A Walk on the Wild Side

I’m just back from the remotest place I’ve ever been – Flores Island, off Canada’s southwest coast.

To get there, we took the car ferry from the city of Vancouver to Vancouver Island, drove across the island to the town of Tofino, then shared a water taxi with drummers and guests pouring into the First Nation village of Ahousaht, the main settlement on Flores Island, for a wedding.

Ahousaht is the kind of community where, when there is a wedding, everyone who lives there attends, everyone who has moved away comes home, and everyone who is just passing through is welcome, including us, backpackers on our way to walk the Wild Side Trail.

The man who picked us up at the dock, drove us to the trailhead, collected our user fees and gave us our trail map told us the wedding was taking place on the beach, which meant we would probably pass it. He also told us to beware of wolves.

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The walk began unpromisingly, through a small neighborhood of new houses. Soon, though, we were on the beach.

Perhaps when you think of the beach you think of lifeguard stands, boardwalks, tilt-a-whirls and saltwater taffy. This was not that kind of beach. Nor was it the kind of beach that entices us northerners to flip our snow shovels the way Jose Bautista flips his bat after a particularly majestic home run, and fly to where the palm trees sway, the sand is sugar and the sea is turquoise.

The Flores Island beaches were the longest, widest and wildest beaches I’ve ever seen. Bleached logs and tree carcasses attest to the violence of the storms and currents. Walls of old-growth forest fringe them.

I would call the forest impenetrable, except that we penetrated it. If the beachy portions of the trail were a breeze – OK, sometimes they were a gale o’ wind — the forest portions were a slog. There were a few stretches of boardwalk, but not exactly in the Jersey Shore style. Mostly there were a lot of steep ups and downs, lots of eye-gouging branches and ankle-twisting roots and lots and lots of shoe-swallowing glop.

By British Columbian standards, this was a walk in the park. The younger of my two companions, a veteran BC backpacker, pranced along like a goat. I groped my way forward like a guest in a darkened house — and emerged uninjured and unswallowed, which allows me, at my age, to triumphantly roar, “I can still do this!”

Offsetting the difficulty of the forest portions of the hike were the old-growth cedars and Sitka spruces. Such was the girth of some of these trees that it would take a hockey team to wrap its arms around them. Some, the signs said, had been “culturally modified,” which means you can see where the First Nations people of the area had cut house posts or planks out of the tree without killing it.

***
We saw a few people hiking with dogs, but on the beach we saw paw prints that were too large for any dog. Then, near dusk, as we ate our jambalaya burritos, we had the perfect sighting: a lone wolf strolling on the far bank of a tea-colored river (like the Red Moshannon) that emptied into the sea. He was near enough for us to get a good look at him, far enough not to scare the bejabbers out of us.

Later, when I went to the river to rinse the dishes, I reminded myself that though my parents said I was delicious when they kissed me when I was a baby boy, I am not a normal part of a healthy, balanced Canis Lupus diet. What’s more, I am a large, scary mammal with whom most other large, scary mammals prefer not to tangle.

We also saw bald eagles, but I don’t want to make too big of a deal about it because in BC they’re as common as crows and if you want to give yourself away as a tourist all you have to do is get amped about the eagles.

Or open an umbrella in a light rain. Yes, what would a travel piece about the Pacific Northwest be without some mention of the rain? The forecast called for rain on our arrival day, mostly cloudy with showers for the two full days and nights we would be in the wilderness, and rain the day we would hike out.

This was considered promising.

Indeed, in this part of the world, mist, drizzle and light rain are hardly considered rain at all. Although, we later found out, the wedding on the beach was shifted indoors on account of rain, which explained why, disappointingly, we weren’t able to crash it.

But that was the only disappointment.