Into the Carmanah Valley
As is traditionally a camping weekend, Yuki and I spent last week frequenting MEC and SportCheck with Frances to get rain jackets, hiking shoes, and a pack. On Friday, we got picked up by Mike and took an early ferry over to Victoria. This allowed us to pick up supplies, mostly food, and some rain pants at MEC for Yuki and I. We got Hydrofoil 3 pants, the same line as my current jacket. They were expensive, 80$ each, but well worth it as the weather was looking like rain for the better part of the weekend. It didn’t rain, but we kept dry while tramping through the mud and wet ferns. Yuki also got a kids deuter fox 30L backpack. I teased her because it is meant for kids but it fits well (and best out of all the bags we tried) and performed excellently on the trip. This bag is actually for the trip to Asia and so this weekend worked well as a dry run.
Friday night we spent at Mikes parent’s house where we had a tasty dinner of BBQ burgers, packed food and gear for the trip and went to bed around 3:30; planning on getting up at 7 to leave at 7:30. The plan was to hike into Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park on Saturday and spend one night there that would allow us to explore the trail on foot and then return Sunday to the house and Vancouver on Monday morning. We had to be back in Vancouver mid-day to meet Yuki’s parents at the airport who are coming to graduation.
Carmanah Creek through the Valley
Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park is on the West side of Vancouver island, west of Duncan and Cowichan Lake. It is north of the Juan de Fuca trail and south of Banfield. The park is surrounded by mountains that feed the Carmanah creek watershed down the valley to the ocean. It is considered one of the most remarkable wild places on Vancouver island due to “some of the world’s largest Sitka spruce trees” that are an excess of 90m tall and 800 years old. There are also gnarled cedars over 1,000 years old (BC Parks) (History).
Our Saturday morning was a tired affair as we pilled in to Mike’s small Nissan truck. I slept most of the way to Duncan where we stopped at Timmy’s for breakfast. After some coffee, I took over driving to Youboo and then for part of the logging roads. To get to the Park is about a 4.5hr drive from Victoria, 3hrs of which is on logging roads.
Decked out in rain gear, we motored through the drizzle with an air of fog overhead that gave a particularly intimate mood to the trip. I wasn’t expecting many landscapes to shoot so I only brought the 35mm prime lens. This wasn’t the best choice as there were plenty of surprising wide views but also gave me great low light capabilities under the forest canopy.
Nitnat Lake on the way
We stopped to look at a forestry bridge, a view of Nitnat lake, a nice beach that becomes a fishing village in the summer, and periodically to stretch our legs. I particularly liked how the fog of the clouds seemed to float below the trees like whispers of ghosts and how it felt moist like rain but didn’t rain.
When we arrived at the Park, it was around 2 in the afternoon. Unlike the majority of the hiking that I do up mountains, this one was down about 50m into the valley which began after a nice lunch of sandwiches prepared the day before.
Few people come out this way, although there were a fair number of cars (4 others) in the parking lot. Mike suspects that this might be due to the better signage on the logging roads now; however, on the trail, it is quite evident that few people tread here. The trail begins with boardwalks that are very slippery from the wet conditions as well as overgrown with moss. Several of the boardwalks have been displaced by floods and there are many fallen timbers to climb over or walk along. As we got deeper into the woods, the boardwalks turned to overgrown trails and fallen logs.
Boardwalks
We stopped by the three sisters, which is one of the points of interest along the trail and set up camp on a sandbar beside the river. It was a peaceful place, open to the sky away from the forest canopy and with the nice sound of running water. After setting up two tents, we went exploring further up the trail.
It isn’t very surprising that due to the low flow of people coming to this neck of the woods that the trail would begin to disappear into the forest. That is the case in the Carmanah Valley where fallen trees need to be climbed over or are used to bridge the forest floor. Our hike along the only trail that follows the river felt like a moderate pace at the time but we didn’t actually travel very far. After a couple of hours hiking, we found a large deadfall across the river that we used as a bridge to get to our lunch spot.
The deadfall bridge to the lunch spot
There was a couple with a dog camping here and I also noticed the smell of wild mint. After a 6 o’clock lunch, we headed back and cooked up some steak pasta for dinner in the dark. Camping one night out in the woods was nice and for the most part, I had less allergies than in the city. This could be due to the naturalness of the woods and the lack of synthetic particles and dust to aggravate my nose. The weather was mostly overcast on Saturday and did not rain while Sunday morning was sunny but still overcast.
The trip was quite relaxing although I kept coming back to my frustrating problems in finding a job, getting our tours in order to hike Mt. Kinabalu in Malaysia, and wanting to travel longer than the summer. Yuki told me to put them out of my mind till Tuesday and I was relatively successful in doing so. As for Yuki, I haven’t seen her as happy as she was to explore and see the old growth woods. Both Frances and Yuki were super excited and I don’t think it’s like anything they’ve seen before. Yuki said that it was magical and so much more interesting than the hiking we do in Vancouver that we had to come back and that Vancouver was boring in comparison.
Frances and Yuki at lunch
In the morning, we packed up and explored another trail near the entrance which lead to Heaven Tree and Randy Stoltmann Grove. The form seems to be one of the larger and taller spruce trees with a diameter around 3–4 meters. The later is named after the single man who is credited with discovering how important and large the sitka spruce’s are in the valley and for stopping the logging industry from cutting it down. By raising awareness of the land, he was able to get the province involved and a provincial park established in 1990. He would later die in an avalanche while backcountry skiing.
After these highlights, we headed back to the truck. We had some snacks and then drove back home at a leasirely pace. Back at Mike’s place, we cleaned out the truck and washed it as well as our shoes. Frances and Yuki quite enjoyed cleaning the truck which I don’t really get, but hey, it saved me from having to do it. For dinner we had steak and garlic bread and still didn’t get to bed till 2 or so. In the morning, we left and took the ferry home just in time to meet Yuki’s parents at the airport.
Rounding off a great weekend of camping we now dive headlong into the final 10 days before our big trip where we show Yuki’s parents around Vancouver and do the last of our planning.
Photo by Yuki
