What a sensational area! Thank you, David and Sue!
We moved the RV from Burnaby near Vancouver to a town east of there, Aldergrove, and left it there for a few days. We boarded the car ferry from Tsawwassen to Nanaimo and drove the twisty but mostly good road over to the west side. We stayed in a "cabin", a small house, in Ucluelet, and hiked and saw the sights in the area.
As Ucluelet and Tofino are on the west coast of a range of mountains on the island, the area they are in has all the features of western slopes in most places, that is, tons of rain! This is a rain forest. There is a national park that protects a large section of the land along the Pacific Coast called the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve (a reserve because the Canadian government is still negotiating with the First People over land use). It is spectacular! We have seen the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, but we think this beats that. We hiked many of the trails in the park and explored several of the beaches.
The forests are dense with green foliage of every imaginable type: ferns; cedar, hemlock and Sitka spruce trees that are HUGE; other plants, moss, fungus, grasses, wildflowers, bushes, and much more, all growing on top of each other, competing for space and light. This is old growth forest. Trees are hundreds of years old. The dead ones serve as "nurse trees" on which other trees grow, a tangle of living and decaying plant matter, huge dead trees lying on the forest floor, covered with other plant life. Huge living trees with mammoth root systems and gnarled trunks and limbs. Trees are so tall that the tops can't be seen, just like the giant Sequoia in California, I think bigger than the coastal redwoods of California. It is WET, and, indeed, it has rained every day we have been here.
Here are some photo examples of what we saw on our various hikes on trails with names like Wild Pacific Trail, Schooner Cove Trail with its long boardwalks and stairs (lots of stairs!), Rainforest Trail (more boardwalks and stairs), Shorepine Bog Trail, Nuu-chah-nulth Trail, Long Beach, New Trail at Tofino, and a few more.
The boardwalk going down to Schooner Cove
Nurse tree
Rocks in the tidal zone covered with barnacles and mussels
Fantastic tide pools
Big driftwood logs piled up on the beaches
Well, maybe these give the idea. I don't think my photos convey the hugeness of the forest trees, the density of the growth, the wetness of the forest and the beauty of the ocean, rocks, tide pools, views from the cliffs, etc.
We got in our kayak one rainy morning and went out for a paddle on a sheltered bay. Fun, a little wet, cold and windy for my taste, but we were glad we did it.
No shore birds here now except for a few gulls here and there. We saw ravens, two kingfishers, heard a few song birds in the dense forests, and saw one eagle soaring above us. This is a great birding area, on the Pacific Flyway, but most of the migrating shore birds are gone - they have moved north for the breeding season. We were a few weeks too late to see them in the numbers that fly through here.
Back to our RV tomorrow on the ferry. It was really nice when we came over. It will be raining again tomorrow.
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