Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

In addition to the recent hike on the West Coast Trail, I enjoyed a few smaller adventures on Vancouver Island recently. Enjoy the photos! Besides the beaches on the trail, we visited Quadra Island and found some pretty beaches there. Tidepools with crabs, as well as tiny fish and shrimp (not shown). Comox Harbour Rebecca Spit. Of course, with a name like that, I had to visit! I also took a hike in the Paradise Lakes area of Strathcona Provencial Park. Paradise Meadows Battleship Lake Mountain stream Of course, a trip like this was also all about the ferries (all told, including the tiny "ferry" that took us down the lake to start the backpack trip, we rode 5). Large BC Ferries vessels to take us from Tsawassen (Vancouver BC) to Nanaimo. Leaving Vancouver, Mt. Baker dominates the skyline to the south. There's a sharp line where the muddied waters of the Fraser River flow into the Salish Sea. The small ferries that serve Quadra and the other islands are open-ended like the

True confessions time: I went for a hike yesterday instead of working on my photos and writing this post. So the weekend post is going up mid-day on Saturday. I also have a problem: a quick skim through my photos from the West Coast Trail (a mere 4-day trip and less than half the whole trail) had me selecting over 80 photos I want to share. I had to trim that down a LOT.   I did this hike in the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve on the west coast Vancouver Island July 18-21 with  my friend Sumi. She handled the logistics of permits and transportation--a non-trivial effort for which I am very grateful! Our hike was intended to be 2 night and 3 days, but because they warn that the trail can have issues--washouts, high water, inconvenient tides--we got the permit for 3 nights. By the end of the first day we had figured out two things: miles on this trail are a lot longer than on other trails, and we wanted to stay out there as long as we could. That led to an easy decision to shorten our