Vancouver Island Nature Tours

Many of the trails on Central Vancouver Island, including the Alberni Valley, are only known by locals. Often people new to the area need to meet people who have been in the area for a while before they find out where these trails are. They are usually not mapped by anyone except perhaps by a Regional District (similar to a County Government). And they won’t give you a copy. There are rarely any signs approaching trail-heads, at them, or along them. For visitors and travelers this situation is even worse. They have no idea that there are even any trails.

Often these trails are quite lovely. They often go to wonderful places, like waterfalls, groves of old forest, unique rock formations or wonderful views. Travelers are missing out.

And this post is a first attempt to put local knowledge of trails on line. As much as possible, I will be posting GPS tracks so that people with a GPS unit can be certain they are at the trail-heads without the need for a sign.

In the Alberni Valley, there are three locations where you can find reasonably good trail information. But each of them is missing bits of information that is very helpful.

First, and best is the web page on the Alberni-Clayoquot Regional District’s site. The ACRD, as it is also known is the local regional government similar to county government in other areas. Anyway, the trails are all relatively easy except the CNPR Trail. It is quite steep in places and it is a long climb. The Adobe Acrobat files provide a good description of the trails and how to get there. However, there are no GPS files of the trails available to the public…yet!

Another other good place for hiking information is the Justabunchahikers site. The site itself is not maintained very frequently. But there are some good hike available. Look in the orange box on the left for maps. there you will find 44 mapped GPS tracks. They vary in difficulty from a mild afternoon walk to quite strenuous. The trouble with them is that they don’t give good directions to the trail head. However, I know that the person who created all the GPS tracks still has them. You can contact him through the website if you are interested in any of the hikes. From the track you will be able to figure out exactly how to get to the trail head.

The third good source of hiking trails is IslandHikes.com. The author, Craig Wagnall, otherwise known as Quagger. Is an incredibly able hiker and an excellent photographer. He has 74 hikes he has done on his site. They are all mapped on a contour map using a GPS track. Additionally, he has dots along the routes which you can click on to see photos taken at that location. Most of his hikes are strenuous, but not all. there is also a forum on his site where you can ask about or tell about trail conditions on any trail on the island. If you ask him, he might send you the GPS track. But he likes to check you out a bit so that you don’t get yourself into a dangerous situation beyond your limits or expectations.

A final site is TrailPeak.net.  This site is North America wide in scope, and even extends into Mexico. But It still has many good hikes in many parts of Vancouver Island. A large number of them have GPS tracks you can download. But they are not free, unless you upload a GPS track yourself. Otherwise you have to pay a $25 US fee to obtain 5 Credits. That’s enough to download 5 tracks.

I have added all these links to the links section of this site.

More to in the coming weeks…