This walk was so much fun and I haven’t laughed so much in a long time. The Canso bomber site is in the middle of the forest near Radar hill and holds the wreckage of the plane that crashed in 1945 (everyone on board survived). The trail is not an official trail recognised by Parks Canada and is extremely hard to follow. To get there a friend and I parked up at Radar hill parking lot and walked along the road south for precisely 14 pylons as the online instructions described. From there you follow a gravel trail uphill and come across an abandoned building covered in graffiti. We checked this out for a bit before carrying on down a dirt path towards the bomber.
Soon we realised why it’s suggested that one does not tackle this walk within four hours on sunset even though distance wise it’s pretty short. The entire rest of the walk is through a wet, muddy bog where the water goes past your ankles into your boots. Huge stretches of the walk are covered with muddy footprints where people have attempted different routes so it’s impossible to tell the correct path from looking. The occasional coloured tape had been tied to some branches to indicate the way but it seemed that no single colour had been used (i saw blue, pink, orange) and these tapes were sparingly hung. Luckily maps.me saved the day again and i could check that we were roughly on the right track. We tiptoed along half sunken branches and stacked it into the mud a few times.
I laughed literally all the way along as we were just so hopelessly muddy. It was especially funny that even though we were saturated with dense, petey mud our natural instinct was still to try and avoid it happening again instead of just ploughing through it. We had to keep stopping and looking around for tape and it would have been extremely easy to get disorientated in the swamp.
Eventually my friend spotted the bomber above us on a little hill- I would not have noticed it among the foliage had i been alone. We went and sat by it and rested a while, enjoying our success. We explored the area before setting off back towards the car and i was very conscious that my phone was dying. Luckily we seemed to remember some parts of the trail and had no mishaps. I was giddily tired by the time we got back to the car and we attempted to get the worst of the mud off before heading into Ucluelet to watch sunset.
Number 17- A giddy and difficult 5km
1Year/52Hikes 2019 