it either. Thus silence on this blog, in my journal and at my laptop in general for the past week. Like writer’s block, except I think it might be less about not being *able* to write than not *wanting* to write. Why is that? Perhaps because I’m a little unsure of myself these days, a little anxious and down and I hate to admit that in writing, as if penning it makes it more true. So easier not to write at all.
I got up this morning though, despite misgivings about writing at all, and put 1000 words or so down on the page. 400 I kept, discarding the rest, but the upshot is that I started a second scene in what I hope might end up as a novel or novella. I’m just playing with a story at this point, writing out particular scenes to see if there is enough there to turn into a longer work, if it will hold my interest for long enough to complete. The bottom line though is that I got up this morning and wrote for the first time in about ten days, and I plan to do the same for the rest of mornings this week. Perhaps by the end of it I’ll have a whole new scene drafted, to go along with the first one. And then I can start another.
So that’s good. But it’s made me realize that a lot of my self-confidence lately is tied to this and other routines, and I suspect that this recent disruption in them, like the anxiety, is tied to quitting smoking (six weeks today). Yes, I am starting to feel more normal again, but I haven’t quite shaken particular avenues of obsessiveness (finances, weight gain, relationship) and it’s definitely wearing me down. I just want to enjoy my life right now, the fact that things are going incredibly well on all fronts, but instead I’m feeling nagged by myself all the time and everything seems like a monumental effort.
It will pass, I’m sure, but this phase has made me quiet on here because what could I possibly say that would matter to anyone? I’m too lazy to write. I can’t get my thoughts straight. Etc. All excuses to do nothing that would challenge the part of me who would rather remain unsure and thus unchallenged. A little fragile on that front. A little tired of the amount of work it all takes.
But holidays are on the horizon next week, the wedding of my brother, a hiking trip with Brian planned for several days after that. I just need to find a way to believe in myself again, as silly as that sounds, to find the excitement about my own potential that I felt only a couple of months ago. I’m hoping that some outdoor time, some new skill development (kayaking!), and reigniting my productive routines will combine to bring me back into focus. My life is *damned* good and I know it, but I don’t always feel it. Odd how that works.
Red Cedar 