Long Beach vacation day 5
Wednesday October 14, 2009.
My goals for today were to walk the lengh of Combers Beach (the next one south of Long Beach) and to visit Schooner Cove, which is where my parents lived and where (I just learned) I was conceived.
A digression first: Before I embarked on this vacation, I looked through my photos to try and find pictures from my childhood visit to Long Beach, with the intent of rephotographing them. I only found one, which was a picture of a sand castle I made as a child with some islands in the background. Yesterday I didn’t spot any locations that might have been it, but today with a bit of a shock I spotted those islands right outside my resort cabin! Confirmed by phone with my mother: we stayed at a campground that is just up the beach from where I am now. Here are the original and rephotographed versions side by side (no sand castle this time; not because I didn’t want to make one but because it was cold and rainy and I don’t have any suitable clothes for scrambling around in the sand):
It was interesting to reflect on standing in the same place almost two decades later, but it didn’t really give me the same cognitive dissonance effect that you might expect; not much has changed here and the site wasn’t really familiar enough to me. It’d be different if this were a place I had spent years and a lot of the surroundings had changed. Anyway, end of rephotography digression.
So I went down to Combers Beach. The walk down from the parking lot went through a tunnel through a dark and scary bunch of trees. These trees were so competitive and yet so stunted by the constant strong wind and sand and salt blasting they get that almost no light gets through their canopy. There is no undergrowth:
When I reached the beach the tide was high but on its way out. It was reaching almost to the end of the path, but by the time I got back it was out far enough to take the photo above.
I walked north first, all the way back to Green Point, and climbed on the rocks again a bit. I had been expecting it to be really rainy here based on the weather at the resort this morning, so I put a rain jacket over top of my warm jacket and also put on rain pants. This will become important later. The weather at Combers Beach was quite different though; it was dry (almost no rain) with a very high wind; there were sheets of sand blowing along the beach and making small dunes around the driftwood. The sun actually broke through the clouds a few times.
Saw a couple more beached jellyfish and also a live crab of a species I haven’t encountered before:
I was going to continue south on the beach past where I entered, but I was quickly blocked by a small river crossing the beach, too deep to cross without getting my feet soaked. Checking my map later, I discovered that the section south of this river is called Wickaninnish Beach and is accessible from another parking lot – maybe something for tomorrow. So onward to my next destination: Schooner Cove.
Access to Schooner Cove from the nearest parking lot is via a trail that skirts the edge of the nearby indian reservations. The trail is the most incredible boardwalk I’ve ever seen. It’s a full kilometer long and has a lot of ups and downs, even dipping in and out of a small canyon at one point. Very Ewok village. However, I rather doubt this is how my parents used to reach the cove when they lived here, and on checking by phone afterwards it seems they used to cut right through the reservation. Oh well.
Remember I mentioned the rain pants earlier? Yeah. Since it was windy, dry and not too cold at Combers Beach, I took them off and switched back to a camera that couldn’t be safely stowed in a pocket. Mistake. As soon as I reached the water here I found myself in an incredible downpour. Just a plain, no-nonsense soaker. I was soaked to the bone within half a minute and having a very difficult time keeping water out of my camera.
Also the tide was still a bit high here and it didn’t look like I could get very far even without the rain. So I turned around and trudged back up the kilometer of stairs to the parking lot, and headed back to the resort for a hot shower and a dry-off. Only the power was out when I got there. Damn! So I just put on dry clothes and went into Tofino to explore.
Not much to say about that. Like Ucluelet, it’s a small town with a heavy emphasis on tourist-soaking. They do seem to get a lot of custom from the natives who come and go by boat from here though.
Several of the local business were running on gas generators; I guess power failures are not uncommon here either. I picked up some snacks at the local bakery, The Common Loaf, then noticed the sky was clearing up.
I rushed back to the resort with the intention of trying to take a time-lapse movie of the sunset. I actually would have loved to make a movie of the tide coming in and out at Long Beach, but there was nowhere to get enough power for that. I will think about portable power solutions for the future. The power did come back on while I was filming, which is why there is a slight frame skip partway through this movie, and it did cloud over again before sunset, but presented anyway is this experiment: 900 frames at 5 seconds per frame, covering a span of 75 minutes – so about 150 times realtime. d20091014c.avi – it’s high-def, so best to save locally before playing. If you’re missing the codec, it’s called “h.263+”.
End of second full beach day. Today’s GPS track:
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