CAPE SCOTT
HISTORIC
SOLITUDE
MISADVENTURE QUICKLY TURNS INTO TEST FOR SURVIVAL
RESILIENCE
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
T
he morning start felt like someone had hit me during the night with a muted death stick to keep me from getting out of bed and catching the first ferry of the day on time.
This trip was difficult enough to get started for in the morning because of the amount of planning and the number of things that could go wrong on my most complicated trip into the backcountry so far.
The only variable that kept the trip on track was that I was not going into absolute wilderness, but I was instead going into a long established provincial park that had been groomed a bit, and where, no doubt, other people would also be heading toward during the same summer time slot. Some park visitors would be more prepared than I, and some visitors a bit less.
I kind of rolled to the left a bit and then gently a bit harder to the right, and tried to keep the momentum going toward the kitchen where there was an espresso machine on the counter next to the toaster. Espresso and a warm bagel with cheese was a good start to the morning, but decidedly the last little bit of home comfort that I would experience for a while.
I obtained permit 47075 on-line for a three day overnight stay while waited for the ferry to dock. I, being in the ferry line-up, was now confident that the reservation would be required after weeks of carefully picking and choosing departure times and return travel dates.
I had planned the adventure on and off for several weeks, purchasing odds and ends that might become useful.
The issue of greatest concern, that caused the greatest delay, was always the weather forecast. I checked the weather patterns to ensure I did not arrive during the many rain and wind storms sweeping so determinable off the ocean to make landfall without notice. The sailors called them squalls. But these sudden gusts of wind, sweeping rain off the ocean ceiling onto the land floor, would often develop into days and nights of heavy rain.
Some people like the weather that way: hard and fast and disturbed, but I knew enough that a change in the ocean sky from blue to grey can quickly turn an adventure into a test for survival. I have always enjoyed my comfort zone, usually preferring city hotels and beachside motels for my overnight stays.
I delayed the trip for one week because of the coastal rains, and then one more week, checking each day and watching the weather pattern move forward another day into the next week without sunshine in the forecast.
When I finally decided to go, I found difficulty getting out of bed, even just to get to the espresso machine in the kitchen in the morning, having settled for partial sun with scattered clouds. If the rainforest rains fell from the sky during my trip, I would be undoubtably unprepared and miserable, and at the very best uncomfortable.
No doubt in my mind from the very beginning of the planning that this trip would be an adventure with many unexpected twists and turns, despite whatever preparation I had managed.
I could only be certain of the inevitable mental and physical exhaustion getting there, and then again experiencing a much more debilitating repeat of the mental and physical exhaustion all over again on the long walk back.
The ferry line-up is just the first problem, catching the sailing as planned, and then waiting out the 1 hour and 45 minute crossing to Nanaimo, British Columbia to get to the Island start line of a 5 hour drive up Island.
The Vancouver Island Highway is a nice four lane, well maintained highway that disappears after Campbell River.
Hwy 19 then turns into a two-lane highway, but the traffic eases off by this point and the road is still well maintained with an extra passing lane now and then through the forested landscape.
I headed in the direction of Port Hardy, a logging and fishing village, and ecotourism launch point, with ferry access to Northern British Columbia coastal ports, such as a one day sailing to Prince Rupert, from where another ferry takes people to Haida Gwaii.
Haida Gwaii has evidence of a 13000 year old civilization. The area is the traditional home of the Indigenous Haida community, who still survive despite the population being decimated by small pox transmitted to them in blankets by European colonialists over one hundred years ago.
I stopped in Nanaimo for some camping food and hoped to purchase camping equipment that had been sold out in stores on the Mainland due to supply problems. Another half hour disappeared in the shopping aisles of a big box store.
I had been on the road sitting in the driver seat for a long time by the time I arrived at Port Hardy.
I then realized, after counting the hours along the way and trying to rationalize more hours in the day before sunset, that I did not have enough daylight to finish the trip to Nels Bight in Cape Scott Provincial Park before nightfall.
