salt spring island

Salt Spring is the biggest of the Southern Gulf Islands – which I normally call the little islands, become they’re near me and I live on a much bigger island – with its 12k population comparable to my town (just over a much larger area). Its known for things like its markets and its vibe, so I’ve saved my camping and hiking trips for the smaller islands of the small islands and travelled to Salt Spring for “doing stuff”, effectively going to the downtown at each visit, buying things, looking at things, being around people.

Keeping with its theme of being bigger than what’s around it, Salt Spring not only has the largest area and population of the Southern Gulf Islands but also the highest peak. Although I didn’t climb it, I climbed something that wasn’t too far off. I read that the hike to that peak was just along a dirt road the whole time. Maybe one day I’ll do it when I don’t really feel like being in the forest and just feel like saying I’ve done the highest peak in the Southern Gulf Islands.

Wikipedia says Cece from New Girl lives or has lived on Salt Spring, but I can’t confirm and somehow doubt it. Maybe she visited or spent a summer there.

I’ve been to Salt Spring five or six times between 2014 and 2025, but zero between 2016 and 2023. I wonder what’s changed more over time – the place or my perspective. The reality of the place, if such a thing exists, is probably an interaction between me, the experiencer, and it, the land mass and all the stuff going on there.

In what feels like a hyper-tourism era, both a ‘destination’ (I still see it on lists of ‘top places to visit’ in BC, Canada, and sometimes the world) and an individual can change pretty drastically over a decade. Maybe more than the changes both in the person and the place, so much depends on the passing weather during the visit, both in terms of the literal weather and the moods and inner shiftings (sleep, hunger, social bandwidth).

Here’s an amended version of what I wrote ten years ago after a haphazard biking/camping trip (we were neither bikers nor campers, with the gear hanging off our sides while blazing downhill to attest):

The most popular and populated of the Southern Gulf Islands, Salt Spring holds some well-known poets and other artists who go there to retire. 1/3 of the island is retirees, but the vibe here is a lot more alive than the other nearby islands. Older adults certainly are noticeable in the downtown area, but they’re hippies full of energy.

The downtown is quite the hike from the ferries, which makes finally getting to where people are a feat in itself. Once you’re there, an element of magic presents itself: people dance spontaneously to spontaneously-played music in the town square, a grassy area off the harbour with a small playground on a hill. People take off their shirts and stomp their feet to keep beat with homemade instruments. Pot is smoked more freely than cigarettes, and drinking in public doesn’t seem to be a problem either.

I feel conflicted when I think about how much I actually like Salt Spring. There is charm in spontaneity, and I like to think that it’s not all dress-up for tourists. When I overhear conversations, though, in several instances people were orating their self-importance: a group of younger adults laughing about how BC, and particularly this island lifestyle, was superior to central Canada. Ontario just doesn’t get it, they asserted. A lot of the conversations I heard were complaint-oriented and comparisons to other places, which were inherently not as good because they had a different ideology, which kind of distracted me from the relaxation and acceptance that I thought the place stood for otherwise.

That’s without getting into the tension between the apparent happy-go-lucky ideology with the high housing costs. A boarded-up building graffitied ‘low cost housing?’ is a ripe example of how things are not always how they appear, and though people dance barefoot and have ‘alternative lifestyles’, there is still an expected income on the Island that puts you in the relative upper-middle class, meaning it is an exclusionary place by nature. It doesn’t mean that the people on the Island actively try to drive up costs to keep out those with less wealth, but it is a reminder that even spaces such as the community area of Salt Spring are not accessible for everyone who shares these alternative ideologies.

It’s a nice place to see for a day or two, but I think it’d get old pretty quickly. The jump between tranquility and chaos must get overwhelming at times as well, though I’m guessing if you’re not in the touristy areas you can escape the bustle pretty easily all year. Salt Spring has its unique qualities, but I’m left with the impression that it’s a show-island, when I strive for something more sincere in my surroundings.

I haven’t seen anyone barefoot in my post-2015 visits. The place definitely feels like something has been sucked away, replaced with things that are more similar to other places that you pass through on vacation.

Ten years ago when visiting, there was, what I thought at the time, an interesting juxtaposition of commercialism with groovy/crazy old people high on mushrooms or life. More recently, it’s all business, with those oddballs either banished to the periphery or no longer coming into those places that they clash with.

Now, downtown Salt Spring Island is a chaos on summer weekends, a space with a hippie reputation that has long since banned dogs from many places and tucked away its counter-cultural elements, except the ones that can be marketed and sold for large profits.

Apart from location changes and person changes and weather changes, a lot of the perspective of a place depends on the specific spots you end up visiting and what you do exactly. On my most recent trip, I did something that I do often but something that I’ve never done before on Salt Spring.

