West Coast Trail, Part III: The Flood

Apologies for a much delayed post on the continuing West Coast Trail adventures.  Some knee surgery with complications made it rough to even get to my computer for a while, but thankfully I’m doing much better now and am well on my way to playing ultimate again next year (fingers crossed!).

Back to the trail, the rain continued on and off, and we tackled even taller ladders, a long suspension bridge (I thought that was fun) and a chilly river crossing.   We managed to ride out one particularly nasty horizontal rain spell with burgers and hot cocoa at Chez Monique’s, a welcome food haven on day 4.

Lots of beautiful scenery.

Dev and Jason not impressed by the size of their supposed 2-man tent.

My “it’s not raining!”  smile.

 The toughest part of the trail came the evening of day 4 while camping at Walbran.  We dragged ourselves into camp at close to 7 pm and there were few potential camp sites left.  We made sure we were well above the high tide line and set up our tents just as a major storm rolled in.    As the winds whipped up and the rain fell harder, Dev couldn’t keep the flame going on our little camp stove.   The others still like quoting my cry of “Deeeeeeeev!  Screw dinner!” as we all retreated to our tents sustaining ourselves on trail mix and builder’s bars.   Even worse was the realization that I had forgotten to stow away our food before bed and had to take off my nice warm pajamas, put my stinky wet clothes back on again and struggle through the wind and rain to find the bear cache for our food bags.

We all settled down for a stormy night and I was just about to turn my headlamp off for the night when I noticed my hiking shoes in my tent vestibule were floating.  Apparently the storm sustained 50 mm of rain / hour for a short while which was enough to flood the nearby river and our campsite.  We frantically moved to higher ground in the middle of the night and thankfully managed to avoid completely soaking our down sleeping bags.  That night we played the game of “how much money would you be willing to pay right now to be magically transported to a warm, dry room with a bed?”.

Here I am standing where our tent was the night before.  By  morning the river had already retreated back to its normal banks.

 The day after the storm dawned cloudy but no rain.   Our luck was changing!  Stay tuned for our triumphant, sunny finish.