Some of the pics Simon sent from his last trip.

Simon writes:

“We had a great time, through Washington, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and home to the island. Altogether maybe 5000 KM? (I wasn’t tracking it). Only a couple of minor issues with the van; my electric locks went funny one day into the trip and so I disconnected them and went manual for the rest of the journey, also my window wash nozzles weren’t spraying, figured out it was a kink in the line at the pump, had a fun time fixing it with a lighter and a golf tee in cold campground in Yellowstone.”

Quick report on a four day trip into the Klanawa valley here on Vancouver Island. It’s the main east west valley between Nitinat watershed and the Alberni Inlet. We like this watershed despite it being extensively logged, you don’t meet many other travellers and it has a few special spots. We’ve exported this area a few times, “Klanawa” and the search box on the right will bring up previous posts.

First night was at a small lake. You have no idea how good it felt swimming in that lake after the 3.5 hr hot and dusty drive. Ok it’s hyperbole, but jeez it felt good.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but the fog from the Pacific was thick the next morning. Dripping wet and chilly. So off we went further west into the fog and found a hill to climb out of it.

About 450 meters elevation we broke through the fog.

We parked on the side of the hill, facing south. By about 2 pm the fog retreated back to the coast. We got too hot, drove down to the Tsocowis river/creek and cooled off. This creek never seems to warm up, its not head numbing cold but it’s not “let’s just float around and enjoy life” warm either.

Than back up the hill and set up for the night. 

The road went a bit higher but no better southern view up there. Spot the van?

Yup, the fog/cloud creep back in the evening.

We smelled propane that day, I tried (soapy water) to find the leak. Somewhere at the tank I thought. No luck at detecting it. Ran out of propane during that night. Sheesh. So on Monday we packed up and drove into Bamfield to fill up with propane. Also took the guard off the tank and was able to get a bit of tightening on one fitting. Or maybe it was the spit valve leaking? In any event the leak didn’t re occur. Thought about staying at the campsite at Pacheena Bay, but decided to go back to our spot on the hill after some unsuccessful exploring for the other perfect spot. Do you get the idea we like high places with no one else around?

Yup, fog back in the morning. Actually I forget which morning.

Next day we drove back down into the clouds ( to be honest, the entire valley cleared up around 12 pm). This shot gives you an idea of the maximum grade of most of the roads. I think this is about 18, maybe 20%. Sometimes you find it steeper, and often it’s quite a bit steeper around the switch back corners.

Well that’s it, short report. To be honest it all seems much of a muchness and pretty dull stuff. But the pics don’t do justice at all to how spectactular the area is, and really how much fun it is to explore.

Weather great, didn’t get lost, only one thing broke* on the van. The main logging roads were rougher than usual, seems that a lot of  the gravel has gone and the bigger rocks underneath are exposed. It’s like driving on very rough cobble.

*a leak on the fresh water line from the new pump to faucet. Manifested itself by a little drip under the sliding door. Didn’t do a field repair, the leak seemed to be in part of line behind the fridge. Wasn’t bad enough to go to all the bother of pulling fridge. But at home, pulled fridge, and I lifted the entire floor (to get it dry). Found the tiny leak at a section of hose that ran adjecent to the fridge combustion chamber. It’s my fault, I secured the line back there with tie downs but too close to that chamber. I’m guessing that the new water pump made enough pressure to weaken the hose that was softened by the heat. Was just a pinhole leak, but still…

Another weekend trip to favourite places. A little different this time as there was little fog. I hope the residents of Neah Bay across the straits took the opportunity to hang laundry.

Obligatory clear cut shots.

And one of our favourite creeks.

Saw lots of shipping with the lack of fog. Cruise ships, oil tankers, and container ships. a few of this kind went past. I like how the containers are stacked in a subtle wedge shape.

Came across a doe and new born fawn. Fawn was very shaky and wouldn’t get out of the way.

“and my axe”

Mmm, chicken

ok, another cheesy vid, this time the creek

For various reasons we haven’t managed to get out using the van for its intended purpose until this last weekend. It was just an overnighter to familiar places, but still a fun outing.