I took a solo daytrip with the sole goal of hiking, actively choosing not to go into the town part for lunch, instead surviving on a big pre-ferry breakfast and what I could get from the brewery in the woods next to one of the Mount Maxwell trails I was keen on. If that was my first and only trip to Salt Spring, instead of having these connotations and associations, I would think of it as a paradise of few people, myriad trails along the water and up mountains, and beer in the middle of the woods, which is what these photos contain, minus the one sly photo of the market above.

I like the most recent version better.

Salt Spring is a 35 minute ferry ride from the ferry terminal adjacent to my town. Since that ferry is about a 7 minute drive, and it’s another 10 minutes to the hikes from the ferry terminal in Salt Spring, I barely drove fifteen minutes to get to remote hiking trails on a small island, where I only saw one person during a four hour hike.

The longest part of the whole thing is just waiting for the ferry, which can fill up, so I get there 45-60 minutes early (it’s non-reservable). The other islands often have other stops on their way, are longer trips, and don’t run as frequently, so it got me thinking that a random decision to day-trip to Salt Spring isn’t such a bad option.

The first hike I did was something called the Girlfriend Trail, which is incredibly steep for awhile, to the point where on the way down my knees were shaking pretty violently. At the top of the trail I connected to trail #4 to get to all the lookouts. There was a small parking lot at the top, so you could drive up just to get a look at the views if hiking isn’t your thing.

The views are definitely worth it, but if hiking is your thing, the grueling uphill is a heck of a workout and the landscape is multi-layered, with big boulders, garry oaks, what looked like giant sea grass, big trees that might have been firs, and even a waterfall you have to criss-cross near the bottom.

On the trail within about 15 minutes of the summit, there are multiple viewpoints that give you various angles of the surrounding islands and face you in different directions. At the top of Baynes Peak, which I think is the highest point of Mount Maxwell, you get a half-panorama, with of course giant trees behind, looking towards mid-Vancouver island while also being able to turn your head and look, far back, at the tip of the Saanich peninsula on southern Vancouver Island where I live.

A week after this day-trip, I saw a click-bait blog post about how the top views in Canada, and Mount Maxwell was ranked second. I don’t think it’s in my top two for views in the country, but it’s still pretty cool.

I’ve read a few books on identifying trees but not much has stuck. I need someone to walk with me and point to things and tell me what they are about a dozen times and then maybe I’ll be able to do it on my own, beyond a handful that I proudly know the names of like garry oaks and douglas firs.

After the mountain hike, I went to my car which was parked along Burgoyne Bay, which I got good views of as I was walking up. There’s more horizontal trails that go along the bay that I’m sure would be a good time.

After checking out the water quickly, I made my way to the brewery, which is about average to slightly above average in terms of BC craft beer, but top of the charts in terms of ambiance. The inside room feels like an attic or a treehouse, with lots of games but not a ton of seating, and outside there are two spaces where you’re surrounded by trees. Breweries and nature aren’t always something that people associate, but this spot, and Persephone in Gibsons, are easily two of my favourite beer-enjoying locations.

After the beer, I did a second hike, which ended up being more abridged than I intended because I didn’t know if there’d be a ferry lineup and I wanted to make sure I was there early, but mostly because my phone was dying and I didn’t trust myself to navigate back to the terminal without getting lost. I know I would’ve found my way eventually, but I wasn’t confident it’d be in time for the next ferry, and I didn’t want to hang out for an extra two hours in the dark.

The second hike was at Ruckle Provincial Park. Pretty much the whole time on the trail you’re on the edge of the island looking at the water, in and out of foresty areas, with many opportunities to climb down some rocks and sit right at the shore, or sit at some small sand beaches.

There’s some up and down but overall pretty easy to do. Instead of pushing through to get to a lookout point, basically the whole thing is a lookout, you’re just walking along it. It’s somewhere I’d like to go back to, walk along some more, and spend time sitting at various spots and taking a dip in the ocean in the summer. Being right on the side of water, it’s quite lush, mossy and rocky.

The ferry terminal to get back to Swartz Bay has a little community library, and importantly, outlets and bathrooms.

I guess if I had to sell Salt Spring as a travel or a day-trip destination, I’d say that it’s multi-dimensional. If you’re loaded, you could stay at a luxury retreat. If you like kayaking and paddleboarding, you can do that. If you like hiking, there’s lots of opportunities. If you like alcohol, there’s a brewery, cidery, and wineries. If you like shopping or craft shops, it’s got tons of that. So if you’re in a group you could all do different things, or if you like a few of these things, you can do them all over a couple days.

Like many places, Salt Spring seems to have gravitated towards sameness and commercialism, and I’m sure it started way before my first visit there. It’s still a cool place to go, especially for me since it’s so convenient, and you don’t have to go to their dog-restricted markets or beaches, you can do other stuff, but relatively alone, and have a great time being in a beautiful space.