Tofino Travel Diary
Last weekend Matt and I went to Tofino to celebrate me surviving my qualifying exams and Matt getting an articling job for next year. For those of you not familiar with west coast geography, Tofino is a small town on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The drive from Victoria to Tofino is about 300 km and took us just over five hours on Friday. On the way up we stopped at Cathedral Grove to see our first of many old growth forests. This is Matt and I in front of an 800 year-old Douglas Fir. This tree is 76 m tall and 9m in circumference.
After arriving in Tofino we spent the late afternoon walking along Long Beach in the Pacific Rim National Park. Long Beach is 10km long. I don’t think we walked the whole distance but it sure seemed that way! Tofino is known for its surfing and we saw many surfers out in the chilly water. On Friday evening we ate at a great restaurant called SOBO which stands for Sophisticated Bohemian. All their produce is grown on site and everyting was amazingly fresh. I don’t think I can express how wonderful the food was – especially the spring roll. Of course my judgement might have been affected by the fact earlier in the day I’d found out I passed my exams (I just had to throw that in).
We had great weather on Friday and were pleasantly surprised to have sunny skies again on Saturday. In the morning we returned to the National Park to do a short hike through a rainforest. Most of the nutrients in the forest are acutally in the trees not in the soil. When a tree dies (perhaps knocked over in a wind storm) other trees and plants take root in the stump and grow from there. What a neat ecosystem.
In the afternoon we went sea kayaking. The waters around the town of Tofino are protected from the ocean so the water is very calm. We paddled for about an hour out to Meares Island. The island is actually bigger than Bermuda and home to lots of wildlife including ferral cows! Meares Island has never been logged so it has some amazingly old trees. The oldest one we saw was a cedar estimated to be between 1000 and 1500 years old. It’s hard to determine the age of a cedar because as they age the centre of the tree starts to rot out and the tree becomes hollow. Our group of 5 was able to go inside one of these trees. Apparently 12 people have managed to squeeze into that particular tree at one time. This was my attempt at taking picture of the inside of the tree.
On Sunday morning we woke up to the first fog of our trip. We started the trip back to Victoria by visiting the Wickaninnish Interpretive Center at the National Park. We then did what was called the “Bog Trail.” We had spent the weekend surrounded by massive trees and so were pretty surprised when we got out on the boardwalk and saw lots of small stunted shorepines. In good soil these trees could grow up to 30m. The area has been nicknamed “The Giant Broccoli Forest” because the trees sort of look like oversized broccoli. It was hard to get a picture that wasn’t completely washed out by the fog but I gave it my best.
We had a great time on our trip to Tofino and certainly plan on returning. I think we’ll avoid the busy months of July and August but it would sort of neat to go during storm season. We still have the hot springs to visit and surfing and whale watching to try!