Living the best adventure life, since 1958
May 4 – 6, 2019
~ submitted by Julianna Wells
On Saturday, May 4 ten enthusiastic Island Mountain Ramblers met at the Wharf in Tofino and headed out by chartered boat to Flores Island and the Village of Ahousaht.
~ submitted by John Young
May 19-20, 2018
Susann and I and seven lucky women (or is that lucky me and seven women?!) journeyed over to Flores Island from Tofino on the May long weekend. And my seventh time on this wonderful trail didn’t disappoint!
–submitted by Mathew Lettington; Read the full report on his blog
Dear Hemingway,
We did it! We survived our first father-and-son backpacking adventure. I’m happily writing the trip down as a success! We picked the perfect location, Flores Island’s Wild Side Trail, and lucked into a spate of great weather. Of course, our adventure companions helped us enjoy the trip all the more. We were just two members of an eighteen-person trip that I was co-leading. Trips of this size are often complicated, and the Wild Side Trail is fraught with additional issues. This trip proved no different. Aside from the normal challenges with the water-taxi, some of our hikers had contacted me the night before because they were stranded with a broken axle.
As I expected, you fell asleep on the drive to Tofino on the day before the trip, which made you grouchy and unwilling to go to bed that night. What’s a dad to do? We made the best of it by wandering the mean streets of Tofino, even though it was well past your normal bedtime. I treated the trip with the care that it deserved: we ate pizza-by-the-slice, I bought you a toy car at the Co-op, and when we returned to the hostel (the Doctor’s House, as you called it), we watched the sunset from the big window in our room. It was ten o’clock by the time you were asleep, after we read all the way through the Five-Minute Star Wars Stories book–twice!
Total Distance: 15 km
Total Time: 3 days
When does the summer start? For many Families living on Vancouver Island they might say, May long weekend as this is when many make their first camping trip of the year. For my family, Easter weekend holds a tradition in my family, not just a lowly ham and/or turkey but a tradition of camping.
This Easter I picked the Wild Side Trail as the destination for Hemingway’s first backpacking trip. The 11 km of walking combines easy beach walking and a small mount of forest walking, over headlands. It’s satisfactorily long, worth the effort. It features beautiful west coast rainforest and offers opportunities for wild life encounters. Further, the wilderness is old-growth forest; one of the few areas left on the west coast. The route brings hikers past dozens of forest-giants, moss so thick you’ll want to lie down and sleep forever, and at least a few Culturally Modified Trees. Adding tot he fun, I brought the Island Mountain Ramblers with us. In total 15 people hiked and camped, including three children.
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| Flores Island’s Wild Side Trail GPS route |
Total Distance: 34.6 km
Time: about 9 hours of hiking over 3 days
March Break, 2014 marked our trip to Flores’ Wild Side Trail, was exactly as the name suggests wild. We started our trip on Saturday morning from the First Street dock. The passenger ferry was bumpy trip, the seas were not smooth, easily swelling 5′ in the highest places and the driving rain. Regardless the captain brought to Ahousaht Village, safe and sound. Tara, from the Wild Side Trail management team, met us at the dock and escorted us through the village to the office where we recorded our itinerary and paid our trail fee.
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Fortune would have it that the walks along side the cabin, taking no effort to locate. We made our home for two nights at the cabin, using it as a home base for cooking, sleeping and excursions. The first day we ventured to reach Cow Bay but the water on the trails for the headlands slowed our progress so much that we feared not being able to return to the cabin if we continued across the final headland. However, the next day the conditions were much better and most of the water on the trails drained off and progress through headlands was significantly easier. Throughout the day the wild Pacific raged onto the shore, rollers as high as 10′ were evident on the not too distant rocks and close to shore. Making it to Cow Bay was easy but we failed to find the route to Mt. Flores and truthfully it was bathed in fog and cloud and the promise of no view at all (because it is treed at the top) was not enticing us to look as hard as we may have.
It wasn’t until after dinner on the second night that the first signs of something other than rain became visible, at first just a single blue patch of sky and later a beautiful sunset combined with low tides permitted us a late evening walk on the beach and ample time to explore an islet that is normally cut off from the beach.
The third day, the trip back to Ahousaht, was gorgeous. The sky was spectacular, with fluffy white cloud formations and excellent blues and a general lightness in the air. These conditions accompanied low tides that meant we were able to walk the beach almost the entire way with the warmth of the sun, cutting travel in time in half. Even though the trail reads 11k each direction with our various wanderings the GPS tracked us at around 35 km of walking. For those interested, Mr. Stinky Feet Michael P has his own spectacular trip rerpot on this trip! Honestly I much prefer his reports to my own.
