NITINAT NARROWS — Carl Edgar Jr., 59, remembers a time when anything went on the 75-kilometre West Coast Trail. "I've seen up to 140 hikers per day," remarks the member of the Ditidaht First Nation. "It was a free-for-all long ago."
Edgar readjusts his cedar-bark cap against a bright sun and adds: "There were no hikers when I was a kid. I've seen the beginning of the West Coast Trail."
Nitinat Narrows has always figured prominently on the trail, which follows the coastline between Bamfield and Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island. It's near the halfway point, where hikers typically buy food or snacks from the natives and board a small boat to be transported across the treacherous currents almost 50 metres to the other side.
Hikers have drowned in the past trying to swim the distance with their packs. "There are only five to 10 minutes between tides," warns Edgar, whose aboriginal name is Wikinnash. "It may look nice, then halfway across the current takes you away."
Nitinat Narrows is also a place where hikers with twisted knees and ankles, blisters or spirits dashed by rain and rough conditions call it quits and catch a 35-minute ride some 21 kilometres down tidal, wind-tossed Nitinat Lake to the Ditidaht reserve, about 80 kilometres from Port Alberni.
Edgar confides that he can remove 100 to 200 such hikers per year, in addition to the 65 to 75 carted away by park staff along the trail. "Sometimes they're just wet and miserable," says the father of five children. "This is the quickest and easier way to get in and out."
As such, it's fitting that Parks Canada has officially declared Nitinat Narrows the third access point to the iconic West Coast Trail, a place where broken hikers cannot only exit, but where fresh ones can start, choosing an abbreviated trip of a few days while creating new revenue potential for the Ditidaht.
Anyone entering from Nitinat Narrows must still receive an orientation from the First Nations, and are recommended to be as experienced and prepared as someone tackling the entire trail — since the potential for harm is only a footstep away.
Parks Canada established a permit system in 1990, when a high of more than 9,500 people challenged the trail — too many for the natural environment and the trail's infrastructure. The federal government officially closed the trail between Oct. 1 to April 30, and implemented a quota system in 1992. The number of hikers levelled off at close to 7,500 per year in the early 1990s.
Under the current quota system, 30 hikers per day are permitted to start the trail from both the Pachena Bay trailhead near Bamfield to the north and Gordon River trailhead near Port Renfrew to the south. With an additional eight hikers permitted to start daily at Nitinat Narrows, an already busy trail suddenly becomes busier — but still nowhere close to the route's heyday.
"A lot of thought and planning has gone in it," says park superintendent Jim Morgan, superintendent of Pacific Rim National Park Reserve on the west coast of Vancouver Island. "The more people we can get out into the park in different ways and learn about the natural and cultural world, that's what we're all about."
For the Ditidaht's 270 band members, the park announcement offers the promise of economic opportunities, including at a store/grill, motel and campground accessible by motor vehicles in the village next to Nitinat Lake. The village is five kilometres from an existing shuttle-service route serving the other trailheads.
"It will be good for a lot of the tourists," adds Sam Edgar, a relative, who operates the store. "Not so rugged on the body."
Behind Carl Edgar's easy smile is an astute, hard-working entrepreneur who travels to Hawaii twice a year to unwind. The tattoos on his forearms are a fusion of West Coast native and Hawaiian art. "I'm a workaholic, same as my wife, and we like the time away."
In addition to his passenger transport business on the lake ($62.50 each way), he sells pop, candy bars and fresh seafood — Dungeness crab, chinook salmon or halibut at $25 per person — and has just built two cabins for hikers or other visitors as a base for day excursions. Hikers will also have access to hot showers. There are also seven band-owned "comfort tents" just north of Nitinat Narrows with wood stoves, wood floors and cots that allow for drying out.
"We've been looking forward to this day for a long time," Edgar says of the third access. "I've been building full steam. It's created four jobs right off the bat."
The number of hikers on the West Coast Trail in recent years is down considerably. In 2013, 5,715 people hiked the trail, which is down from the peak years but up from a low of 4,273 in 2007.
Reasons for the decline are anyone's guess. Aging baby boomers are less interested in a difficult hike that typically takes five to seven days. The younger generation has video games and its own extreme sports. And wilderness exploration is often foreign to the culture of immigrants.
"Those are all possible factors," says Morgan, noting that the third access is one way to increase numbers. "Society is always changing, and we try to adapt."
Yet the West Coast Trail remains B.C.'s best known and most travelled multi-day backcountry trip, a continuing lure for tourists from around the world.
On the day The Vancouver Sun visited Nitinat Narrows, a pair of German hikers from the Cologne region — Carsten Tacke, 43, and Andreas Steinhoff, 30 — arrived for their boat shuttle across the narrows with Edgar's 29-year-old son, Leon.
Tacke first hiked the trail 20 years ago with his father during wet weather. "This year is much easier, the weather is so nice and dry." He hopes to return one day with his daughter to complete three generations of his family hiking the route.
Parks Canada has a budget of $590,000 for trail maintenance for the current fiscal year, which is down from just over $1 million last year — a higher-than-normal budget necessitated by bridge repairs and replacements, and repairs to a cable car damaged by a fallen tree.
A Sun reporter walked a short stretch of the trail south from Nitinat Narrows, a lush route lined with deer and sword ferns, salal, skunk cabbage and wild berries. "I brushed this two weeks ago and look how much came back," remarks trail guardian Terry Nookemus.
The boardwalks are old, rotting and slippery, often with steps missing. "The West Coast Trail is always a work in progress," says park promotions officer Barb Brittain.
A few years ago Nookemus encountered Trevor Linden, now the Vancouver Canucks' president of hockey operations, hiking with noted Belgian cyclist Axel Merckx, who now lives in the Okanagan. "He's tall. I'm six feet two inches, and he made me look short," says. Nookemus.
National Hockey League stats peg Linden at six feet, four inches.
For the past 16 years, Nookemus has worked as a Parks Canada contractor conducting seasonal maintenance of the trail, more recently as a supervisor. He clears away trees toppled across the trail and he splits fallen logs, using the two lengths as walkways, chainsawing notches into the surface to improve traction for hikers.
"I sign up every year for this," he says with a big smile. "The scenery and all the people — it blows me away."
