June 9 – Wild Pacific Trail Lighthouse Loop

This morning was cool but mostly sunny so we headed down to Ucluelet to do a loop of the Wild Pacific Trail that is out at the end of a peninsula. We just did the section in the lower right of the map below. The map says it should be 2.6 km. Our GPS said 3.8 and it is probably somewhere in between with all the wandering that we did..

 

This is a really well maintained trail. It sticks as close to the coast as it can, on a wide smooth path.

Most of the time we weren’t right on the cliff edge but there were little paths out to viewpoints everywhere. And they actually were viewpoints because they trimmed down the salal so that you could clearly see without any obstructions. The guard rails were unusual as well.

 

Lots of twisty trees.

This sort of looked like a yelling face.

The views from the trail were good.

But we wanted to get closer so we followed an unofficial trail down onto the rocks.

I checked out the tide pools. I have no idea what this is.

Jennie checked out the flowers.

Continuing on.

Our pet peeve with a lot of places is how most viewpoints could be made so much better with a little trimming. No problem here.

Amphitrite Lighthouse.

We did some more rocky exploring.

Endless great viewpoints.

There was a side trail down to a rocky beach with some more tide pools.

There looked like there was a sandy beach around the bay but the tide was too high to get to it.

I thought that this pool was full of snails.

But each shell had a little crab in it.

Another unknown creature.

Back up to the main loop.

Looking down at that beach around the corner.

Up and over the hill in the middle of the peninsula and back to the car.

We thought that this stump looked like a horse with a flowing mane.

Our path. You can see all the little spikes out from the main trail as we hit the viewpoints.

We went to another section of the trail because it was early but by now it was getting darker and colder so we quickly turned around and just went home.