All the Way to the Top - Chemainus River
Our Chemainus River Adventure started from a B&B in Sidney the morning after a wedding. I’m not saying that’s where your adventure should start or that you should be at the wedding the night before, I only mention it because we stayed at the Beacon Inn (actually a bed and breakfast) and it was awesome. I’ve never stayed at a bed and breakfast before (and I only did this time by accident) so I have nothing to compare it to, but it was great. Mad Props to the Beacon Inn.
Ok, so then we drove all the way down the Saanich Peninsula, and up over the Malahat to get onto our true adventure, the Chemainus River.
We turned off the Trans Canada Highway to the Cowichan Valley Highway toward Lake Cowchan. After about 10 minutes we turned left on to Hillcrest Road and drove under the power lines. When we came to a fork in the road we also discovered a recently burned area and a burnt out car. This fire season has been a rough one, everything was red, covered in retardant. An uncomfortable sight as you head into the woods, but we’re responsible campers and had no intentions of even thinking about starting a fire so we turned left and continued into the woods.
After a couple kilometres we turned right off the road, onto a steep 4X4 path that you would barely recognize as a path to go down . . . but we did. Coming up the road was a guy and young kid on an ATV with gold panning equipment. Apparently they had found some gold and were taking a big tote of sand and silt home for further investigation.
NOTE TO SELF: start gold panning.
We got down to “the spot” on the river. The water was so low the river bed was exposed in a lot of places, but the canyon was still deep enough to swim in. I had just bought a snorkel and dive mask to help get some good gopro footage without dealing with the pesky breathing conundrum, but even though the water was low it was still freezing. Daniel took about five minutes to get in, but I took about twenty. I’m not proud. We swam for an hour, found some crayfish, snorkeled around, got too cold and got out.
But then we had our evening situation, when it is 6pm and you’ve had dinner, set up camp, and can’t have a fire, what do you do next? The fire really is key to evening camping activities. So we got back in the truck and decided to explore some more. With our off road map book in hand we toured through the wilderness for another couple hours looking for the illusive back way into the Copper Canyon. We didn’t find it, but we did find a bunch of really good roads. And as the sun set we told ghost stories that made it almost impossible for me to get out of the truck and into the tent.
I’m going to nag for a second because I have to. This gorgeous spot by the river is secluded, hard to get to and is clearly not a spot that loads of people know about. And yet, it was full of garbage. Someone was obviously doing target practice on pop cans and thought it was cool to leave them all on the river bed, but come fall when the water rises where do you think those cans and bottles are going? Dumb shits. Anyway I cleaned a bunch of it up and ranted at Daniel about how terrible (and probably ugly) these people were. So please, don’t be an asshole, pack out what you pack in.
In the spot by the river we also successfully completed our first star time lapses. A lot of people have asked us how we did it. Really it is simple, you go in the woods where there is no light and you let your camera take pictures while you sleep, until the battery dies. Seriously though, each exposure was 25 seconds (probably a titch too long) the ISO was 1600 and the lens was wide open. Roughly, each second of time lapse took 12 minutes to shoot.
Here’s the snapshot video of that adventure:
Where should we go next?