Late Flights, Old Friendships & Exploring Vancouver Island’s Strathcona Provincial Park

Sometimes the bumpy journey to one’s destination just doesn’t seem worth it. In my case, an 8-hour delay at the Toronto airport flying to Comox on Vancouver Island nearly broke me. By the time I landed at the airport in Vancouver, my hopper flight to Comox was long gone. The airline advised that I would have to wait in Vancouver for two days for the next available flight (with no accommodations offered).  At the advice of my friends in Comox, who I was coming to visit, I decided to take the Horseshoe Bay ferry to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. But to make the second last departure of the day, I would have to go like gangbusters, so I snatched an Uber from the airport and crossed the city and up spectacular Highway 99, arriving at the ferry docks with just 10 minutes to spare. Phew. At that point, my day had already stretched for 19 hours, and I still had an hour and a half ferry ride and another hour drive from Nanaimo to Comox. Grumble. Grumble.

After boarding the ferry, I found my spot on the upper deck at the bow, which quickly became a hive of happy photo snappers and fresh-air breathers. However, as the boat began to move from the protected inlets to the open waters of the Salish Sea, which separates Vancouver Island from British Columbia’s mainland, a forceful wind lashed the deck, the temperature dropped, and more and more people fled for the protected interior. In time, I was all alone, albeit bundled up in a thermal jacket and a wind breaker. It was heaven, watching the Salish swells and the mountains bathed in the golds and reds of dusk. I felt vital and fully alive, the memory of wandering the Toronto airport for 8 hours distant, as if lived by someone else.

Without a hitch, my friend, Loys, greeted me at the Nanaimo ferry terminal and drove me back through the darkness to his house outside Comox, where I would spend a week with him and his wife Alison.

I had known them both for decades. Loys, in fact, had been my Spanish professor in university in the early 1990s and later taught an illuminating environmental studies course that predicted the environmental crisis we are currently living through. We had stayed in touch all this time and had visited each other several times through the years. My wife, son, and I even came out to visit Loys and Alison in 2011, when our son was just a few months old (that was actually the last time we had seen each other).

The next morning, I awoke to a stillness rarely experienced in my home city. I could hear the silence of the house, and only the scent of brewing coffee signaled there was life beyond my bedroom door. I gratefully found a mug and took my coffee out to the balcony where I absorbed my natural surroundings of forest and the bubbling Tsolum River like a bleary-eyed newborn.

Whenever I stay at someone’s home, I am keenly aware that my hosts have their own routine. Visiting Loys and Alison was no different, and I was happy to adapt to their rhythm. As it turns out, we were well suited. I wanted to have time to work on my next novel, but I was also eager to catch up with them and go for lots of beautiful hikes. And with their house so close to Strathcona Provincial Park, a sprawling 231,434 hectare patch of wilderness, it seemed I was going to have it all! Loys planned three hikes of 6 to 8 hours each, with days in between to relax on the homestead and write (Alison didn’t join us for the hikes, as she was recovering from surgery).

For our first outing, we drove an hour and a half to the trailhead at Upper Myra Falls to hike the first section of the Golden Hinde Traverse to Arnica Lake inside Strathcona. The parking lot sat at the edge of a mining operation with giant aqua-coloured trailing ponds filled with toxic waste. Vancouver Island, I came to see, really was this strange mix of natural beauty and brutal scars left by human plundering, including giant swaths of clearcut forests.

The hike from the parking lot quickly ramped up, following a series of forest switch backs, covering just over 800 vertical metres in 6.5 kilometres. Certainly not a cliff, but a workout for my city legs! When on the move, Loys hiked with great pace — without food or water for many hours at a time. It was astounding, particularly for a man in his early seventies. Of course, as an immensely curious biologist, if he saw something interesting, he would stop in his tracks, and I would find myself hitting the brakes hard and almost running into him, as he stooped down to take a closer look and snap pictures of fungi or lichen. In due course, Loys would sort and post these photos to the iNaturalist.org database, a depository for professional and amateur botanists, cataloguing nature’s diversity all over the world (I’m particularly fond of this type of collective citizen science).

The heat dome that had recently settled over British Columbia remained intact, and when we left the shade after the long climb from the parking lot, we could feel the baking sun. Loys had hiked this section of trail many times, but he had never been up to Phillips Ridge beyond Arnica Lake, and he seemed deeply motivated to get up there, despite the sapping heat. As bait, he promised me spectacular views — because he had figured something out about me.

Loys, as I came to recognize, spent a great deal of time looking at the details of nature found in the flora, while I found myself itching for epic alpine views. It occurred to me that my connection to wild places was perhaps a tad more superficial and aesthetic, while his was arguably a deeper appreciation of the miracle of life found in the infinitesimal (during my stay, he spent hours peering into his microscope viewing water samples taken from local ponds to see what was dancing on the glass).

When we arrived at Phillip’s Ridge, we followed the exposed spine for some time. Loys stopped here and there to examine the tiny patches of lichen, while I gazed into the distance at the glorious snow-capped mountains with names like Castlecrag Mountain, Golden Hinde, and Mount Thelwood. After a leisurely rest in the shade, we took the gravity train back to the parking lot (i.e. fast hiking downhill) and headed by car to the long elegant Buttle Lake for a swim to cool off.

All three of our hikes that week, which included a proper bushwack to a small lake inside Strathcona and another hike along the Plateau Trail to a beautiful cliff overlooking Aston Pond, always included a swim near or at the end of the hike, which seemed like a just reward for our backcountry efforts.

On the days we stayed at their home in the woods, we would do forest hikes in their ample backyard or hang out on the deck to discuss everything from family and health to the general state of the world. Alison, herself, had been a professor for many decades and brought to every conversation great thoughtfulness and depth.

Our conversations regularly drifted back to the state of politics in the United States. While I had been mid-flight to Vancouver, in fact, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump had taken place. We talked about how the failed attempt would likely give Trump a boost, and we could see the GOP was quite giddy knowing it was going up against a faltering President Biden and a jittery Democratic Party. They clearly saw the future, which Trump promised would not be a democratic one (his words). Another shoe was going to drop, I suspected, but what it would look like I didn’t know.

We also discussed at length the growing impact of climate change on the world and the toxic humans that seemed to be rewarded for running the planet into the ground. These weighty conversations inevitably tapered off with a sense of despair. But then we would look around at the trees rising up on all sides and say in near unison, Life is good!

After a week of hiking, writing (another draft of my upcoming novel complete), and savouring many amazing home-cooked meals, I said my heartfelt goodbyes and boarded a plane for home. Would I be plunged back into the precarious world of air travel? Well, yes. My flight from Calgary to Toronto was delayed by 3 hours, but it was made more bearable, when the other shoe dropped on the US political stage while flying from Comox to Calgary.  President Biden had stepped down and Kamala Harris appeared to be the heir apparent. With that came a gust of great hopefulness that maybe Donald Trump and the GOP would be denied the chance to plunge the United States (and the rest of us) further into chaos (the world is already chaotic enough). I used that tailwind of hope to get me all the way home, exhausted but grateful I had made the journey west.

*

If you would like learn more about the lichens of this region, check out Loys Maingon’s Field Guide to Basic Lichens of Strathcona Provincial Park published by Strathcona Wilderness Institute Press (www.strathconapark.org).

Postscript: Air Canada provided a $400 e-transfer for the 8-hour flight delay, while WestJet said no compensation would be forthcoming, because the 3 hour delay was “mechanical” related.

Watch the video here: