May 24 – Newcastle Island

Another cloudy morning, where the forecast said it would get mostly sunny in the afternoon. This time it actually did.

Today we took a short ferry ride from downtown Nanaimo over to Newcastle Island Provincial Marine Park. There are many trails on the island but the one that we did follows the shoreline all the way around. In the brochure it said the length was 7.5 km. With all the rock and beach scrambling that we did, along with a wrong turn, the GPS said that we did just over 10 km. We were really wiped out by this one and near the end were just moving in zombie mode.

The ferry is runs on every hour and is just for hikers and campers (there is a small campground on the island). No cars obviously.

We caught the first one at 10 am. There was one other couple on the trip. The captain said that yesterday, being Victoria Day, it was a zoo all day.

We did the loop in the counter clockwise direction.The annotations will have meaning later.

Looking back at downtown through the small gap between Newcastle Island and Protection Island.

If there is a beach, Jennie will investigate.

The long grass in this field had some great wavy patterns.

It looked like this tree root was a ghost roaring up out of the ground to attack Jennie.

A very fast Pileated Woodpecker. It was hard to catch him in a picture.

It wasn’t long before we abandoned the trail in the forest to be back out on the shoreline.

This point was covered in stone that looked like it had once been flowing mud.

If we had followed the trail and come out to the point, we would have just seen this view and not known what was out there.

The next section of shore looked a bit rough so it was back in the forest again.

We popped out on another section that had what looked like an old totem pole washed up on shore.

Can’t keep Jennie away from the water. She found this interesting seaweed.

Back to the forest.

The trail ran along the top of some very high cliffs for a while, far enough back that we couldn’t see down until we came to our lunch spot at Giovando Lookout.

The brochure said that when it was clear you could see the coast mountains. Not today.

Also according to the brochure this is where Gibsons is located, of the TV show The Beachcombers fames.

The trail continued around the point to the west side of the island, staying high up above the water. We saw a trail that looked like it went down.

It did not. There was about a 10 foot drop that I could not see away around. I guess a lot of people tried this. I took a picture from where I got stopped.

Eventually the real trail dropped down to the beach and I went back to check out the cliffs.

As I was walking along, I spotted this guy along the base of the cliffs. He was going my way so warily continued on. There a supposed to be blond, almost white racoons on the island but we did not see one.

It is hard to judge the size of the cliffs until you find the tiny me in the picture below.

Looking back at Jennie.

From here we see could the Sugarloaf Mountain viewpoint, that we had been to the other day.

I am assuming this was an iron something due to the rust colour.

We saw a lot of these things on the beach. They are the remnants of the egg case of a Moon Snail.

I headed up to rest on the next point while Jennie continued her exploration.

An interesting arbutus tree.

We are now along the narrow channel between the island and the mainland. Endless marinas.

We watched this float plane take off.

We continued around this beach. The actual trail went inland from where I am standing. At the end of the beach there was a “trail” which we made the mistake of following.

We ended up out on the very rocky shoreline staring up at a massive cliff. The real trail was on top and there was no way up. So back we went.

That detour took a lot out of us so once we were back on the trail we just walked on automatic.

 

As we got close to the dock we saw the ferry leave the other side. Our timing was just about right. It leaves the island on the half hour and it was now 3:15.

There was a family of geese on the lawn. As soon as the ferry got close to the dock they all rushed over to sit and watch.

We had planned to go get groceries afterwards but there was no way that was happening. When we got back to the RV, we crashed for a 2 hour “nap”.