June 16 – Tonquin Trail and Beach

For our last day here I was trying to decide whether to go back and finish the very last section of the Wild Pacific Trail or try something new and hike to Tonquin Beach. One night, one of our neighbours at the RV park had said that Tonquin beach was worth a visit so off we went.

Things didn’t quite turn out as planned. I didn’t really feel like a lot of hiking today but somehow I managed to get us onto the wrong trail for just over a 2 km out and back. At the sign board, there were two trails. The trails were marked correctly but the map on the board was not oriented as though you were looking at the trail. Altogether we did about 5.5 km today.

The wrong one was a nice wide trail although it did go up and down a lot.

There were interpretive sign along the way.

There was even a “You are here” map that I didn’t really look at. I wondered why they would put one in the middle of the trail where there was no junction.

Anyway the trail was just a connector to another part of town so that you could hike to the beach trail. Once we got to the end and it was just a parking lot I realized what I had done. Insert swearing here. Back we went.

On the correct trail now. An interesting dead tree.

Almost like a totem with long Viking horns.

A few flowers to look at.

The trail goes down to the beach but a branch also goes along the shore to some outlooks.  There were lots of weird stumps along this section.

The main stump was as big as a car.

We thought this one looked like a llama.

The viewpoint down on to second beach. You could not get down from there.

Then the outlook over Third Beach.

The trail ended down there but the beach didn’t look interesting enough for us to make the effort to climb down and back up.

We backtracked and headed to Tonquin Beach. The last step down is a doozy.

We were here at high tide but one of the lower ones. I wonder if that island is ever really an island.

We first walked over to the south end of the beach to explore the rocks.

There were a few small pools.

We had lunch on the rocks under this overhanging trunk.

On the other side of the island there was another section of the beach that turned out to be much more interesting.

I am guessing that this is some sort of resort with that fancy set of stairs down to the beach.

The shore had a series of what looked like dark caves but they were just long cracks in the rocks that were covered by the trees.

We noticed this nice curved bridge up on the cliff.

On looking at the map, we discovered that there is another parking lot very close by and a short trail leads to this bridge and then down to the beach. So we really didn’t need to take our trail at all but (I rationalized) we can always use the exercise.

Jennie was walking along and was startled by this person sitting against the white rocks. I guess they have very fair skin but want to get out to the beach. I never even saw them until Jennie point them out.

After we were done our exploration we headed back up the stairs to our trail back to the car.

We are moving on to explore the Comox Valley tomorrow.