Camping at San Josef Bay

For the second half of my summer 2013 holiday I went camping with friends at Cape Scott Provincial Park at the northern tip of Vancouver Island.  Cape Scott is about 450 kilometres north of Nanaimo in the north west corner of the island.  At Cape Scott one can do quite a bit of backpacking and hike to some pretty remote places.  We opted to go to San Josef bay which is easily accessible from the parking lot after a 3 kilometre hike down to the beach.

We were a group of six on this trip so we had a fair bit of gear.  Additionally we planned to eat “real food” on this trip and my friend Arwen had gone to great efforts to prepare gourmet meals which we could reheat at camp.  We had an off road wagon with us to haul all this great food, a fair amount of beer and our gear down to the beach.

I have never eaten this well on a camping trip, ever!  Sadly I only got a picture of the first meal, the rest were devoured before I could take a snap.  Dinner the first night after arriving was chicken quesadillas; for breakfast the next day we had egg, bacon and vegetable wraps; for dinner the second evening we did a fresh mussel hotpot, camp fire grilled steaks, potato and Greek salad; breakfast the next day was egg, potato and bacon frittata reheated around our 36 hour cedar log (burned forever!); and for dinner the last evening we had a most delicious butter chicken curry with nan bread.

We had pretty good weather considering we were on the west coast of the island facing direct exposure to the pacific ocean.  A wall of cloud loomed over the horizon which did not effect our exposure to the sun, all but for a few times when it rolled in briefly.  We spent our days eating well (see above), exploring the sea stacks and islands at low tide, collecting mussels for our hotpot, hiking Mt St Patrick, and some of even went swimming in the pacific on the last day!

Every morning we could see wolf tracks across the beach as wolfs run wild in the area.  On the way out we spotted two baby black bears with their mother along the dirt road.