Lily Haight

Vancouver Island Adventure Part 1 – Victoria to Port Renfrew

I have always loved reading books where the main characters are on a long outdoor journey, where they have to walk, or ride horses, or take a cart or something equally midieval, to their destination many days away. They hunker down at night in the forest, cook their food over a fire, wash their face in a stream.

Of course, in books they are usually facing a dangerous foe or great evil that is threatening them, or their villages, or family and friends. But the part where they’re on the journey – to get the cup of life, to throw the ring in Mordor, to get out of the realm of the gods and back to their home, etc etc – is always a moment of respite in a book. There is nothing they can do but keep moving towards their goal. There may be small dangers: perhaps they run into some mercenaries and have to fight them off, or one person falls down a cliff and has to be rescued by the other. But the rest of the journey is rythmic and methodical. They walk, they eat, they sleep when they can, then they keep walking. Everything they need they carry with them.

I think this is what draws me to motorcycle adventure camping. People like it for different reasons – I know my dad enjoys the hunt for good dirt roads and beautiful views from mountaintops. I like that too – especially finding hidden natural gems along the way – but what I like most of all is the freedom of carrying everything I need on my bike, setting out down the road, getting far from home and knowing I’m self-sufficient in the wilds.

This is how my dad and I set off on our Vancouver Island adventure last week – after a bit of a struggle figuring out the puzzle of how to get everything we needed strapped down on the back of our bikes. Finally every strap was tied down and tightened, and we hit the road early in the morning on a beautifully sunny Saturday.

At first, we were in our home territory, riding the dirt roads from Snow Creek to Sequim, and then taking the old Olympic Highway to Port Angeles to catch the Black Ball ferry. This felt like a good way to start the day for me, riding roads I’m very familiar with, to ease the tension of wondering what was coming down the line, and to test out that we’d strapped everything down well enough that it wasn’t going to fly out at the first pothole we bounced over.

After a 90-minute sail across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, where we had to tie up our bikes to the side of the Black Ball ferry in case the crossing got choppy, we were out in Victoria, driving past horse-driven carriages, the grand old Empress Hotel, and straight into a traffic jam that took way too long to get out of considering how hot it was.

By the time we got out of the city and back to the water, my shirt was soaked through with sweat and the ocean breeze was a welcome respite.

We drove across Ocean Boulevard (not the one Lana del Rey sings about in her latest album) and stopped for a photo and a bit of a cool down. And then we headed west, as we would spend the first half of our trip driving along the western edge of the island, with small detours into the mountains for some dirt riding.

I had done a minimal amount of research ahead of time, just enough to know that there were a few stops I wanted to make before we reached our first campground. The first was the Point Shirley Lighthouse, which I only realized later is the lighthouse featured in the new show Dead Boy Detectives. In the show, they say it’s the Point No Point Lighthouse which is funny because it looks nothing like it. They also say the Point No Point Lighthouse is in Port Townsend. Which it isn’t.

Still, I understand why they chose the Point Shirley Lighthouse to feature, as it is incredibly dramatic. When we walked down the hill from the tiny parking lot, the lighthouse slowly revealed itself, perched on the edge of a rocky head, battered by wind and waves. Coolest of all, the fog we’d passed through on the boat ride from Port Angeles was rolling in, surrounding the lighthouse in a shroud.

We didn’t stay very long, as it had taken us much longer to get out of Victoria than we expected, we had eaten lunch hours ago at this point, and we still had one more stop we wanted to make. We snarfed down some granola bars and got back on the road.

Our final stop of the day was Sandcut Beach, where I had read you could find a waterfall on the beach due to some sandstone rock formations right on the water. This beach finally cemented the fact in my mind that we were out on the true coast – the waves were strong, the beach rocky, and the fog was rolling in closer and closer the more we stayed out there. The waterfalls were perfectly shower sized, and I was tempted to just stand under the water trickling over the sandstone rock formations (I had gotten very sweaty earlier in the day, so the thought seemed refreshing, if very cold).

But I resisted the temptation as we were only a few minutes away from our campground in Jordan River, at China Beach. The campground was maybe the most clean and well-cared for campground I have ever been to, the sites nestled between a thick stand of trees that blocked the wind, making it eerily quiet and dark. There we methodically set up our campsite, ate a dinner of cup-a-noodle, and collapsed in our beds as soon as the last hints of sunlight disappeared between the tree trunks.

We knew the true adventure would start the following day, as we would venture off of paved town roads and highways, and onto dirt mountain roads on our way to Lake Cowichan.