I spend a night or so a year in the backcountry of Golden Ears Provincial Park. British Columbia’s Lower Mainland knows all about Golden Ears; the vehicle-accessible campgrounds sell out most nice weekends, day use areas resound with visitors, and the official trails are well-trafficked almost for the length of the 150,000-acre park. It is a huge place that draws a huge number of people.

As well it should. This park inspires awe. Forest, subalpine lakes, haunting valleys, beautiful creeks, and mountain views. The only thing missing is solitude, which admittedly is important. Yet the backcountry campsites are gems which, while hardly hidden, are less well-known than they should be. A feature of these trips is people who ask “can you really camp back here?” Yes, and most affordably; there are a number of BC Parks-approved sites and the permit runs $5 per night.

With a car the backcountry sites at Viewpoint Beach are accessible even to parties of Cub Scouts, and Alder Flats is not so far that you can’t get bring a two-four of beer. Without a car, Golden Ears Park becomes a proper trek. In 2019 ParkBus will drive you to the Gold Creek parking lot, the jumping-off point for the backcountry, for $49 return¹. Better than a cab, but not cheap, and the ParkBus only operates on Saturdays meaning that if you want to camp you’ll need to make your own way in or out.

Vancouver has two types of hikers. There are those who put on Crocs and wander around a lake on a path that might as well be paved, go up a flight of stairs, pat their fat old dog, and say “that was a good hike.” Then there are the people who voyage into places shown on the map only as “Bad Idea,” dropping sentences like “after a brisk fourteen miles through waist-deep poison ivy I ascended the cliff to Mount Hopeless and ate an entire box of After Eights.” The first group writes tour guides and fills up buses, the second group writes trip reports and fills up message boards. Damn the lot of ’em.

What about us normies? Those who don’t mind being sore the next morning but react to the word “bushwhack” like the fat old dog to “vet”? Our stories are lost, not impressive enough for the survivorman and too try-hard to the weekend stroller.

Today I defy convention. On a sunny Sunday in July I took my first shot at Coliseum Mountain, in Lynn Headwaters Regional Park on Vancouver’s North Shore. Lynn Headwaters is one of my favourite places in the world. It has trails for all: ones you can wheelchair down, ones with a bit of a climb, ones which tax all but the very fit, and routes with mountain traverses and alpine challenges that the park would not dare to advertise, for fear of great reeking heaps of dead tourists. If you like company, head into Lynn Canyon and get booty-shorts tight with people taking iPad selfies on a suspension bridge that’s more biomass than structure. If you like solitude, Lynn Headwaters can provide even on weekend afternoons. It is a little patch of joy.

Coliseum Mountain is, with the justly-famous Hanes Valley trail and justly-ignored Lynn Lake, one of three hikes the park calls very difficult. You can seek out tougher routes in the deep backcountry but for a tubby guy in 27-degree weather with a heavy pack full of crackers Coliseum is certainly tough enough to be getting on with. It is a long way horizontally and vertically: more of both than I had ever hiked in a day before. Is it worth it?

Oh heavens yes.

The Long Trail in Vermont is held to be the oldest long-distance hiking trail in the United States. Running 273 miles long, experienced backpackers can finish it in about a month through the mountains between the Massachusetts and Quebec borders, plunging deep, deep into the forest where no civilized man would go. Though not the most famous patch of track the Long Trail is regarded as a must-try for the ambitious backpacker.

While I did not have a month to spare, my hiking partner Carolyn and I arranged to do six days of it, nearly fifty miles from the Appalachian Gap to the resort town of Stowe, before gorging on ice cream and beer. However, while I was en route Carolyn noticed that we were in for the most appalling weather in recent history: temperatures always around 35° Celsius¹, humidity in the nineties, and three days of lightning storms while we would have been crawling across the top of Mount Mansfield. It appeared to make travel ill-advised.

A late-night Skype conference from a shitty hotel in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania produced a plan. The news was grim but even in such hostile conditions the Long Trail could be conquered.Thirst and privation would be our constant companions, the heat our implacable nemesis, and death our only friend, but should we succeed the adventure would define the rest of our lives. Generations not yet born would feel their blood quicken as they thrilled to our tale. The price would be immense; perhaps greater than we could pay. But it is not given to everyone to carve new tracks out of the wilderness: sometimes you simply persevere when the weaker, and perhaps the wiser, would long ago have turned back. The prize for all this pain? Trivial, local, but real immortality.

But it was really hot so we went glamping in Ontario instead.

My Victoria Day long weekend was spent at Golden Ears Provincial Park near Maple Ridge, British Columbia. I’ll diarise about that another time; suffice to say it was a bust. There were clouds and bugs but most of all there was a crowd; a happy, rowdy pain-in-the-ass. At a spacious campground 45 minutes from the nearest parking lot people gave up and went home by three in the afternoon. The survivors seemed like nice people; the problem is that they were there. Enjoying the outdoors in their own way so, just by being around, we made that enjoyment a bit less for each other.