Driest May on record here this year, and the Thursday and Friday before we left felt like August. It wasn’t quite August out on the west coast, the wind was coolish, but the sun was warm.

The syncro was a champ, hauling us up loose gravel and rock logging spurs, and the newly installed big assed auxilliary battery didn’t even blink about the amount of electricity we used. The battery truly is way bigger than we will ever need, its both daft and kinda fun to have it.

And yes, we camped beside clearcuts 🙂

On our way, we realized we had left the Thai themed marinated chicken thighs back at home, so we picked up some meat strips in Sooke.

Where’s Waldo?

We were planning on exploring some new areas when we left late Sunday afternoon but were thwarted by closed gate on the access road. Where there is active logging the contractor usually restricts access to the area by locking a hefty steel gate across the road or even just a steel cable with signage. I think they do that mainly to reduce chances of vandalism or theft of machinery or equipment left on site during non working days. So we headed up to one of our fall back view point spots while there was still heat in the day and we could sit back and enjoy the view and some beverages.

So there we were, again.

Bridging ladder used to level the van. My van is a rolling advertisement for my slowness in finishing things. Sliding door skin repair, rear bumper build (well it is getting closer), still no tires for the 15″ alloys I bought a while back.

Took a walk, into newly logged area. I was taken by this cloud on the hill.

And took a bunch of pics for a pano. If you click on image it comes up in new tab/window, at my default image size of 1500 pixel max dimension. You might be able to make out the beach at Port Renfrew.

Then suddenly it seemed like someone turned on the smoke machine to film some post apocalyptic movie.

And almost as quickly turned it off.

You know, i never get tired of the view looking over to Washington, summer sunset. You notice the orange haze? Could be from a forest fire somewhere. A couple of summers ago we had amazing sunsets when camping in same general area that were due to forest fires in Russia. Hard to believe eh?

Next morning I got up early and took some more pics to stitch.

We left at about 0930 and made a few exploratory trips up roads like this. But we didn’t find a good spot to camp.

So it was a fall back to Loup Creek. It is pretty isolated, I don’t think many would make the effort over the moderately rough and slightly overgrown road just to be able to sit on a bridge. No, I’m not picking my nose.

The creek is beautiful, but quite cold. We hiked around, exploring a few km upstream and a little ways downstream. Here are a couple of pics of a little feeder stream, posted to point out a couple of things. First is that I find it really hard to take a pic of theses streams during mid-day. The river rock reflects light, the shadows and greenery suck the light up. I think i would have to set the camera on a tripod and take a series of pics with varying exposures/aperture and sam them together for an HDR image.

Second is that these short steep streams on the west coast of the island vary in flow tremendously.

You’ll find debris high up on the rocks or the bank that was deposited during floods.

All that white rock would be underwater during winter spate.

Supper time on the bridge. Chairs now on south end to catch the sun.

Eco-Que being used. Marinated chicken on flat steel skewers. Still haven’t used the grill surface of the Eco-Que. Yeah, just nine briquets.

Lid on to finish cooking.

Had this canvas bucket for years, US Army issue, one of the most useful accessories.

Next day we explored more, sunbathed more, read more, drank more, ate more, dunked in the frigid creek more, and then drove home in the late afternoon, early evening. Van ran like a champ, fridge worked from when it was lit at leaving on trip to when we got home. Garmin Glo and iPad mini remain a superb navigation combo – I should do a post on the software I use.

Just back from a short overnight trip. Our goal was to see if we could find a camping spot on Loup Creek (a tributary of the Gordon River). I’ll leave it up to the reader to discover just exactly where we ended up.

July set records here for the lack of rain (it did shower for a couple of days at the end of the month) and we were worried that gates would be closed on some logging roads. Turned out many gates were closed and that stopped us from exploring some other spots before we got to Loup Creek. We drove up some fairly steep and rough roads, but at the end of them there was neither a good view or a creek or lake. For some reason I didn’t take any pics of the steep roads, I guess I was distracted by the search and the road conditions. I have to say that the little mods to add some more ground clearance on the van really paid off. No more scraping the spare tire carrier or the trailer hitch when going over the ditches cut across some of the minor logging roads. Those roads can be fairly steep (+20%) and the road surface is loose sharp rock.

