Cathedral Grove
No sooner had we gone to bed last night, early, around 8:30 since it was so dark, and we were both tired from the long day of ferry crossing yesterday, than it started to rain. At first it was very light, but it continued all night, until we awoke. Then it stopped for a bit tempting us to get out and start breakfast, but it soon started again with a real downpour as we stood under the rear door of the Yukon using it as a rain shelter. It did stop again though, so we got the tent down without getting the inside too wet, though the fly was thoroughly soaked.
It was a slow drive across the island to Pacific Rim National Park as the road is very twisted. It did stop raining somewhere along the way, but not until after we had gone through the huge trees of Cathedral grove. We stopped there, got one of the last available parking spots, and spent almost an hour admiring the huge Western Red Cedar and Douglas Fir on the site. I saw one young girl of about fourteen who obviously was not as thrilled with the spectacular views of the forest as she was in texting on her cell phone. I thought “what a sad comment that is on society, that you can’t enjoy the real beauty here because you are so wrapped up in technology.”
Greenpoint Camground is not very full. It is the last day, Monday, of the long weekend, and we met hundreds of cars exiting the area all along the highway in. It was a steady stream of cars and campers on the opposite side of the road heading home, and very few going our way in to the park.
The weather is dull and very foggy, but it hasn’t rained since we arrived. We’re set up in a nice campsite under the huge moss covered cedars here. Our tent is drier, but not dry, as the floor is still damp, but we’ll make do. After we had the tent and the tarp set up we went for a long stroll of a couple of kilometres along the beach. It was low tide and we enjoyed watching the anemones, mussels and very small fish in some of the tide pools. The fish were not more than a couple of inches long, but they were aggressively tearing at one of the mussels whose shell was partially open.