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Travel Story

Vargas Island

Journey to Ahous Beach

Photography by Louise Christie

A stiff breeze impels me towards the federal wharf in Tofino just as surely as it whisks spindrift from the swells of surf that break on nearby Long Beach in Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. Now that the strengthening sun has routed the hamatsa , or cannibal spirits, of winter, I’m journeying to the west side of Vancouver Island in search of change. After a winter of layering myself in Gore-Tex, fleece, and polypropylene, I’m more than ready to succumb to the summer urge to hop, skip, and go naked.

My weekend destination is Ahous Beach on Vargas Island, five kilometres north of Tofino. All but deserted since the Ahousat First Nations moved northeast from Vargas’s outer coast to Flores Island’s sheltered inner shoreline in the 1880s, the wind still plays and whispers through the salal and Sitka spruce, and across the shell middens in grassy clearings where their villages once stood. Vargas boasts one of the largest collections of Native heritage sites in Clayoquot Sound.

By prior arrangement, Neil Buckle meets me at the First Street dock in Tofino and ferries me and my backpack to Vargas in his trusty aluminum skiff. It’s a 30-minute ride north across Templar Channel and around Wickaninnish Island to the Vargas Island Inn, which he and his wife Marilyn have operated since the 1970s on property that his grandparents first homesteaded in 1910. A haven for kayakers, the inn also marks the start of an old telegraph trail, constructed after the establishment of a lifesaving station in Tofino in 1913, that leads three kilometres west across island to Ahous Beach.

As much as I’d like to paddle my way around the 60-square kilometre island to Ahous Beach, my respect for the power of the exposed open ocean exceeds my kayaking skills. My backpack may weigh 20 kilos, but carrying that burden for what amounts to little more than a one-hour hike is a small price to pay for peace of mind. And as I’m not counting on finding fresh water, I’m carrying enough to last several days.

Buffeted by storms that often drop as much as a 15 centimetres of rain per day, much of low-lying Vargas Island – about half of which is provincial park – is a blend of soggy peat bog and crescent-shaped sand berms. Fortunately, a corduroy of cedar planks and shore pine poles covers much of the trail. It provides a raised surface across which I pick my way past pink western bog laurel blossoms and strawberry-hued hummocks of peat moss. A peregrine falcon circles lazily above while a banana slug the size of a Popsicle hugs the ground below.

The going turns a shade sketchy for the last kilometre. A sign warns that the trail is officially closed, a formality to protect B.C. Parks from liability in case of an accident. (A similar notice is also posted on their web page.) As it stands, anyone with waterproof footwear and a modicum of balancing skills should do just fine.

I strain to detect sounds of surf as I push through an almost impenetrable barrier of salal shrubs densely interwoven with dwarf red cedar. With a final heave, I force myself and my backpack through the trail’s dim channel, then burst out onto sunlit Ahous Beach. Small wonder that here on the notorious "graveyard of the Pacific" shipwrecked sailors needed such a trail, even a rough one, if they ever hoped to find their way through the thicket in search of help. The trick would be finding the trailhead in the first place. On Ahous, a pile of flotsam and jetson marks the entrance.

At first glance, Ahous Beach seems impossibly large. The upturned corners of its two-kilometre crescent shape are shrouded in mist. Not surprisingly, the hardpacked sand beach occasionally serves as a rough airstrip for those who arrive by light plane. Aside from a pod of kayakers barely visible at one end, today the beach is mine alone.

I shrug off my pack, wriggle out of my hiking boots, and barefoot it towards the ocean whose rise and fall has etched an intricately-woven pattern of curved lines in the sand. Absent-mindedly, my feet trace these outlines, which quickly induces a heady sense of intoxication. I half-credit this to the overload my central nervous system is experiencing at suddenly having to absorb so much sensory input in such a short span of time. A sudden splash of chilly seawater across my chest clears my mind. I manage to wade up to my waist before turning tail as a swell steamrolls me into the briny surf. As I would discover after sunset, at night the breakers glow like northern lights with misty green bioluminescence.

What I need to find now is the sheltered side of a log where I can dry off and stake out a place to pitch my tent. As much as I’d like to sleep under the stars, I recall that early morning dew settles as heavily as rain. Although there are no bears on the island I plan to hang a food rope and prepare my meals at a driftwood shelter away from my campsite so as not to attract the attention of a pack of grey wolves that call Vargas home – as mutely attested to by prints I’d spotted beside the trail during my cross-island hike.

In the lee of the on-shore breeze, I make note of everything I hope to accomplish during my stay, such as scan for grey whales whose northern migration route leads between the beach and nearby Blunden Island. I’m just as keen to explore the myriad of life forms revealed in intertidal pools midway along the beach where hermit crabs scuttle among purple starfish and giant green anemones at the base of islets that become landlocked at low tide. More than anything else, I want to find several rocky clefts choked with bleached Pacific blue mussel shells cast up above the tideline in natural middens, a vivid memory from a previous visit. Only then will I turn my attention to gathering some fresh mollusks for dinner. Countless numbers colonize the wave-lashed headlands, testimony to the old saw that when the tide is out, the table is indeed spread. Let’s say grace.

ACESS: Tofino lies 227 kilometres northwest of Vancouver (via Nanaimo and Parksville) at the northern terminus of Highway 4. Clayoquot Connections (250-726-8789) provides water taxi service between Tofino and Vargas Island. The Vargas Island Inn (250-725-3309) has a variety of accommodations, from campsites to individual cabins. Good sources of information on Tofino and Vargas Island include the Tofino Information Centre (250-725-3414; www.tofinobc.org/ , March to October), the Pacific Rim Tourism Association (1-866-725-7529; www.pacificrimtourism.ca/ ), and B.C. Parks (wlapwww.gov.bc.ca/bcparks/).