The drive from Port Hardy to the Cape Scott Trailhead is 63 km on an active gravel logging road used by logging trucks much more so than backcountry equipped SUVs.
The best on-line estimates had been 1.5 hours driving on the gravel road and then another 5 hours hiking with a heavy pack on the 16.8 km trail. And even my limited experience in backcountry misadventures told me that time estimates were often generous to the hiker’s fitness level so as to make the trip more enticing.
If I added 25% onto the time estimates, with sunset at 8:37 pm, I would be hiking the last hour in the dark and then setting up camp in the dark while arriving very tired.
If the rains covered the trail, the hike would have turned into a real struggle for survival during the last bit with the sun having switched places with the stars and moon hidden behind an ocean blanket of heavy grey clouds.
The Holberg access road goes to a real small town of Holberg, but my best guess is that this town, established by the Danish settlement in 1895, is a small logging town of no more than 35 company loggers not interested in sending out invitations to ecotourists, even for just a pint at the Scarlett Pub.
Scarlett operated a lumber company in the classic Hollywood film about the American South during the Civil War, Gone with the Wind (1937). And here she was, Scarlett, all ‘dolled up and looking fine’ in Holberg, just like Red Butler said about Scarlett O’Hara.
I was heading to a place where there was no television, I thought to myself as I passed the Scarlett Pub.
Despite the lack of amenities, this trip would definitely cost a bit, beginning with the $73.75 CDN ferry trip, each way, and the $114 CDN motel stay the first day in and again the last day out, before and after the great adventure.
I had decided for safety reasons that I was too fatigued on the way in to hike the trail before sunset, and too fatigued and broken down on my way home to make the 5 hour drive to the Nanaimo Ferry Terminal. So, I stayed in a motel, for safety reasons.
Other costs included $130 CDN worth of gasoline for a 960 km roundtrip (not including the ferry crossing). Since my last backcountry adventure, I also added some items to my gear.
Instead of packing two days of fresh water, I purchased a water filter kit for $60 CDN. Nels Bight has a freshwater stream where people are encouraged to water up, but then campers are just as quickly reminded to treat the water before drinking. The stream water comes out rainforest yellow even after being filtered, but I did not experience any uncomfortable side effects.
I suggest running fresh water through the filter bottle at home about three plus times to get rid of the loose filter particles, as well as the taste and smell of a newly pressed soft plastic bottle.
I had expected to camp on a wooden tent pad, so I purchased a self-inflating matt for $60 CDN. The matt self-inflates after opening the air nozzle. And then you can also put more air in manually. I found having a matt necessary even when camping on the sandy beach at Nels Bight, there having been no wooden tent pad in sight.
I had a light summer sleeping bag. And I used the ‘mummy’ top on the sleeping bag as a pillow, instead of trying to keep a pillow dry during the trek into the park.
I also bought two bear bells, after running into a bear last summer without a bell tied to my pack in Garibaldi Provincial Park.
The wildlife is scared off by the sound of the human activity on the Cape Scott Trail, with overnight campers and day use hikers continually arriving and leaving along a well established path leading west from the parking lot at the trail head to the Pacific Ocean beachhead. But there were spots on the trail with bear droppings, including more of this evidence of bear activity right near the beach. And apparently, as I read beforehand during my planning phase, the park was concurrently home to a wolf colony.
I felt more comfortable with having provided the bears and the wolves with the early warning system. The ‘stay away’ signal is much better for both of us than the fright of a surprise encounter.
I initially estimated that the drive on the Holberg access road would take between one and three hours, based on my research. I was hoping for my experienced driving to pay off with a reduced time of 60 minutes. But the trip took two hours of slow, careful driving to avoid major potholes, which were an obvious consequence of several days of heavy rain, reinforced by the heavy trucks used in the logging rodeo. The road also had some loud washboard sections, as well as stretches with a series of as many as six pairs of smaller potholes.
