The Road to Tofino, B.C.

I visited Victoria and Nanaimo on Vancouver Island back in 2005 and it had always been my wish to visit the "wild" west side of the island.  It took me 17 years to get there, although it was only the not so wild area between Tofino and Ucluelet, it was a taste of the Pacific Coast.  Thinking back, the landscape is very similar to the Pacific coast off Washington and Oregon which I visited in 2018.  Sunrise and sunsets on the Pacific are legendary and I was lucky to experience a few of those in the few days I was on the island.

The B.C Ferry from Horseshoe Bay to Nanaimo was a two hour ride with beautiful vistas of the coastal mountains and a bonus whale sighting. 

From Nanaimo, it's several hours' drive to the west coast cutting across the middle of the island.  There are a few scenic stops on the way, including the goats on the roof of Coombs Old Country Market, the awe-inspiring Cathedral Grove and Wally Creek.

Goats on the roof at Coombs

Cathedral Grove - a spectacular cathedral of nature. Some of the trees are more than 800 years old and 30 ft in circumference.

It's not a very long trail but you'd spend most of it looking up!

New life on what looked like a dead trunk

This is probably the tallest and oldest Douglas Fir at the grove

Wally Creek with its beautiful backdrop of the island's mountains must be very impressive in the spring when the water would be rushing down it.  

With construction on the road and possibly a half hour wait to get through, we managed to make it to Long Beach just barely catching the setting sun and a few surfers packing up to go home.  It was a magical time of day on the Pacific coast.