The only pic I took of this part of the trip (not steep and not rough)

So off we went northwest alongside the Gordon until we found the old, abandoned Forest Service road. Moderately steep climb, loose rock, few over hanging alders. Toodled along until we came to the first bridge over the Loup. This was a bridge built to last – large concrete abutments, 2 giant I-beams spanning, and precast concrete sections as deck. Deck about 30 feet above creek. Other side of the bridge was pretty well alder choked, and the roads led to nowhere interesting so we decided to continue upstream to find the second bridge. There was this sign just up the road.

Then there was a steep section and the surface of the road was made up of larger than normal loose rock. At this point the van started to miss and buck, just the same thing it did at the end of our last trip. We barely made it up the steep section, van bouncing, tires slipping. Not that much fun with a ditch on one side and a very steep drop down to Loup Creek on the other side. We had to drive on a kilometre or so before we could find a level spot to stop. I won’t go into any thoughts about why the van was missing and bucking in this post, but we let the engine cool down (it was a hot day and we had been working it hard) to see if that made any difference. Well it didn’t and even thought I really wanted to go on to find the second bridge we decided to turn back  and camp at the first bridge.

It really wasn’t a bad place to camp. Secluded, beside a creek, bugs not *that* bad.

So here I am sitting and thinking. Am I marvelling at how good the classic Thule Combibox 250 looks on the van? (that’s for you Phil Z.). Am I enjoying using the table mod? Am I enjoying a drink and some potato chips? Or am I wondering why the van engine is acting up?

All of the above 🙂

As the creek runs pretty well north – south at this section, and as the sun was in the west, I couldn’t get very good pics of the creek from the bridge. I did get a pic of the van lit up by all the led strips later that evening, for Jerome.

About 11 am next morning, sun made it down into the creek. Still hard to get a shot, the river rocks reflect a lot of light

Looking upstream (north).

And downstream.

We packed some food and drink and clambered down to the creek and walked up stream a short distance. My wife and Jake found the way down.

There are some small trout, and perhaps salmon fry?

You might be able to make out the bridge.

And about 6pm we packed up and drove home. Van bucking came and went, no rhyme or reason. Ah well, that’s something to figure out later. It didn’t spoil a nice little trip.

This past weekend my wife and I headed off for a quick overnight trip. We didn’t plan a destination, but ended up, again, in the area north of Port Renfrew. Snow level was much higher than it was back in January, and we managed to get up Grierson main and we had hopes of getting to the viewpoint we visited last May.

But the combo of thick crusty snow and a steep final approach thwarted us.

No really, it was steep.

We really wanted to get to the end of this spur, but no way. Just above that steep section the road flattens out.

What it looked like last May.

And this time.

And the spur we wanted to camp at, as it was last May.

And this time.

Our fire pit was still there.

So we went back down the road about 200 metres.

Wasn’t too bad, sunshine and a nice view.

Walked down the road a ways and looked at the desolation after logging.

If you look closely you might be able to see the yellow shoots of Skunk Cabbage poking up at edge of the water.

Pretty little oasis amongst the logging.

One of our dogs, loves the snow.

Cape Flattery, Olympic Peninsula, Wash. State.

We had the Go-Westy rainfly up, and the Westy pop top insulation blanket installed inside. We also brought along the Olympian Plat Cat heater (not used when sleeping). The set up worked very well, and with the pop top vent cracked overnight, we have very little condensation on the windows in the morning. Must have had some sort of chimney effect going.

A little bit of snow falling next morning.

Breakfast, and the tell-tale sign that someone in the family is a Molecular Biologist.

The old “Excelsior” at work again.

The dogs taking up space.

Then off we drove to explore more of the area. The weather cleared a little, if it wasn’t for the wind it could almost be described as mild.