I was nervous about getting a tire puncture or a mechanical breakdown, even though I was confident in the condition of the vehicle with a good tread on relatively new tires, with less than 20,000 km on them, as well as recently installed rear springs and front struts.
But I was not driving those superfine trucks the logging companies use, in place of the old style crummies, to drive the company men in and out of the bush.
Campers driving in all sizes of vehicles, from those micro vehicles (highly not advised) to outback four wheel drive camper vans (I wish), should be aware of the large potholes on either end of several short bridges crossing streams, as well as the 24/7 operation of the largest road grader you have ever seen. I would have taken a selfie with the grader, but I was too scared by the presence of the ‘big machine’ to get out of the car, having been gradually dwarfed as the grader approached on the narrow logging road.
I was relieved to get to the trailhead parking lot on four inflated tires, and to find one of three or four empty parking spots in about a fifty car/truck lot that overflowed out onto the gravel roadway from visitors already camping overnight in the backcountry.
I was grateful for the spot, and to have left the motel when I did, with people continually arriving while I packed my gear from out of the trunk of my car and began to take the first steps along the trail at about 10 am.
The trail was almost immediately too muddy, after a short stretch of, as it turned out, park wonderland trail encased in crushed gravel. I was grateful to have brought along two walking sticks to test the depth of the mud and to steady myself as I navigated around the mud and over wet logs placed through the mud for just such a purpose.
The walking sticks were a gift from an indigenous acquaintance who carefully chose the wood during long walks through an urban forest with his daughter, and then delicately carved away all the remnants of tree until they took the form of walking sticks, with me specifically in mind. I was delighted to finally use them as they were intended.
The rainy days I had so carefully avoided had done their damage to the trail. I knew this reality, but I could not wait for the trail to drain during a week of dry weather that might never arrive off the ocean.
The trail becomes relatively level after an initial elevation gain over about 3.3 km to Eric Lake, and then a bit more of incremental elevation gain between 5 km and 8 km on the trail. Many of the kilometer markers are missing, perhaps over half, but you know, through my ordeal, especially being a bit exasperated on the return trip home, I could not really be bothered to count the one’s there and the one’s not there.
The trail is advertised as being mostly covered in boardwalk, but about half the trail is not, with a lot of muddy sections, including a ‘sloppy mile’ that oddly repeats itself, to make a sloppy two miles for the misadventure. The trail also has challenging, winding root sections, with a two kilometer rooted stretch between 6 km and 8 km being the most difficult section of the Cape Scott Trail.
The muddy spots that had to be circumnavigated were too many to count; however, I would estimate that at least 12 spots, up to three meters in length, had to be avoided by bushwhacking one or two feet off the linear trail.
Thankfully, another hiker had discovered the dry route already that morning, and after surveying the mud hole, I was able to follow the dryer path marked out before me by the previous hiker’s boot prints.
Even the safety of the boardwalks is an illusion. The bare planks are decidedly slippery after weeks of moisture in the rainforest. I slid three or four times on the boardwalk, even though I had been careful.
The other problem with the boardwalk is that if you do not pay at least a little tiny bit of attention, and allow your mind to drift into the thick wilderness on either side of the trail, the hiking poles will repeatedly get caught between the wooden slats from time to time, which is really annoying even after only the fourth or fifth time on a five to six hour hike.
I also noticed two or three slats rotted through and broken, which is not a bad ratio considering the miles of boardwalk being considered.
What is noticeable though is that the trail is not regularly maintained, which is initially indicated by the deep mud holes that start about one hundred meters from the trailhead parking lot, and the missing kilometer trail markers and then the broken wooden slats and the obvious need for something useful to assist hikers with heavy packs in traversing the many recuring unpassable linear sections.
Certain experienced hikers like the trail conditions like that, I am sure.
Some mud holes are two or three feet deep, filled in with dirty water and mud – which I had check for depth with my walking poles. I saw several hikers with light packs and trail running shoes, protected with gators on their ankles, going through a lot of puddles, but you would not want to get stuck in a three foot deep mudhole with a heavy pack on, and no one coming by for a while to help you out of there.
