Driving the wild coastline of Vancouver Island

Driving the wild coastline of Vancouver Island

Beautiful beaches, marine life, hiking and adventure await

story and photographs by ELLIE WHITE

Filled with miles of accessible beaches and moss-filled forests, and home to Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, the West Coast of Vancouver Island is an ideal destination for families who want to explore the wild coastline of our neighbors to the north.

Planning your stay: Start early

Our trip had two legs, which included both renting a house and camping. For the first leg, we rented an Airbnb in Ucluelet, just south of the park.

For camping, we found a spot in a campground just north of the park. A bonus: The beach at our campground turned out to be my favorite of the beaches we visited. I highly recommend really considering how your family likes to travel and booking sites and accommodations well in advance.

Getting into Canada: Check your documents

Months leading up to the trip, I’d diligently checked and re-checked that our kids only needed birth certificates to get across the border. So imagine my horror when I pulled out all of our documents and realized that my husband’s passport had expired three years earlier. Luckily we learned that his enhanced driver’s license was all he needed to get into Canada.

Lesson learned: Check the current requirements for entry. To save time, go to the ArriveCAN (at 3Canada.ca) to scan in your documents and COVID vaccination records, then show the customs agent the barcode at the border.

Getting there: What to see and where to go on this 5+-hour journey

Getting to the West Coast of Vancouver Island is a beautiful but long journey. After crossing the border, you have a short drive to the ferry terminal and a 2-hour ferry ride to Nanaimo. Make sure you arrive early –the ferry website encourages you to be there an hour early, and will cancel your reservation if you don’t arrive early enough. From there it’s three more hours in the car until you reach the coast.

Along the way: check out goats that live on a roof at a shop in the city of Coombs. Pull off at Cathedral Grove for a quick stroll among 800-year-old trees. And get any last wiggles out at Port Alberni before making the last half of the trip across the island to the coast through largely uninhabited countryside.

Highlights of our trip:

Beach accessibility: As you drive along the coast between Ucluelet and Tofino, there are numerous beaches, all open to you. Some beaches are a short (often steep) hike from the parking lot. Others are just steps away from your car. We didn’t get to all of them and wished we could have visited some of them again.

Learning: In summer, the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve offers a variety of educational programs at the beach. At the talk we went to, our kids learned about bears, cougars, and wolves and examined replica skulls, tracks and poop from these predominant predators of the area. We later found bear poop on a hike!

Balance bikes on the beach: Our toddlers could not get enough of riding their balance bikes on the hard-packed sandy beaches.

Weather considerations:

When it rained on Vancouver Island, we headed to the Ucluelet Aquarium. Local sea life is brought into the aquarium for visitors to enjoy and then released back to the ocean. We saw some animals during low tide at the beach, but at the aquarium, we got an upclose view of some wild and amazing marine life. We also went hiking on a heavily forested trail in the morning. What could have been a miserable day camping in the rain turned into a day where we hardly even noticed the rain.

Considerations:

Laundry: Frequent beach stops mean tons of sand and dirt. We put the machines at our rental house and campsite to good use.

Food: With rising food prices and a remote location, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that food was more expensive than we anticipated. Consider bringing food but check border restrictions at 3inspection.canada.ca.

Pre-trip reading

To give your kids a sense of what they might discover on the wild coastline of Vancouver Island, I recommend Roy Henry Vickers’ beautifully illustrated Northwest Coast legend stories, the incredible photography in the Pacific Wild children’s books and author Deborah Hodge’s West Coast Wild children’s book series.

If your family loves beaches, surfing, nature walks, wildlife, and wild, accessible landscapes, Vancouver Island may be just the ticket for you.