June 13 – Laverty Falls and Herring Cove

I have officially given up carrying my heavy DSLR camera and have been exclusively using the camera on my Google Pixel phone. The quality isn’t quite a match since the lens is so much smaller but the convenience outweighs that. It can do the photospheres, automatically stitch together panoramas and today I found that it could do the blurred waterfall pictures. The only thing it doesn’t so well is zoomed shots because it is a digital zoom where it just crops the full size shot vs an optical zoom which keep the full resolution.

All the things we are doing here in the national park, have done on our previous visits but they are worth doing again.

Today we did the hike to Laverty Falls . I was a bit worried about doing this one because of the bugs. On the way into the park on Sunday the ticket booth had been swarmed by black flies. This hike is also in the middle of the park away from the coast. They were pretty bad but not as bad as expected. Jennie got a bunch of bites, mostly on her legs through her pants which we can’t figure out.

The hike is 2.5 km one way and descends about 400 vertical feet to the falls in an almost constant slope. Over that distance the incline is not that much but coming back because there is no let up, it got to be quite a grind. And it was hot today.

Some of the trail was pretty smooth.

But for most of the way there were lots of roots to navigate.

And some easy stream crossings.

You arrive first at the top of the falls.

I checked out upstream before we headed to the bottom.

A photosphere.

Looking back at Jennie.

Then the short trail down to the bottom and our slightly early lunch spot.

Of course I had to rock hop to get closer.

And the blurred version.

And the photosphere.

We had the place to ourselves for a while and then were joined by several other groups.

Eventually we headed back. Thankfully today we had left a bottle of ice water in the car which was a real treat after the long hot climb.

By now it was only around 1 o’clock so we decided to head down to an easily accessible beach to cool off.

You can drive almost right to Herring Cove Beach and then take a set of stairs down from the parking lot.There are 150 steps (Jennie counted) which was OK going down but again a bit of slog coming back up.

 

As it is near low tide the beach was huge.

There was a very distinct divide between the muddy and clear water.

While Jennie did her thing I headed off to the interesting rocks on the point.

Looking back at Jennie.

There were lots of interesting sculpted rocks around the point.

Again the photosphere does a better job.

And then home for a nap.