6am came early, and with it, dawn revealed a cool, gun-metal grey overcast sky. Again!
Everybody seemed to get going between 7:00 and 7:30.
Debbie was still hobbling, so she and Heather set off a few minutes ahead of everyone else, on the start of the 12km walk. At about 2 km, the seven of us caught them, and Deanna surged ahead to set a good pace, with the other six of us in hot pursuit.
Just after passing Debbie however, my somewhat fuzzy morning mathematical skills made me realize that she was in real jeopardy of missing their boat ride back to Port Renfrew. Recalling that Rob had carried Debbie’s pack with him into Michigan campsite the previous afternoon, I turned around and told Debbie that I’d try and carry it for a while. When she briefly objected, I explained that I didn’t think they’d make their 12noon deadline. So she handed it over.
I joked with Rob that I now had full body armour, ready for a face plant and the dreaded “turtle”. With Rob having to carry my water bottle and camera for me, I decided to hang back with him [he had stuffed a bunch of gear from Debbie’s pack into his own pack, so he was carrying extra weight himself. I think Deanna and Heather were too]. Debbie and Heather went on ahead.
While hiking with Rob, he tried to impress me with his own version of a “turtle”, slipping on a boardwalk behind me, and achieving bonus marks for putting his boot through a small hole in one board. The humorous part came when he tried to pull his foot out. Somehow it had gone in a lot easier than it came back out!
Shortly after that, he dropped my water bottle while crossing a small bridge. With amazing agility [hey, it was Day 7!], he threw off his pack and jumped off the bridge abutment to retrieve it. While he was doing this, I was standing on the bridge, taking in all of the great action, and noticed that my water bottle was floating in a small pool of white foam in the creek below. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe all of his quick actions weren’t all that necessary!
We continued on, and just before the ladders about 2 kilometres from the end of the trail, Debbie and Heather sat waiting for us. Debbie asked for her pack back, and I obliged, but was still worried about her leg, and their 12noon deadline. Rob and I had noticed though, that her pace had quickened considerably from earlier in the day, perhaps the result of walking without weight and the extra-strength Ibuprofen that John had given her earlier in the morning.
At the top of the last set of ladders we met two Park wardens, and Heather gave them a detailed account of their “close encounter with the furry kind” at Darling River the day earlier.
Minutes later, just before 12noon, we reached the end of the trail, the Parks Canada Trail Information Centre, set in a small clearing near Pachena Bay.
With the others having arrived an hour earlier, we exchanged handshakes, hugs, and high-fives, and then passed cameras around for the obligatory end-of-trail photographs, including an updated one of “Six Cheeks Peak” (“R” rating! …viewable in “Jim’s photo album”, end of Journal), which apparently has moved from the Rockwall Trail area in Kootenay National Park to just north of the porch of the Trail Information Centre at Pachena Bay!
Rob and the girls had made it in time for their boat ride back to Port Renfrew, and we had another hour to kill before boarding the WCT Express back to Victoria, an “interesting” 5-hour bus ride!
