Bamfield

Well, there's no turning back now!


Jeremy and company picked me up at 5:30 a.m. and Edward drove us all to the airport. My pack felt very heavy. I didn't get an accurate weight on it, but I think it's around 37 pounds. Yikes!


We landed in Vancouver and hijacked a free shuttle ride to the seaplane terminal. Funny story. We picked up a free shuttle phone and they came and picked us up and dropped us off at their seaplane terminal. We "realized" we had the wrong company so we tipped her generously and walked 100 feet down the road to our seaplane terminal.


It was fun to watch the seaplanes take off and land. When ours landed, we were told by a guy on the dock to "watch this guy land his plane." This pilot was the Dukes of Hazard of seaplanes! He landed, taxied in, climbed out the top of his plane, jumped down to the pontoon and floated alongside the dock where he jumped off and tied it up. ALL BY HIMSELF! Oh, and he wasn't your typical 18 year old Bo and Luke Duke. He was a 60 year old Duke's of Hazard. I was very impressed.


Our plane was an old 1953 Beechcraft. It was in the original Godzilla movie as well as Jurassic Park. It was ancient. We flew only about 300 feet off the ground, up mountain valleys, below the tops of the mountains most of the time. The view was breathtaking. We could communicate with headsets. We landed in Bamfield Inlet as lightly as if on marshmallows.

After another solo Duke's of Hazard docking by our 60 year old spry-as-a-spring-chicken pilot, we were instructed to "turn right off the dock and walk 2000 steps to our hotel". We checked in and took a taxi to the Orientation office to pick up our hiking permits.


Jeremy had promised us that we would be hiking 4 hours per day and sitting with our feet up in the sand for the rest of the day. At the orientation session we learned that the last 5 km of the trail would take us 5 hours. Red flags went up as we realized this wasn't a regular hike. In fact, there was so much information given at the information session, I was grateful that Julie took some notes.

Back at the hotel, we had supper, explored Bamfield and tried to replan our hike. We had originally planned to hike 13 km on the last day. However, being told it would take us 5 hours to hike 5 km made us rethink that. We improvised a New and Improved Hiking Schedule.