HIKING ON THE ISLAND

HIKING ON THE ISLAND

There are endless choices of places to hike on Vancouver Island and we have walked a couple of memorable ones.

One Thursday after my yoga class, Eric and I climbed Mount Finlayson in the Goldstream Provincial Park, which is about 16 km from Victoria. There are many interconnecting forest trails in this park and the one we took climbed steeply out of the rain forest up on to dry rocky ridges of arbutus trees and pine.

The arbutus tree is a very distinctive and unusual looking tree which reminds me somehow of being in Zimbabwe. It is the only broadleaf evergreen tree in Canada and does seem out of place among the conifers and hardwoods of BC. It usually has a “crooked or leaning trunk that divides into several twisting branches.” Its bark, a beautiful reddish brown, is in sharp contrast to its glossy dark green leaves and against the often deep blue sky. It peels in thin flakes or strips exposing a smooth “greenish to cinnamon red” bark underneath. The trees grow on well-drained soils high up in rocky places, or on bluffs close to the seashore. Sometimes you might see one with a branch that is dead and looks like a piece of white curling drift wood, attached to the rest of the tree that is still happily alive, in its reds and greens.

The trail up Mount Finlayson was steep and rugged, a challenge for me. There was much puffing and panting coming from this engine! Thank goodness for my trusty boots. As we got closer to the top it was a case of scrambling up on all fours much of the time. The descent was a whole lot easier on the heart and lungs though not on the knees. It took us couple of hours up and an hour and a half down. In our trail book there is an ominous warning in bold letters which says “Take this mountain seriously: people have lost their lives on Mount Finlayson”. Thankfully we made it with no mishaps and still had the energy to walk a short way along a small river called the Niagara River to a very pretty though mini Niagara Falls, which had an alluring pool at the bottom.
A point of interest in the park is that late in the fall all along this stretch of the Goldstream River the coho and chinook salmon come back upstream to spawn. I hadn’t realized that this is such an exhausting process for both the male and female salmon that once it’s over they die.

About a week later we took off to the other side of the Island to do a coastal trail in the East Sooke Regional Park. We had spent several days in a cottage in the Sooke area 2 years ago with our dear friends June and Rod and their 2, Jamie and Anna. But this section was new to us. East Sooke is it’s own knob of land jutting out into the Juan de Fuca Strait and we followed the coast line from Creyke Pt. to Cabin Pt. and back again, a walk that took us all day.
The scenery was magnificent and all the way along we could see across the strait to the Olympic Mountains in Washington. In the morning when we started out there was a deep mist resting over the water and above that the mountains rose up a pale steel blue with white spotty patches of snow, illuminated by the morning sun. As the day advanced and the sun moved, the blue of the mountains changed and became clearer and crisper. By the afternoon the mist had disappeared and there were whitecaps as the tide came in.
The walk itself was somewhat reminiscent of the Nootka Trail though nowhere was there passable beach to walk along. The path ran above the water level, sometimes climbing up through patches of wildflowers and arbutus to the tops of cliffs, and at other times dropping down over roots through red cedar to lower rocky outcrops. All along the way there were views down into deep coves below that were being battered by waves, and across the strait to the mountains. There was a feeling of wildness and remoteness that I loved, enhanced by the constant cry of the seagulls.
I was thrilled at one point to spot a group of seals sunning themselves far below on some rocks. There was a small island a short distance away and they had found a warm spot protected from the wind between our coast and this island. I was glad to have my binoculars with me and we were able to get a good look at them and vice versa. They seemed totally relaxed stretched out on the rocks but were visibly keeping one eye open to see what we were up to too. We watched them for a while on the way out and on our return trip we noted that they hadn’t moved and were still lounging about.
A glorious day and weary limbs, what could be better than that!