The West Coast Trail is a 75 km trek through the remote and beautiful Southwestern coast of Vancouver Island (in British Columbia, Canada). It had it start in the early twentieth century as a a rescue trail for shipwreck survivors. In the last couple of decades, it has been developed by the Canadian Parks Service into popular backpacking trail cutting through beaches and forests between Bamfield and Port Renfrew.
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Despite the loving attention paid to accurately rendering the city limits of Port Alberni, and the careful censoring of the mainland, we didn't use this map. |
Bamfield and Port Renfrew are both remote, only reachable by logging roads. There are no towns or roads along the trail. You must carry with you everything you need for your entire trip, and carry out everything you don't use and can't burn.
You also have to pay a $95 registration fee and reserve two months in advance, as only 26 people are allowed onto the trail each day at each end.
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Peter, gifted artist that he is, made a few sketches. But he only scanned in two. What's up with that? |
Five of us, noble graduate students from the University of British Columbia all, set out for the trail. We didn't know which, if any, of us would return. We were: your humble narrator Eric Brochu, my roommate Eddy Boxerman, and friends Peter Carbonetto, Dave Pritchard, and the lovely and talented Katja Hoffman (who gains distinction by being the only one of us who is (a) not Canadian; (b) not studying Computer Science; and (c) possessed of not one but two X-chromosomes).
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At the beginning of the trail. Left to right: Eddy, Katja, me, Dave, Peter. |
Intrepid souls all, but while we all had some backpacking experience, none of us had ever done a trip of this magnitude. Undaunted, we gathered together what gear we had, and then bought, begged or borrowed what we didn't.
And it began.