Nice little lake, second growth forest.

Edinburgh Mt. in the background, steep logging in the foreground.

And wouldn’t you know it, we even checked out the Camper Creek area campsite that we spent so much time at last summer.

Ooh, kindling!

Notice how the mirrors take a bit of a lashing on these trips?

Came back home via Gordon River and Cowichan Lake (a round trip we have done many times before). Saw signs of kayakers along the Gordon – crazy folk who paddle down the canyons.

My wife and I revisited the Camper Creek watershed that we went to a month ago. We had it in mind to see if we could find the trail down to Camper Creek, near the park boundary. So we set of on Thursday afternoon and arrived at our campsite around 3 pm.  Funny thing about my stitched panoramas, the centre portion of the pic ends up narrower than it appears in real life. A bit of fog on Juan de Fuca strait, Neah Bay is over there on the other side, close to the middle of the picture and some smoke from (I think) slash burning up the hillside to the right of Neah Bay. Cap Flattery to the far right.

This fog evaporated as the afternoon wore on and we could see some of the marine traffic in the strait.

Neah Bay is behind the leftmost ship.

I’m guessing you get the idea that we didn’t do much once we got to the campsite, not much except sip cocktails, look out over the strait, and read mystery novels.  Oh and then before you know it, it was dinner time.

And three Nighthawks appeared, diving and buzzing. Very hard to get a picture of them.

A bit of an apocalyptic sunset.

Next morning the fog was back.

I took us half the day to pry our selves out of the chairs and stop reading long enough to do some exploring. We found what we think is the trial down to Camper Creek, but the dogs were acting excited and we decided not to go down it for fear of running into something that the dogs would chase. There are lots of bears around this area, no shortage of bear poop, and our dogs have a history of going after them. So we decided to drive as far northwest as the logging roads would allow, heading to where Walbran/Carmanah Park “T’s” into Pacific Rim National park. It is a logged area between Cullite Creek to the north, and Sandstone Creek to the south. Interesting area but no great campsites so back we headed to the original spot. On the way back we had a dip in a nice pond in a gravel pit (often find blasted areas at the side of the roads. The rock used for logging road construction). I’d give this pit 4 out of 5 stars.

Back to the book. I was reading “Voices” by Arnaldur Indridason. The fog never did lift form the straits that day. We wondered about the number of fog days Neah Bay must have. Here is a link with some weather data. Seems that Neah Bay has at least 14 days per month of fog.

As the sun set, the fog crept up towards us.

But then the wind changed to a land breeze and the fog was pushed back a little.

Following morning was pretty darn nice.

We packed up around noon and headed back out towards Port Renfrew. We did explore some logging spurs, nothing much to report except to say that expect some bugs when going down dank, alder lined roads like this.

There was one productive side trip, up Braden main a few kilometres. A couple of female elk trotted across the road, finding and fumbling with camera got me this “Bigfoot spotted in PNW” class picture.

Then we found a nice spot where a bridge crosses Braden Creek.

We had a dip in the (cold) water then headed home. The van ran fine throughout the trip, but I’m really starting to get tired of the front springs – I still have the originals (tin top) on, and they are just not up to the task of supporting a westy conversion. I’d like a little more lift up front and I had been thinking about spring spacers, but now I’m wondering if those 2wd westy springs I have might be worth a try. I’ll need to look over the spring data again.

Just back from a couple of days exploring the area NW of Port Renfrew. My wife and I made a trip there back in May but bad weather limited how much exploration we did. This time it looked like our summer had finally arrived so we headed out there to see what was what. Turned out the gate on Grierson main was locked so we could not make it up to the nice view point we camped at back in May, so we headed west on Camper main and found a spot just on the southern edge of Walbran Provincial Park. Yup, another campsite on a logged off area – we joked about writing a book “Slash Camping on Southern Vancouver Island”.

But the view was magnificent, looking over the logged area of Camper Creek watershed, to the south and west the virgin forest of Pacific Rim National Park (West Coast Trail), and Juan de Fuca Strait and Washington to the far south. This panorama doesn’t show the park boundaries, but just to orient you, Port Renfrew  is pretty well behind that dip on the left.

