After our enchanting visit to the Koksilah River Ancient River Forest we drove by night to Port Alberni. We didn’t stop to Cathedral Grove as we decided to keep the visit of the most famous Vancouver Island big tree park for our way back from the Pacific Rim area. So the second old grove forest we visited was the Canoe Creek red cedars forest, located between Port Alberni and the Pacific Rim visitor center.
The Koksilah was an old grove forest of Douglas Fir trees and few Sitka spruces while the Canoe Creek forest features amazing red cedars that look so old and mossy that it is difficult to imagine how they could be hundreds of years ago…
The Giant Cedar Trail is not a hike. It is more a forest walk in a really bushy and wet forest that lead you to a bunch of old Cedars, survivors of an ancient past. It takes between 5 and 10 minutes to reach the first big trees and if you don’t stop in front of every big trunk like us you can do the whole trip in 30 minutes or less.
As you can imagine by looking at the pictures, my main advice would be to take your time here. First, it is really quiet. We didn’t meet anyone here on a sunny monday of february and the path doesn’t look very often used compared to other famous ones. Second, the trees here are just incredible. The forest is very dense with a lot of moss and ferns and when I think of all the “small” trees around them and the landscapes we drove through before reaching the trailhead they looked like forgotten ones…
The whole forest here is a huge mess… It is difficult to take pictures that really deserve the trees as you don’t have any depth in this flat and bushy forest. The biggest trees lies on the bunch of a river and it is really weird to imagine how many people or animals walked between them during so many centuries before us…
If I have to think of every old grove forest we visited in Vancouver Island I don’t really know how to classify this one compared to some other ones, but if I have to be honest I would say that I would never go back to Pacific Rim wihtout stopping again here. It really worthed the stop and the drive, and for a really easy and quick effort you can enjoy wilder trees than in many famous Vancouver Island forests…
Information
- Departure : Canoe Creek, Giant Cedar Trail
- Duration : 5/10 minutes to reach the big trees
- Date : february 2020
- Located between Port Alberni and the Pacific Rim National Park
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