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Gambier Island (Mis)adventure

Wed 06 June 2007

It take a while to get back to normal after a fun weekend. I took my Ford Focus on it's first major highway trip, to Vancouver. It seems to have no lingering tiredness like I do, but perhaps that is because we--myself, my friend Tanya, and three of her friends--left it behind at the Horseshoe Bay ferry docks on Saturday while we travelled to one of the gulf islands in an attempt to hike to Gambier Lake on Gambier Island.

I say attempt because we never actually made it to Gambier Lake. Who knew that such a small island could have so many old and active logging roads? After we had gotten off the ferry and went up a short hill to the Gambier Island General Store, which looked a lot more like a kitchen/dining room than a store, we found a local who offered to drive us up the road to the trailhead. We piled into the back of his pickup truck, which looked like it had been used to haul all kinds of things, from construction tools to plastic bins to a full load of garden dirt. There was a good inch-thick layer of garden soil still in the truck bed and a uniform, thinner, ground-in layer on the seats, too. On the way in we passed a French couple carrying overnight backpacking gear, whose presence prompted our driver to slow down and ask if they were still too afraid of him to want a ride. "It's haunted, you know," our driver said, with a fearsome look on his face, and revved off.

Here is a photo of our driver and us on the veranda of the Gambier Island General Store:

The next hour or two (we lost all sense of time, which was later proven when I erroneously told everyone my watch said 4:00pm and no one questioned the time, even though it was really only 2:00) we spent wandering around in circles and to dead ends and back, occasionally running into the French couple, who were just as lost as we were. Finally we realized by observing the topography of a nearby hill that we had turned off the main trail well ahead of the proper turnoff, and were wandering around a new development unmentioned in our hiking trail book!

Back on the right path, a truck rushed by containing a local driver and some Asian tourists. They slowed down just enough as they were passing for Tanya to ask them where they were going. "To see the Big Tree!" was the only answer the passengers had time to shout gleefully before we were left in a cloud of dust. I wonder if they ever found the Big Tree. The fact that a local was driving them provides some hope, but really, these are the gulf islands, and the climate is moderate and coastal. All the trees are Big Trees.

After the tourists had passed us, we really didn't see much of anyone. We found a trail that didn't seem to go in the direction we wanted to go, another that quickly ended in forest, and a third that, after a few minutes of walking, was suddenly covered by fallen trees as far as the eye could see.

After all that, I got home curious and looked up the Gambier Lake trail on Google. Here is what I found:

There are many old skidder roads and trails, which are not marked or mapped, running off the marked trails. Remain continually aware of which trail you are on to avoid getting lost. (Gambier Island Conservancy

Remain continunally aware of which trail you are on, eh? The trail markers consist of ribbons, and their colour-coding doesn't match the trail book's indications. Remaining continually aware of which trail one is on seems a difficult, if not impossible, task. The colour-coding scheme seems deliberately designed to confuse unwary hikers. Combined with the circular and dead-end roads, this island is very mysterious, indeed.

Like our driver said, maybe the island is haunted. Or maybe our driver was so bored and crazy from living on an unhaunted isolated gulf island for so many years that he decided to make it appear haunted by switching the trail markers, felling trees across trails, and altering the trails and terrain (hence the dirt in the bed of his pickup). Maybe the French couple's refusal of his ride offer shows they were on to something after all.