The Long Beach Unit, situated inbetween Ucluelet and Tofino, of the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve is a very diverse piece of protected land. It’s got beaches, windswept coastal forests, lush temerate rainforests and wetlands. And everything within a twenty minute stretch of highway.
Saturday (5/5), we spent an entire day hiking on the extremely easily accessible trails in the park. The first trail we took was along the shoreline, and after taking a photo of the ocean I turned around to find the girls standing neatly in a line waiting for me. Adorable. But that was the last time they waited for me. I’m not an easy traveling partner – but all of the girls wanted to copy my photos on Sunday night. So I’m not all bad.
The trails were really crazy easy to hike. It was not at all like the rough, narrow trail in Goldstream Provincial Park. And most of them weren’t longer than a couple of kilometers. I think that there is a good chance that this park might be one of the most easily accessible rainforests in the world.
Me, trying to hug a red cedar. I simply can’t understand how evolution has been able to create these trees. What the advantage was. But they’re magnificent.
And when one tree dies and falls down, new ones start growing on top of it, feeding on the nutrients in the dead trunk. That’s why there’s also trees that seem to be growing a meter above ground, with air inbetween their roots. Those are trees that started growing on a dead trunk, and continue standing above ground once the trunk has decomposed.
Frida had a goal with this day: that we should walk ten kilometers, or one Swedish mile aw she put it. Well, adding all the trails we walked, plus the extra turns around the beaches, I’m pretty sure we reached that goal. Poor Kate, she was exhausted. She wasn’t used to our crazy, hearty, out-doorsy Scandinavian pace.
Katja Malmborg 