North Coast Trail opens with a flurry of feet
Runners attempt to be first to cross 58-kilometre route
Carolyn Heiman, Times Colonist
Published: Sunday, May 11, 2008
Build a trail and they will run.
And so three keeners set out yesterday wanting to be the first ever to run the 43 kilometre North Coast Trail on the northern tip of the Island, formally opened yesterday by the province.
The new trail links with the existing Cape Scott trail, forming a 58-kilometre stretch west from Port Hardy.
Al Huddlestan, chair of the Northern Vancouver Island Trails Society, said the three contacted him months ago about with their dream of doing the trail in one day and on the first day it officially opened.
At press time there was no word on whether the three made it yesterday. After being dropped off by a water taxi at Shushartie Bay in the morning, they were to be picked up at Experiment Bay in Cape Scott provincial park.
The runners are just proof to Huddlestan that the new trail, touted as a rival to the West Coast Trail, will attract a lot of people to the northern tip of Vancouver Island.
The former mayor of Port Hardy admits he’s not much of a hiker himself, but he feels he’s been on a long trek to get the trail completed.
Dreams of the trail have been kicking around for years, but in the last four years provincial and federal funding fell into place “and things went into high gear.”
From 2000 to 2002 the provincial government acquired 716 hectares of private property valued at $7 million and added them to the Cape Scott Provincial Park.
In 2004 the trail route was mapped and construction started that fall.
Huddlestan said six to seven thousand people hike the Cape Scott trail every year, and estimated that thousands more will be attracted to the area now that the North Coast Trail has been linked to it.
“I’ve been getting messages from people all over the world. People are really keen and interested in it.”
Port Hardy mayor Hank Bood said the trail will be “a nice additional cog to the region’s tourism wheel” adding the economic impact will be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“It’s a world class trail … the full meal deal,” he said, with boardwalk passing over boggy areas, dirt trails, bridges and trolleys across rivers.
“If you want to see the wild that’s what this trail is about.”
The newly opened section includes sandy beaches and is similar to the West Coast Trail: “Once you are on it you have to finish it or go back to where you started,” Bood said.
Unlike the West Coast Trail, the new trail won’t require advance bookings, at least for the first year.
Huddlestan said “there may well be a reservation system in the next year or years down the road. [If it becomes really popular] we’ll have to have some control over the number of people going on. You won’t want to get to the trail head and find there are hundreds of other people there. People don’t want to feel like they’re on Robson Street in Vancouver. They want a wilderness trail experience.”
With the trail officially open Huddlestan feels relief, but work for the society isn’t done.
Next they want to work on getting road access to the eastern terminus of the trail. “That will be our next challenge.”
In future the trail may have a series of yurt-style camping huts along it. In 2007 the provincial government put out a request for proposals for fixed-roof accommodation in several parks, including Cape Scott, and one company put forward an idea for yurts along the trail.
Huddlestan said there’s no funding for the project but believes its the way to bring wilderness access to more than a small group of purists who don’t want anything in the area.
“The yurts will leave a very small footprint,” said Huddlestan.