The BC Park Rangers do keep the trail from being overgrown by wilderness, as was seen firsthand near Fisherman’s River, which is the next stage after the 8 km mark, a few kilometers beyond the difficult rooted section.
A campground has been established there and serviced with a pit toilet, by BC Park Rangers, if you did not use the pit toilet at the trailhead parking lot and Eric Lake, or if you just need to take a rest and use the pit toilet again.
Fisherman’s River is a nice place to take a break about half way through your journey into the backcountry. The groomed area might also be a nice easy out if you got a late start to the hike and cannot make the beachhead by nightfall.
People are good natured on the trail, with a bit of trail culture having been developed as people pass by in either direction chit chatting with people hiking in the opposite direction just because you are on the way in and they are on the way out.
Hikers will occasionally share real time stories when stopped along the trail for short breaks. I leap frogged three or four sets of hikers, exchanging chatter each time I passed them, and they passed me.
This backcountry culture is maintained in the campgrounds on the beach as if the entire trip had been socially engineered as an attraction for like-minded people. The shared adventure is a great equalizer with hikers unaware of each other’s names, let alone economic and educational backgrounds.
I honestly hoped the hike would take about 4 hours, after several reviews had stated 5 hours. However, after 4 hours of continuous, determined hiking with a heavy pack, through a lot of mud, everything slowed right down as a result of mental and physical fatigue. Another hour would pass before I got to the Nels Bight/Nissen Bight/Cape Scott Trail Junction.
If the physical exertion was not enough, the need to constantly assess the trail, and use different skills on different parts of the trail, was tiring after 240 minutes, not including the long drive from the Mainland.
At the trail junction, backcountry hikers can choose to go right to Nissen Bight, a couple of more kilometers away, and then also on further yet to the 43.1 kilometer North Coast Trail. I had always planned to go left toward Nels Bight, another 3.7 kilometers from the junction for overnight camping, and then the next day, to go on to the Cape Scott Lighthouse on a day trip back and forth to the campground at Nels Bight.
I had made that decision back home during those weeks of planning I told you about earlier. And so, I went that way once finally at the junction.
I took another hour to get to Nels Bight from the junction, partly downhill and then through the lagoon that had been dried out with a dyke for farming by a Danish settlement over one hundred year and twenty years ago. Of course, this downhill section, is just what is not needed on the return trip home, ascending with a stiff tired body, with only a bit of breakfast in you, after a third night camped on the sandy shore, knowing there is another five hours of hiking from the junction to the parking lot.
The Kwakwaka’wakw Indigenous People (Kwakiuti) made trails into this area for trading in the ocean coves with the British and American naval merchant expeditions at a time when the Spanish, British, Americans and French Canadians shared a common frontier.
Oregon Country was part of the fur trade during the 18th and 19thcenturies that stretched from the Oregon/California border to the 42nd Parallel just north of Cape Scott on Vancouver Island, before the land was settled and the Canadian-American border established at the 49th Parallel.
People like the Danish settlers have come and gone over the centuries, but the Indigenous population remains with about 3600 people living on Northern Vancouver Island. Indigenous people work in the commercial logging and commercial fishing industries, as well as the ecotourism industries.
Russian, Spanish, French Canadian and British colonialists negotiated boundaries in this area. The British established Canada. And the Americans established the United States of America. The Russians kept Alaska for a while, but the Spanish eventually retreated to Mexico, leaving behind settlers in the northern lands for sure, while the French Canadians joined the new British Dominion of Canada.
James Strange had embarked on an expedition on behalf of the East India Company to sell to China fur traded with the Kwakiuti indigenous peoples at Nels Bight, and also trading at other places along the Westcoast. Strange was sponsored by Mumbai merchant David Scott; and as a result, Strange named Cape Scott after his patron.
