Day 1 - Gordon River to Thrasher Cove (6km)…

Arriving in Port Renfrew August 29th, we decided to camp at the Pacheedaht campground in the local First Nations Reserve. August 30th we attended the required orientation at the trailhead office and early the morning of August 31st we parked our car about 800 meters from Butch’s Marina. Marilyn dropped me off with the packs and gear, parked the car (paid $20.00 for 7 days parking) and she walked back to Butch’s Marina to join me. We were scheduled to take the 9 AM ferry across and downstream to the trailhead itself which is located across the Gordon River. Here is Norah’s convenience store, behind which we got on the boat.

And a better shot of Marilyn waiting with some other campers, Randy and Jenn from Moncton, New Brunswick, some chinese people who had to do the trail in 5 days or less, and a few others.

Behind Norah’s was this fabulous canoe, unfortunately we had to take a more modern barge-type boat. We were ferried across at 9AM:

We got off the boat at the trailhead, the others went on but we dropped our packs to have breakfast which consisted of cereal mixed with powered milk in a zip-lock bag. There was no waiting for the trail to get hard as we began to walk to Thrasher. Marilyn considers the first kilometer to be THE hardest kilometer of the whole trail, partly because it makes you wonder what you are doing there and is there any way out? For those of us who have never done this trail, this first kilometer is physically and psychologically difficult. I agree with this, but the second kilometer wasn’t really any easier. The third kilometer was hardest too. After that, the trail got harder as our knees got weaker. But you do get used to it eventually, however there is always another challenge around the next bend. The trail goes up to the highest point on the West Coast Trail. We were sooo glad it did not rain.

There were a lot of bridges (108 to be exact) and countless more narrow moss-covered logs across ravines and bogs. Most numbered bridges were fairly easy, some newer, a lot older and in need of replacement. As this picture shows, it is illegal to fall off a bridge to the left, but quite legal to plunge off to the right…

The trail from Gordon River to Thrasher Cove is quite rightly regarded as very difficult in part due to the tangle of mud and roots and slippery log “bridges” throughout this walk. This is what the trail looks like:

Yes, this is the actual surface you walk on. Imagine you have stopped along the trail and you casually look down at your feet. Here is what you would see underfoot:

Marilyn gives a little scale to the picture:

And yes, that is the actual walking surface of this trail. But in spite of the hardship of the roots, the ladders were even harder. I say this because the older ladders had rung spacings very far apart which was very hard on our knees. The newer ladders had smaller spacing that was very good. We could not use our poles on the ladders to save our knees. At least hopping up and down the roots we could use a lot of arm muscle to spare our knees by using our poles. A word of advice for older folks: Bring two walking poles (preferrably adjustable). Younger folks are healthy and not arthritis-striken and they seem to have no problem but we simply could not have done this trail without them. We would have had to be evacuated probably. This year when we finished the trail we found out there had been 57 evacuations of people who could not finish for various reasons, most of them serious. They will not evacuate you for blisters, or lack of food and water, but you have to be really fairly crippled or injured for them to evacuate you. Are ladders hard? Ask Marilyn:

What goes down, must come up…

The trail area was logged long ago and some relics remain. Here is a view a an old abandoned Donkey Engine used by loggers. How they got it there I don’t know - it is a ton of solid steel, especially that flywheel - perhaps they brought it by boat and hauled it up the mountain on its own steam…

But there were natural delights as well. Because it was so dry (I assume) we did not see nearly as many fungi as I had hoped. Here is a shelf fungi the size of a huge dinner plate and another shot of some orange fungi growing high in a tree. Unfortunately the light levels were so low that our camera (which has been acting up) had a hard time focusing. We ended up discarding a lot of close-ups and other pictures because of poor quality.

This is the beach access to Thrasher Cove, which is the first available campsite on this side of the trail, as seen from the beach. That is a lot of long ladders to climb up or down, but it is not all ladders, there is a long stretch of scrambling up even higher along steep crumbling slopes. It is a 1 kilometer side trip off the main trail straight up from the beach to the main trail. Total length of trail from the Gordon River Trailhead to the beach at Thrasher Cove is 6 km and it took us about 8 hours to walk it including several breaks. We learned the hard way that we needed to carry two liters of water each rather than the one liter we had planned on. We eventually corrected that mis-calculation. The picture also shows a small blue sign with an arrow indicating that this is the route to safety in case a tsunami occurred:

At the top you can see how skeptical I am that anyone could climb that far that fast! The sign here has no arrow and lets you know that you are safe from a potential tsunami.

And finally it is evening at Thrasher Cove…

Coming up…Day 2, Thrasher Cove to Camper Bay…