The end of the road built a new beginning this fall.
The official map says the West Coast Trail is not for the faint-hearted. "One of the most gruelling treks in North America," it yells in a BOLD RED WARNING telling you to stay away unless you're young, fit and beautiful.
Wrong! If you're a reporter and you breeze in by chartered helicopter, it's a piece of cake. Land on the beach, 20-minute stroll, take some pictures, home in time for tea.
If you recklessly forgot your chopper, though, watch out. Don't even apply for a permit for the five-day hike if you're not in shape. You'll slip, you'll curse and you'll wish you'd never started when it's Day Three of merciless rain and you're lugging a heavy pack up yet another rotting ladder — only to find you must now haul yourself across a canyon in a rickety tin cable car.
The devastation of the trail will be an economic blow to Bamfield and Port Renfrew. (CBC)
Oh sure, the scenery's spectacular — if you can ever take your eyes off your boots as you struggle to avoid a fatal skid into a slug-infested gully. And, if you make it over the trembling suspension bridge and reach the seal rocks, don't forget your underwater camera in case you're swept away by a rogue wave and get an unanticipated close-up of one of the shipwrecks that gave this coast its name: the Graveyard of the Pacific.
For 100 years, the famous trail has separated the men from the boys. It was established in 1907 as a way for rescuers — don't call them scavengers — to reach those dozens of shipwrecks. Today, it's part of one of Canada's defining wonders: Pacific Rim National Park.
The northern section includes Long Beach and has a road. To the south, it's wild. There's no road and the famous hiking trail runs 77 kilometres between Port Renfrew and Bamfield, through a landscape of rainforest, beaches, bogs, salmon rivers, waterfalls, deer, salamanders, sea lions and, yes, colourful slugs.
Last year, 4,900 hikers came from all over the world to see it. This year? The Centennial Year? Don't buy your ticket just yet. You may not find the trail.
It's all Joe Cooper's fault. He's the backcountry operations manager for Parks Canada, so it's his job to keep the trail open. Instead, it's a mess — blocked in about 2,000 places.
That's how many trees came crashing down across the trail in a series of vicious storms that began in November. Normally, 80 to 100 trees will blow down each year — so this year is 20 times worse than normal — and these are some of Canada's biggest trees. Many thousands more were blown down elsewhere in the park.
"I'm in shock, literally in shock," Cooper says as he struggles to find his footing in a blast zone of splintered timber. "Where's the trail?" he is asked by a chopper-chartering reporter wondering if he'll make it out by deadline. "We lost it," says Cooper. "It's like going back to your old neighbourhood and all the houses are gone and you don't know where you are."
Great. They call this guy a manager?
Cooper tries to shift the blame to a freakish winter — worse than anything the old-timers here have ever seen. The cable cars? Wrecked by falling trees. The lovely suspension bridge at Logan Creek? Vanished in a mudslide. The winds here gusted to 140 kilometres per hour — that's hurricane force — and, from the air, you can see where violent microbursts levelled whole stands of cedar, spruce and hemlock.
You'll see the same in Vancouver's Stanley Park, but on a much smaller scale; Pacific Rim is like Stanley Park times a hundred, and it's not just the trail that took a beating. The popular Comber's Beach, in the northern section, is suddenly smaller — badly eroded by the storm surges. Not far from the Bamfield Coastguard Station, Keeha Beach is littered with giant fallen trees. Where was the coast guard? Shouldn't they be guarding the coast?
Of course, there's nothing any of them could have done.
But what can they do now? The devastation of the trail will be an economic blow to Bamfield and Port Renfrew. Cooper has neither the gear nor the manpower to fix it in time for the usual opening on May 1st. Everything has to be helicoptered in. It can take a crew a day just to get in and cut up one tree or build ladders over it.
There aren't 2,000 days between now and May. Emergency funding is a maybe and the full extent of the damage isn't even known yet. Perhaps only sections of the trail will be open this summer.
But, no problem. You can still see one of Canada's marvels: Tsusiat Falls, the jewel of the West Coast Trail, where the clear waters of Tsusiat Lake rush through the woods and spill into the Pacific surf.
You can see it, that is, if you have a helicopter.
This article published from "CBC NEWS"
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