The second day of our mini holiday Kat and I came here after watching the salmon again. We parked at the bottom of an empty trailhead car park and neither of us had done much research about what we were getting into. The whole trail is 22km one way and we only had the afternoon so we had a quick look at the map and chose a section from where we were.
We set off into beautiful old growth forest and climbed up through the mossy trees, very magical. It was a steep climb but worth it when we got to a viewpoint was amazing scenes of the valley below. We walked along through the forest at the top of the hill for a bit before joining a logging road briefly to get the the next trail section. We saw a lot of bear scat along the way which was a bit unnerving given the reaction of the bears we’d seen the day before.
We walked through various bits of forest before starting a long old decent down some quite loose soil in some parts. It was taxing on the knees but pretty fun, though we knew we’d have to come back up as it was an out and back. The trail map on my phone had suggested we would reach the sea at the inlet below, however when we got down there the trail seemed to carry on along through the forrest to the left of the inlet.
We were a little disappointed and as we were near our turnaround time (i had a bus to catch) we decided to start back up the hill. Just as we were about to set off three people who had headed off ten minutes before us at the start of the trailhead came back past and told us to keep going for ten minutes and we’d reach a beach. I set off feeling sprightly again at the thought of a beach view goal. Sure enough there was a cool gravelly beach with lots of driftwood and some cool points of interest like a hut built from driftwood. It was very windy which was welcome after the heat of the day before.
We eventually began what we termed ‘the great ascent’ back to the top of the hill and huffed and puffed the whole way up. I was glad to have got in a proper pre-Juan de Fuca- pre-Himalaya training hike in- more on those to come!
#30 Ascents and decent galore! about 10km that somehow took nearly 4 hours
1Year/52Hikes 2019 