The Danish presence is fitting the history of the world. The Danish had been pioneers since the Norsemen and Erik the Red settled Greenland in the 980s, establishing settlements on the east coast of the Americas. Leif Erikson, the son of Erik the Red, ventured from Iceland to be the first European to land in North America (Vinland) on the northeast coast around 1000 AD, a long time before Christopher Columbus landed in the south of the Americas in 1492.
The Danish Kingdom was a unification of the Scandinavian countries at the time, which embarked on an era of colonial expansion to four continents. The small settlement at Cape Scott consisted of Danish immigrants to British Columbia, many of whom left the United States for a better sense of economic and religious freedom.
The provincial government eventually shut the settlement down, with many immigrants also moving away from the rugged west coast, decidedly settling closer toward a more convenient southern Vancouver Island for logging and fishing, especially after the government refused to complete a drivable road to Cape Scott from Port Hardy.
So, six hours later, I discovered a nice cozy spot on the campground on the beach about 20 meters from the shoreline. The campground has pitted toilets, metal food caches, drinking water from a stream and a park ranger cabin. But most of all, Nels Bight offers rest for a weary body and peace for a tired mind.
On this day, about one hundred people were eventually camped along the tree line before sunset. People just continually trickled into the beach area from the trail for most of the late afternoon and into the early evening.
Camping parties included couples and pairs of friends, families with two or more children over the age of about six and seven, and solo hikers, all of whom, including the children, looked a bit haggard and desperate to find a spot to set up camp and get off their feet for the first time in what seems like a very long time.
The hike is moderate in difficulty, but made much more arduous by the rain and the resulting mud. Make no mistake, though, many people endure mental and physical exhaustion to reach the beach camp before sunset.
Backcountry hikers can eventually finally relax to the gentle lapping of the ocean waves against the tideline throughout the day and all night too. The big bright sun comes in from the blue sky a bit orange and full of fire until becoming a giant orb lighting up parts of the beach in a golden moment just before total sunset.
The clouds can create just the right filter for the sun during the last moments of the day when the sun and moon begin to trade places.
Before you know what has happened though, the sun disappears far enough west no longer to be of a concern.
The colors noticeably change throughout the day from earth tones in the morning to ocean turquoise in the evening.
Campers lit small fires on the beach a few feet away from their tents. The fires were used for cooking meals and for warming when the sun went down. Campers also had single unit hiking stoves with large pots on top to warm shared meals.
The night quickly disappeared once I closed my eyes, and the next morning arrived soon enough.
The next day, I went to Guise Bay, about a one hour hike along a well used trail from Nels Bight. The trailheads are marked with fishing buoys washed ashore and hung up by the park rangers as signs for when the trail enters the beach and when the trail leaves the beach again, until reaching the campground and pit toilets at Guise Bay.
This backcountry trip is long and arduous, leaving little point the next day in trying to push yourself to save 15 minutes here and there.
I found the one hour hike to Guise Bay very nice and beautiful, at a comfortable pace the next day after a night rest on the white sand ocean shore.
The coastal rainforest trail takes you onto the stunning beach at Experiment Bight and then back into the coastal forest a couple of times before reaching the beach at Guise Bay.
I did some beachcombing, discovering various tidepools. And then I did some bouldering over rock formations that had been so beaten by the storms over the centuries that they appeared to be on the verge of crumbling from just the gentlest of touches.
A dune area along the beach has some history hidden underneath elongated mounds of ocean sand and beach grass.
Another set of fishing buoys at the end of the dunes marks the trailhead to the Cape Scott Lighthouse. This trail through the coastal forest takes about 45 minutes one way, along a pretty easy trail that joins a road. The lighthouse is a beacon surrounded by small houses where the lightkeepers live high above the ocean shoreline. The view at the lighthouse is limited, though.
Similarly to the Cape Scott Trail, the Lighthouse Trail disappears in the rain forest with no views beyond either side of the trail.
