Buzz

By the time we arrived in Campbell River town we'd eaten most of our delicious foods, so we stopped first at the local supermarket. Janine went in while I sat in the van, reading up on where we'd be riding and listening to the local radio station. Our "Guide to Mountain-Biking on Vancouver Island" devoted a few pages to the Campbell River region, including a map which showed a bunch of trails, and a couple of suggested loops. It also advised checking with the local bike shop for a detailed trail map, but a) we'd ridden a couple of times already using the maps in the book and had had only minor issues, and b) I could see the local bike shop from where I was sitting*, and it was closed. Accordingly, Janine's reappearance with new delicious foods heralded a blast out to the watertower carpark (via a 30km forgot-to-read-the-bit-about-how-to-get-there detour) for some forest action.

Unfortunately, the water tower looked quite different from its picture, and the carpark was deserted, so we weren't certain we were in the right place and went looking for alternative spots down some seriously shitty roads before returning to the only tower in the vicinity for a slap-up feast of burrito-like things. Set off on the bikes, found the trailhead, and were instantly befuddled as no less than four trails meandered away where our map said there should be one. Sigh. Janine's charming self to the rescue saw a helpful local helpfully tell us which trail was the one we sought and where he thought we should head. Then he gave us his own trail map, which was four times the size and massively more detailed than the one in the book. Thanks, helpful local!

The Campbell River trail network lives across the Snowden Demonstration Forest** and the Elk Falls Provincial Park, covers a sizeable area, and contains some of the best riding I've found anywhere; as good or better than Rotorua outback trails before SouthStar started shuttling people to the top of the hill and killed the flow of the trails. We rode fast and for hours, and the riding outshone the wildlife (especially once the "elk" I was stalking turned out to be a horse ridden by a fat ugly woman drinking pepsi from a can). The not-scared-of-YOU chipmunk was pretty cool though. We found a hydro dam and a trail called Sanitarium (which we didn't ride). Got mildly lost, just for a change.

After the ride, we had a decent gravel road drive to Gosling Lake, where we camped overnight. We were almost cleaned out by a huge pickup towing a HUGE caravan at really high speeds straight down the middle of the road (our van handled the off-road avoidance detour rather well), and saw an eagle (which was ENORMOUS!) at a lake which had ruins which indicated it had once had a bridge of sorts across it.

Gosling Lake was deserted. A local family turned up, had a picnic, and left again in the early evening, but apart from that we had the place to ourselves, which was both pretty cool (NAKED!) and kind of scary (What was that noise?). There were shotgun shells in the firepits, which made me wonder when the locals were going to turn up for beer- and bourbon-fuelled shootin' and hollerin', and the (really loud!) chorus of frogs from the swamp at the south-west corner of the lake had a disconcerting habit of falling totally silent (as they did when we went looking for them) at irregular intervals, leaving me wondering who or what was on its way into camp. Janine was blissfully untroubled by any such paranoid musings, and instead of fretting did practical things like tie our tarpaulin (we have a tarpaulin?) between four trees to provide shelter from the light rain for the picnic table we were using. As usual, the lake was full of fish. Somewhat less usual was the raft tied up to the jetty (we sat on it but didn't take it out), and the massive amount of splashing from the far end of the lake at one point in the evening, where something big (bear? cougar?) was doing something (fishing? bathing?).

Saw our second hummingbird, which was the first one I've seen close-up. The noise of its wings was incredibly loud; it was like being near a gigantic insect, only without the revulsion.





* = Luckily the parking lot was out of sight of the local Little League baseball field we passed on the way in to town - I'm pretty sure that in a town that size a scruffy, smelly bloke sitting in a big white van which used to be red next to where a bunch of children are playing might invite attention.

** = The "Demonstration" part of the name refers to the management model in use, where commercial forestry and power generation operations exist alongside recreational use elements like mountain-biking, hiking, and camping. There was a lot of info about it posted on signboards around the place, and more available on the net (including an article about North Vancouver's Seymour Demonstration Forest entitled "Sweet Places to Take Your Sweetie")