camping

while we were on the island we went camping for 2 nights with my brother, his girlfriend and his girlfriend's family dog "joey" (his first camping trip). my brother has been doing a fair bit of back country camping and hiking so he knew lots of good spots. we didn't want to have to bring a lot of gear from australia so we told him any area we can car camp would be good. the first night we went down some back country roads to a spot along the nitinat river. we found a spot just as it was starting to get to dusk. it ended up being a great spot.

there was a little dirt patch with no rocks where we pitched the tent and the river was only a few metres from the tents so all night long we listened to the sounds of the river running past us (and because of the large log behind us the sound echoed and made it sound like the river was surrounding us).

joey did very well but got scared after dark and would bark and go into a very fearful position when any of us left the light of the fire (especially to me and zac since he'd only met us hours earlier but he did it to my brother too).

the next day we headed down to fairy lake and camped at a campground. it was pretty warm but the lake was too cold for me or zac (or kristie) to go in, but shane went for a (quick) swim. joey was in most of the day until we forced him to stay out and dry off a bit.

the jeep all packed up (including the canadian flag my brother brought out to our wedding-- i guess this thing travels with him a lot):

joey at the lake:

shane took us up some logging roads to try to find bears. we went up some road he had seen bears on a month or so ago. we couldn't find any. we did see some bear poop (even some pretty fresh stuff) and found some bear tracks in some dried mud (which would have been from the last rain a couple days earlier).

the jeep pulled out off the logging road:

bear track:

zac looking for bears:

one of many patches of clear cut and some alpine flowers (fireweed?)

on the way home we stopped at botanical beach:
i think the camping trip was probably my highlight of our holiday. we may have to make that a regular thing on our trips to canada.