The West Coast Trail does look fantastic.
I went in for weeks in the early 70's. Now is it hugely crowded of course and so I live further north on the coast. Gosh how time flies - soon 50 years here!
Basically the coast, the coast mountains and the Rockies where Robson lives are absolutely gob-smacking! I believe that is the British term. After seeing my 80 year old sister who lived in BC for a while in her 20's but who had never seen the Rockies from the ground before, react. I think that's a good term.
Up here of course, there are no huge sandy beaches like down south - except on Haida Gwai, but my grand-daughter liked to bathe in a waterfall falling over a cliff onto the beach just as I once did at Tusiat falls on the WCT. She wore a bathing suit of course unlike most of the people at Tusiat.. We ate some crab here from well down-channel (safer), but back in the day I went over the Nitinat Narrows in a dugout, and they sold huge crabs for $2 as I remember. We camped a long time at Clo-oose, the mid-point of the trail since a storm had pushed fishing boats in and we could get a coho salmon for $2 too. I still remember paddling out to a boat in a dugout and banging on the side with the paddle. Then I asked to buy some. I was pretty green then so I wasn't sure just how big a coho might be, so $20 worth or ten. Back then it was an insult to cheat some-one so the fisherman gave me 13 as I recall, so we had over a hundred pounds of fish being plank cooked on the beach! Other hikers thought they had found manner from heaven and free lunch all packed into one!
It really is all another totally different world here - all of Canada and the US. My sister saw a couple of hour's worth of driving across flat prairie and loved it. she loved it better when I told her that if we had driven east then we'd have gone better than a day through it. But the Rockies really staggered her.
they still do that to me and everyone.
