West Coast Trail B C

Vancouver Island escape, Tiny Sooke offers much more than famed Harbour House

SOOKE, British Columbia —

If you’ve never heard of this small town on Canada’s Vancouver Island, don’t feel bad. You’re not alone.

But if you do manage to find your way to Sooke (the name rhymes with “Duke”), you may find yourself wanting to come back — again and again.

During a recent visit to British Columbia’s capital city of Victoria, I took advantage of the opportunity to detour 37 kilometers (23 miles) and a 40-minute drive southwest to Sooke for two nights.

Specifically, I went to visit Sooke Harbour House, a small European-style inn with a seamless reputation.

Sinclair and Frederique Philip’s European-style hotel-restaurant was on the cutting edge of farm-to-fork cuisine before that term had even been coined. Way back in 1979, they bought a quiet country inn with five shared-bath guest rooms and a small dining room. At the same time, they planted a garden to grow their own vegetables, fruit, herbs and flowers. They even added a seaweed garden to nourish the bounty of the adjacent Strait of Juan de Fuca.

In less than a decade, Sooke Harbour House became the poster child for what Canadians call West Coast cuisine, much as residents of Oregon and Washington like to brag about Pacific Northwest cuisine. Twenty-five years ago, a restaurant that served its home-grown produce, purchasing meat and seafood only from nearby farmers and fishermen, was a novelty.

As the Philips’ fame grew internationally, they gradually expanded their hotel. Today, Sooke Harbour House has 28 spacious guest rooms, all of them with fireplaces and bathtubs for two, most with a wonderful view across the strait to Washington’s Olympic Mountains.

But in this isolated location, I found more than a stunning place to sleep and eat. I found a lovely beach with a long, park-like spit separating a serene harbor from rocky, wave-washed seabird rookeries. I found dense, old-growth rainforests that shroud myriad hiking trails, a river famous for its swimming holes, and a zip-lining adventure. I found a quiet highway that runs past small wineries and farms, one of them producing the ancient beverage mead with its own bees.

And I learned about the oldest independent settlement in British Columbia, a town of about 10,000 with a proud history of native villages and English homesteads. Named for the indigenous T’Sou-ke tribe of First Nations people (the preferred term for native Canadians), Sooke has a burgeoning arts-and-crafts community and a bustling economy tied, in part, to such recreational pursuits as fishing, whale watching, kayaking and bicycling.

How to put up a tent on the Dry West Coast Trail - Tents – All Styles

The weather on the West Coast Trail in British Columbia is almost always wet. Even on clear summer days, often fog develops and develops thick enough to hold moisture literally falls out of the air. It is almost impossible to be completely dry on the West Coast Trail, but do everything you can to be dry and comfortable in the tent will help you get a good rest, which in turn helps prevent mistakes and injuries. With over hundreds of evacuations a year from the path, it is important to take care of as many details as possible to minimize the conditions that can lead to accidents.

The Systems Approach

Treating your tent as a system helps to manage moisture and increase efficiency to get it up at camp. Think through what you do when you get to camp. It is usually something like this:

Each one of these tasks can be better handled through a system. Your warm over-clothing can be kept in a systematic way, in a separate bag, near an opening, as it should be available at each stop. The tent and its system are kept together in a place suitable to reach the camp and use. The kitchen system may be more complex with parts that are needed for lunch, and various items for dinner, so think through how and when to handle a task with appropriate gear is essential. It requires a system approach.

The tenting System

The main goals of tenting system to quickly and effectively to establish a covered, dry place to sleep, change clothes and get warm. Systems can work together. Your sleeping system can be a sub-system for your tenting system when it goes into the tent. If you travel with others and sharing the carrying parts of the tent system, you will undoubtedly need to coordinate your system with the others. Those people then become part of the system. You do not want to come to camp and send the person in the tent out to get firewood, unless you’ve worked out in advance where the tent is and what can and can not be taken out of the package. You do not want to inadvertently pull the person’s clothes dry in a rainstorm, getting them soaked. Know the system and work within the system consistently.

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