Vancouver Island part one - Port Renfrew

It's taken me a while - nearly a year to be precise - but I thought I'd best write up our time on Vancouver Island whilst I could still remember everything. It seems to make best sense to split it into four blogs, covering each of the places we stayed.

I had long wanted to visit Vancouver Island - I forget when or how the seed was sown - but had never really appreciated the crazy scale of the place until we started to plan our trip. Everywhere looked amazing and tempting, but we were conscious of not spreading ourselves too thinly, so to speak, and settled on basing ourselves in three separate area - decided upon after much research, consultation and a bit of gut instinct. We took an early morning ferry from Vancouver the day after our Great Bear Rainforest trip ended, and were amazed to see how many other passengers were doing the same - the ferry was massive compared to your average Calmac boat, and boarding was about three times quicker!

Our first base was Port Renfrew for three nights, where we spent our time exploring some of the amazing woodland and coastal scenery. After a fair bit of travelling to get there, with a few stops on the way, we spent our first afternoon and evening wandering around the immediate area. We were particularly impressed with Pacheedhat beach - a very long, sandy beach absolutely covered in massive driftwood logs. The word 'logs' is a bit of a misnomer to be honest - these things were huge and some of them were essentially whole trees - beautifully sculpted and weathered by the sea and just ridiculously large.

I've included an iphone snap of Rob above, just to give some sense of scale and coverage - you can just about make him out in his bright blue jacket. As is always the case on holiday, proper time for photography is limited but I did manage to take advantage of a couple of moments of fun light, which helped reveal the beautiful, sculpted form of the driftwood.

The next day we had the pleasure of a bespoke tour (pre-booked) with local guide, Drea.  This gave us a great opportunity to visit some amazing old growth forest and to spend time with someone who knows and loves the area. Drea also had a more rugged vehicle than us which meant we could drive through some spectacular woodland scenery to see the incredible, if depressing, spectacle of Lonely Doug.

Lonely Doug is an ancient and incomprehensibly large Douglas Fir tree - over 60 metres in height and nearly 4 metres wide, with a circumfrence of 12 metres. Even before the surrounding area was cleared, Lonely Doug soared above the main forest canopy, but thanks to the appalling and systematic logging that has taken place on the island, it now stands entirely alone - spared by the man marking out the area for cutting, because of its extraordinary size. The light was really not there even to attempt to do justice photographically to a tree such as this - I think it would be nigh on impossible even in perfect conditions - but I have included another iphone snap with Rob (6 ft) at its base, just to give an idea. Just so sad, but also an incredibly emotive thing to see.

From there we went to the nearby old growth forest at Eden Grove, which was a magically grandiose yet scruffy place, and wonderfully quiet. Chaotic, beautiful, awe-inspiring and absolutely impossible to photograph, certainly on a day with drab and very flat light. Still good fun to try, however!

Such are the joys and frustrations of travel photography - you see some amazing sights, you don't always get the conditions in which you'd choose to photograph them and you very rarely get enough time; but I've learned that it's important to try - if only to ensure those memories remain strong visually.

We also visited the more accessible and popular Avatar Grove - less quiet but still absolutely worth an explore, and again we found ourselves marvelling at the sheer scale of these wonderful old trees. An incredible morning and it was fascinating to talk woth Drea about all the issues surrounding logging and, in some cases, the difficult balancing act that is now required.

We spent the second part of our day along the coast at Sombrio Beach - an impressive and windswept pebble beach, strewn with both boulders and driftwood, home to a hidden waterfall, and, like so many of the beaches in the area, just lovely to go for a wander and to enjoy the full force of the Pacific Ocean.

The following day we spent exploring the Botanical Beach trailhead, and the very fringes of the Juan de Fuca trail - more superlatives required, with a winning combination of forest paths and a wonderful, primarily rocky coastline. I rather wished we could have spent more time and walked further but, as it was, we still had a good wander on the main route and beyond.

The marine life was every bit as alluring as the woodland and I found myself captivated once more by the wonderful bull kelp. There was a mass of it, sparkling in the rather bright sunshine, for all the world looking like a congregation of sea otters floating in the bay.

I've always loved rock pools and, in true British Columbian style, the ones here were of course off the scale, in terms of colour and patterns - in particular I loved the purple sea anemones and there were hundreds of them! Even with a polarising filter it was hard to cut through the water and diffraction - although I also tried to use the latter to my advantage to create some beautiful glass-like patterns as the tide swirled around.

I had to drag myself away eventually so we could continue on our route and enjoy yet more incredible driftwood on the beaches. One large stump had incredible weathering with the most beautiful patterns and almost satin-like texture. Bright sunshine made things a little difficult, but you work with what you have when you are on your travels, and the amazing dynamic range of the Sony sensor does make life a bit easier.

We were following our noses more than a map but knew we were always near to a trail, even if a bit of clambering over massive driftwood logs was required to get back into the forest. So many beautiful scenes, full of texture and colour.

The sheer size of the trees we were walking amongst again defied belief and I've resorted to an iphone snap with Rob once more, just to give you an idea - he's hard to spot and looks Lilliputian!

After our walk we had another drive around to some of the lovely spots we'd noted on our travels with Drea the previous day. The sun was still strong but, using it as back-lighting, made for some lovely, rich colours and ensured that crucial sense of depth.

A day earlier, we'd seen a black bear crossing the road just near this little creek and you could imagine one wandering along here, but although at times we could hear things wandering around, we never saw what; and so we restricted ourselves to enjoying the beautiful scenery this time!

As impressive as the old growth forests were, the younger trees - often alder - were also beautiful and the overhead canopy provided just enough shade to make photographing them possible.

Our time at Port Renfrew had come to an end and the next day we took the somewhat circuitous journey to head further up the coast to Tofino - this involved heading across to the east to join the highway north. We stopped briefly at the famous Fairy Lake and a massive, old Spruce tree at Harris Creek, neither of which were looking photogenic in the conditions that morning - but the latter, in particular, was amazing to see. Every so often, we'd pass by scenes that cried out to be photographed - we couldn't stop at them all - but I did love these stark pine trees. With the sun now having left us, and more helpful dreich conditions, they made a beautiful, if sad, picture.

The rest of our journey I will cover in the next blog about our visit to Tofino. Coming reasonably soon I hope!