I returned to Nels Bight by early afternoon. I sunned for a bit with a pair of ravens clacking about in the nearby trees, occasionally soaring overhead, making strong, thorough swooping sounds so obvious enough for them to be noticed and for campers to become a bit intimidated by the patrols of these large powerful black feathered birds.
I then went swimming in the ocean surf after the tide came to a high point at about 4 pm, as I had on arriving the day before. The shore is about 50 meters when the tide is out. And the depth of the ocean for the longest stretch is only about two or three feet when the tide comes in, which allows for the warm summer ocean currents to remain warm for some body surfing. But I was always vigilant for that large rogue wave coming in and sweeping me back far into the ocean, without anyone noticing.
I had a bit of hesitation about the return hike the next day. But once I had packed up my camp site and started off the beach, I felt that the journey would be more than doable and absolutely necessary unless I wanted to call in an airlift to get me out of the coastal rainforest.
I left the beach at about 8 am expecting my fatigued body, knees, ankles and feet to have slowed down and added a few hours onto the overall journey. Maybe I should have stayed one more night to rest up.
I managed the return route in 7 hours, although again after four hours, all the aches and pains became very apparent, and the fatigue really set in after that difficult stretch of winding root sections between the 8 km and 6 km mark on the return hike.
I managed to hike this heavily rooted section at the rate of about 25 minutes per kilometer.
I took micro breaks along the Cape Scott Trail, and also longer breaks at Fisherman’s River and Eric Lake. Many more micro breaks were necessary on the return trip.
I found the last 3.3 kms from Eric Lake to the parking lot very challenging mentally and physically, with a much slower pace so that this last stretch took one and a half hours even though the trail lost elevation to the parking lot. The rainwater was still saturating the trail. And I had had enough already of that dirty water and mud on the way in.
The motel rest and satisfying meal, before the long drive home, was essential. I could barely get out of my car and hobble to the motel office for the room key after the long drive along Holberg Road tightened up all my lower back and leg muscles.
I am here at home the day after, and the accomplishment of completing such a great backcountry adventure is gradually setting in, and everything else normalizing a bit too quickly as I found the espresso machine in the same spot in the kitchen this morning as I had remembered.
The Cape Scott Trail adventure is difficult with multiple barriers such as the ferry wait, the long drive to Port Hardy and the delicate two hour drive to the trailhead parking lot along Holdberg Road.
The trip presents a lot of uncertainty that can turn, on a number of variables, from a great adventure into a horrible, mistaken trip gone sideways.
Hikers should be fit and have the right temperament for the backcountry challenge.
Proper foot wear and clothing is essential. And the lighter the backpack the better, although still carrying all the essential gear and food for surviving the outdoors along the ocean on the Pacific Coast.
I had spent one night at a motel before driving home the next day. I tried to recover by eating a decent meal and drinking a lot of fluids. I remember trying to just relax my legs on the bed for about one hour, and then when I went to walk again my feet began to throb like police sirens.
I learn something new about surviving in the wilderness each time out into the backcountry.
The Cape Scott Trail definitely needs an upgrade.
And I need new hiking boots and lighter gear for the long trips into the outdoors. I am tempted to go from a light, soft leather hiking boot to more of a trail runner with gators.
I packaged individual items in large plastic freezer bags in case the rains fell from the heavens and soaked every little bit I had brought along with me. I hauled clean socks and underware for each day in and out of the rainforest park, a rain jacket, shorts and two sets of athletic pants. Fresh cloths for sleeping in is nice to have each overnight.
I wore athletic pants and an athletic jacket entering the park, but these clothes proved to be too hot; and, as a result, I sweated out a lot of water. I sweat just standing sometimes, and I usually dry out after an all day hike no matter how frequently I try to replenish my body with fluids.
On the way out, I fared much better by wearing just shorts and an athletic shirt.
I am now almost a week back home, with my legs beginning to bounce back just fine, although the soles of my feet will likely be a bit tender for a few more days.
GUISE BAY, Cape Scott, Canada