Canada's Most Popular Campground

Hello Everyone,

By some measures, the Green Point Campground in the Pacific Rim National Park is Parks Canada's most requested campsite. I heard that once, but I can’t find any official metrics to back it up, so I guess I got it from the "Trust Me, Bro" book of facts. First time I've used that volume.

Anyway, Green Point is midway between Tofino and Uclulet, so it's a primo location, and being a National Park, the price is very reasonable. Those facts combine to mean you have about 90 seconds in January to book a site at any point over the coming year.

By a miracle of organizing, no doubt led by yours truly, though I can't back up that fact either, we did manage to book not just one site but two, during said window this past January.

What seemed very theoretical at the time of booking materialized recently when we pulled in to our site. Situated in the middle of a temporate rain forest and a short walk to a huge surfing-friendly beach, if it's not Canada's most requested campground, it should be.

The thing about beaches and young kids is sorta like the old joke that in Saskatchewan, it takes three days for your dog to run away. There's so much open space, you can let them run around all they want. Kids, that is, not dogs. Go chase some seagulls, collect shells, draw in the sand. Fill your boots.

On that note, building sandcastles and digging in the beach is one of those childhood activities that only slightly loses it appeal in adulthood. It's closer to riding your bike which was awesome then and is awesome now, than it is to playing with a noise maker. That was awesome as a kid and causes me brain damage now.

One of the activities we tried with the Munchkin was boogie boarding, and she took to it a bit like Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. She was very excited to try it, considered herself something of an expert before we had so much as stepped foot on the sand, but then fell off the board early and declared that boogie boarding wasn't for her. I, on the other hand, stubbornly persisted with my attempts to surf. I like the sport, I like the image of the sport, and I like the image of me engaged in the sport, so I have the most important elements covered. But the effort-to-actual-surfing ratio is still really, really high. And that’s before I even get to the beach; I’m convinced that wet suits were invented by a double jointed Houdini impersonator.

BC generally, and the Pacific Rim specifically, is the kind of place where a basic hike off the side of the highway looks like something out of a travel magazine where the author flew in a Cessna to a grass trip runway, then traveled by boat up a remote river for seven days to reach some unspoilt wilderness. There’s giant trees covered in moss, it’s dark because the canopy is so thick, everything is some shade of green, it’s misty. In any other place in the world, pictures of that hike would be put on their national currency. But in BC, it’s just casually amazing.

Wes

Photos

The Munchkin flying a kite on the beach.

Did I mention that BC's rainforests have slugs? Giant, giant slugs.

Not from BC, but thought this was a cool picture of a grasshopper in my backyard.