God's Country, Your Backyard

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God's Country, Your Backyard
Vancouver Island is just a short ferry ride away. It only feels like you've died and gone to heaven.

By Kevin Brooker

Freshly launched in our sea kayaks, we're slicing into the steady offshore currents along the west coast of Vancouver Island, the mostly wilderness landmass across the Strait of Georgia from Canada's far left shore. Ahead, through parting mist and gusts teeming with cormorants and whimbrels, we see sheer, volcanic walls topped by a shaggy ancient forest that stares down upon the cold wrath of the North Pacific. Between the black-green of the forest and the gray-green of the water there seems to be a palpable tension, as if the two represent opposing armies. It's the kind of wild intensity you'd expect to find in the vast isolation of Alaska's shore. But here? A Seattleite, after all, can get to the island in three lattes and one gorgeous ferry crossing. Who knew the edge of the world was this easy to reach?

But that's Vancouver Island—so far out, yet so close to town. Three hundred miles long and about 50 miles wide, the island has a glacier-capped granite spine that rises more than 7,200 feet above the sea and divides the tempestuous, sparsely populated rainforests of the west coast from the settled groves of the east. On its hypercrenulated periphery there are smaller islands and islets by the thousands, and everywhere dark water throbs with ten-foot tides, fanning blooms of yellow branching coral, starfish, and anemones.

If the ferry ride from the mainland tells you anything, it's that this evergreen archipelago is spectacular when surveyed from an offshore vantage. Indeed, it's a sea kayaker's dream, where you can put in virtually anywhere. On the protected Inside Passage, in the northern section of the Strait of Georgia, you'll find white-sand coves where the water temperature nudges into the seventies by mid-July. From June through October you may even find yourself paddling alongside a pod of cruising orcas. Farther south, the leeward Gulf Islands are dotted with obscure ashrams, impossibly cute B&Bs, and the occasional monster cottage of a Hollywood superstar. (Robin Williams sleeps here.)

On Vancouver Island's rugged windward side, the muscular Pacific can slap you good. But thanks to the islet-studded fjords radiating from a series of west-coast sounds, even a novice kayaker can dial up rough water or smooth, tuning a wilderness experience to any desired intensity. Of these sounds, Clayoquot, roughly halfway up the western shore, is perhaps the most beguiling. Starkly beautiful yet deeply scarred by rapacious logging over the years, Clayoquot is a microcosm of the larger struggle for the future of the island's natural wonders. It's here that some of Canada's most highly publicized timber battles have been waged. And it's here, strangely, that you feel most overpowered by nature, by the silence of a kayak plying the churning sea.