port renfrew

Dates traveled: May 7, 2017; several times between 2013-2015

Port Renfrew is one of the most under-developed towns in Canada I’ve ever seen, which isn’t meant as a slight. The roads and buildings there are haphazard because it doesn’t see a lot of traffic. There is no cell service, and the nearest town is on the other side of the large park, about a half hour away. It’s somewhere you could go if you didn’t want to be bothered and liked the rugged side of the outdoors.

The one breakfast place they have is cute. It’s in what is clearly a small house, and the public bathrooms are outdoors and unattached to the building. Aside from the main highway, there are a couple old logging roads you can get to from Port Renfrew if you want to take a scenic and bumpy route to other parts of the island.

I wanted to try this once on an extended drive to Tofino. Eventually we had to turn back from our initial logging road route a couple hours in because it was covered in snow (in May). We should have known better, but I was enjoying myself. Towards the end of the road, there were signs with bullet holes in them. We didn’t get much farther than this ‘google maps is wrong’ sign.

Port Renfrew is probably most known for being at the beginning (or end) of the west coast trail and the beginning (or end) of the Juan de Fuca trail. I’ve walked on parts of the Juan de Fuca Trail, but doing the whole thing in one shot (it would take a few days) is still on my bucket list, as is the longer west coast trail.

Juan de Fuca Provincial Park is on the southwestern side of Vancouver Island, more or less as west as you can go in Canada. North of it is Tofino/Ucluelet, but in order to go straight there you have to use the logging roads (as we tried to do unsuccessfully, even in the big SUV), and it’s actually faster to travel two hours east to get to the ‘main’ highway to take there. So this area is pretty disconnected from other places and has intense weather, a shipwreck paradise if such a thing exists.

The trail from China Beach to the edge of Port Renfrew was used by shipwrecked passengers to travel back to a community. There is lots of wildlife in the area. It’s not that far from Victoria (an hour and a half drive), but the towns on the way are small and most of the area is bush. The drivers we did encounter closer to China Beach were of the adventurous kind, to say the least, and I presume were local to the area.

There is a mix of shoreline and forest, both of which are overwhelming by themselves, and when joint together like on parts of the trail, the combination is spectacular. Places that take a little while to get to have a more serene mood than the ones easily accessible, partly because fewer people are there and partly because the people going there normally do so with the mindset that they are going ‘into nature’. They want to be somewhere where there’s no cell service, which affects how they interact with others and the environment. There is an enhanced consciousness of place simply by awareness of it both by expectation before arrival and the uniqueness compared with other places.

I camped at Sombrio beach once, in the middle of the park, which is known as a party beach at certain times of the year. Cops closed off the roads that go up to the beach to discourage teenagers from going there, so we had to walk a few km from the highway with our backpacks to get there. For a southern Ontario born city boy like me, this was already way out of my comfort zone at the time.

I loved the drive from Victoria. A couple hours on quiet windy roads, much less popular than the longer trip to Tofino. The relative tranquility for such a beautiful and accessible place (if you’re living in Victoria at the time, that is – hugely inaccessible for anyone living in any other city in the world) made it great for a day trip or a weekend outdoors. It’s one of the places I miss most about Vancouver Island because there really is nowhere I’ve been since that’s like it.

Since I was last there a few years ago, I’ve seen a lot more people posting about Mystic Beach, which is just a couple km into the first stretch of the Juan de Fuca trail. It’s very instagramable. I wonder if the rope swing some unknowing person installed one day decades ago, or the little waterfall spraying off the side of the rock, are more desired or travelled to in the social media age, or if it’s coincidence that I’m seeing more of my acquaintances experience it.

Therein lies one of the downsides of accessible travel. The more people are experiencing a place, the more they interact with it, and the more it changes. And the hipster side of me, my counter-cultural leanings, makes me feel less special about having gone to places that are now so often photographed.

I’m not quite selfish enough to wish that only I get to experience beauty, but the increasing number of people treading on fragile ecosystems is a real thing. Perhaps there will be a re-set as more people can ‘travel’ digitally, or restrictions or lack of money curtail physical travelling globally.