This was obviously going to happen. Golden Ears is a popular park, being gorgeous, easy to access and getting easier, and possessed by that enormous mass popularity of many local nature spots. Golden Ears, like Garibaldi and Alice Lake and oh God I’m going to stop listing them before I get depressed, is going to be too popular to be fun a lot of the time. The same applies for many day-hiking spots in the Vancouver area, and here I’m particularly thinking of the Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge and the beautiful Quarry Rock viewpoint. The /r/Vancouver Reddit thread on Quarry Rock Victoria Day gave me all the bad feelings. And, going not that much further afield, the world-famous West Coast Trail is renowned as a hotspot for all the bad things the phrase “world-famous” implies in hiking culture.

Of course, backpacking in Golden Ears is an immensely popular overnight experience, so there is a cost attached. That cost is, um, $5 a night. Paid, by the way, essentially on the honour system.

I don’t mean to be controversial, to sound melodramatic, to appear unhinged. But it is time to commit genocide against raccoons. Sure, the clean ones you see cute pictures of in children’s books look adorable enough, but that is media propaganda. Real raccoons spread filth and disease as they zip about noisily at all hours of the night. They inconvenience passers-by and damage property. They scatter trash all over Hell’s half-acre and make a mockery of man’s pathetic efforts to keep order in the universe.

But, most of all, they eat my pepperonis.

Dionisio Point Provincial Park is a patch of marine solitude on the northeast tip of Galiano Island, the second-largest of British Columbia’s Southern Gulf Islands. If you live in the Pacific Northwest and aren’t familiar with the Southern Gulf Islands, take the time. Crowded with tourists in the summer, unbearable on pleasant long weekends, but in shoulder season they are quiet, accessible, (broadly) inhabitable, and picturesque in a fine understated marine way. Rather than the grand fjords, chasms and mountains of the mainland, or the storm-swept savagery of the Pacific coast of Vancouver Island, the Southern Gulf Islands give you all the charm of horizontal lines, great heights at a discrete distance, pretty beaches, and enough on the horizon for your eye to always alight upon something. The weather’s pretty fair too.

Several BC provincial parks and the federal Gulf Islands National Park Reserve offer year-round walk-in camping; no services but clean sites, gorgeous ocean views, and some five-star day hiking that holds up from early spring to late fall¹. It’s not a cheap trip, BC Ferries fares being what they are, but it’s convenient, pretty weekend stuff that lets you taste fresh air when the mountains are snowbound.

I have a bad head for heights. Earlier this year, in the Sooke Potholes Provincial Park on Vancouver Island, I got to show it off spectacularly. On the second day of a backcountry backpack through an area with no official trails, I found myself walking atop the Sooke Flowline, an abandoned water main that once provided drinking water to the people of Victoria. This was intended; missing my turn was not, and with the trails obscure and sometimes unmarked I was lost in spite of my GPS. I didn’t worry at first; I knew the Flowline led to the highway, from which I could not be far, so I stuck to the route rather than bushwhack in an area of valleys and cliffs.

This was a mistake. The pipe soon turned from nicely winding along the ground to perilously perched increasingly high above the forest. Fewer people come this way (because it’s wrong), so the slippery moss growing atop the old concrete was becoming more hazardous. Where there was no moss it was only because a falling boulder had punched a hole in the pipe. It was uncomfortable but not actually dangerous, until suddenly it really, really was.

I don’t clearly remember the context. The ground had been getting further and further away, then it was gone. Replaced by cliffs and the Sooke River, with the pipe that had suddenly turned aquaduct crossing at a height of about a trillion miles. It was definitely far enough. There was no escape save across the concrete pipe, which was say four feet in diameter, slippery with moss, full of holes, and, as pipes tend to be, round. I was already tired from a long day, it had been wet, I of course had 40 pounds of camping stuff on my back, doing a pirouette to turn around with so little traction and absolutely fatal consequences for a slip seemed more dangerous than proceeding. But if I crossed that river I better find something good on the other side or I’d never find the courage to cross it again.

The Juan de Fuca Marine Trail is a 47-kilometre back country backpacking trail, along the south coast of Vancouver Island between China Beach (west of Sooke) and Botanical Beach (a 45-minute walk south of Port Renfrew), paralleling British Columbia Highway 14.

No, you’re thinking of the West Coast Trail. The West Coast Trail is half-again as long, filled with vertiginous ladders, cable cars, and boat rides, and about ten times more famous. The Juan de Fuca Trail is the West Coast Trail’s misshapen bastard brother. You can do them both in one huge trip, connecting through Port Renfrew, but there’s no doubt who the alpha dog is.

At time of writing I had never done the West Coast Trail. So I did the Juan de Fuca Trail, and my choice was pure practicality: the three-day August long weekend was already coming, and I’d worked enough overtime to win a fourth. The recommended time to spend on Juan de Fuca is four days; for us ordinary Joes the West Coast Trail takes seven. So on Wednesday I was booking buses and a night in Victoria, on Thursday I was on the move, and on Friday I was hiking.