I’m not going to go on and on trying to defend our habit of camping on logging spurs, we’re just different, ok?

A bit of haze was coming in over the straits as the sun set.

Next morning, thick marine cloud had arrived.

We packed up and headed down the slope and further west, exploring spurs and dead ends. All the way to the Pacific Rim National Park boundary. On the way we found another logged view point. You almost can see our first night spot back up on the ridge to the left, middle of pic, narrow vertical grey logged area.

About 950 metres further west is the National Park boundary, it is logged right up to it.

I don’t know why I take pictures of giant stumps without some object in frame to give an idea of size, but I do. This cedar stump really is bigger than you think.

Had a look at Sandstone creek.

And then back up to to the previously scouted campsite.

It really wasn’t that bad. See the cloud still on the deck in the background?

The low cloud made the sunset quite spectacular.

The cloud started to form around us after the sun went down.

And in the morning, we got the cloud full on. Damp and chilly.

On our way back home, we stopped at a spot on the Gordon River, a few km upstream of the marina.

All in all a pretty good trip. No one got hurt, no van problems, no run ins with bears (plenty of bear poop around), and plenty of food and drink. What more can you ask for?

Addendum: some more pics from trip.

We often came across signs of cedar shake block cutting, folk salvaging something from left over wood. On this trip it was all Red Cedar, on our previous trip in the area we saw Yellow Cedar shake block cutting too.

Apart from locked gates (mostly to restrict access to active logging areas – protecting machinery), many roads are “decommissioned”. Can take the form of large ditches and gravel berms across road, or taking out bridges. The latter shown in this pic, and a tree across the road to stop folk before they go over the edge.

My quick and dirty levelling ramps worked fine.

One of our two dogs looking noble. We don’t usually have any problems with them and the local wildlife but they have chased off a bear on another trip.

And here he is, dog tired.

As I mentioned before, lots of bear poop around. I think the bears are feeding on Salmon Berries.

Another shot of the marine cloud and West Coast Trail boundary. Where I took the pic the temperature was in the mid to upper 20’s C. Next day when we were in the cloud it was around 14 C. We were sympathetic for the hikers on the trail, they probably had no idea it was so nice and warm 150 metres higher.

Not the biggest slugs in the world, but pretty big.

Some of the sandstone outcrops.

We grabbed the chance to do a little exploring on the south end of the island (Vancouver Island), specifically just northwest of Port Renfrew. The area you get to if you hang a left instead of a right after the high bridge over the Gordon River.

Typical, secondary and not heavily used logging road.

Further on, around 680 meters elevation, some old growth but mostly second growth (guessing old growth cut in the 60’s-70’s, perhaps later). Lots of Yellow Cedar, one down across road but a section at end cut and easily moved to get past (yes, patch of snow there).

And found a nice viewpoint to camp.

Olympic Peninsula (USA) in the distance, Cape Flattery on extreme right.

Like a bad haircut, or having a hightop on the van, the campsite was fine looking out, not so bucolic looking in. Still, no one around and plenty of firewood (felt like a millionaire burning Yellow Cedar, the scent is divine).

Tired dogs.

A couple of little lakes close by, here is a glimpse of one.

The clouds and rain moved in next day.

The “Excelsior” proved its worth at breakfast time.

Typical view when rain comes, looking north east.

We spent the wet day exploring the roads a little, but the low cloud made it a silly exercise. couldn’t see much. Headed back home via long loop up via Gordon River watershed and Cowichan valley (some pics of Gordon River area in this post). All in all a great little trip.

Oh, forgot to include one of those “same place, different time” shots. Side road on Gordon Main (TR4 I think), again on slash, where my son and I camped overnight while exploring region last year.

Then:

And now:

Addendum: I was asked about pressure cooker beside “The Excelsior”. It is my EKCO model I use winter camping and in the van, had it for 30+ years. I bought it second hand and it seems the model at least, dates from the ’40’s. Found an ad at this site.