Route planning NOBO
Last year we hiked the West Coast Trail from Pachena Bay to Gordon River, known as southbound or SOBO. This year we are northbound or NOBO, so planning the route is a little different. The south section is significantly more technical than the north end of the trail, so we need to take our heavier starting packs and unaccustomed muscles into account for the first few days, particularly over the notorious boulders towards Owen’s Point!
Here’s a map of the West Coast Trail produced by Parks Canada. A hard copy of this is given to every hiker as they register at the start of the trail, with that fortnight’s tide tables taped on, and I’m glad to have last year’s copy to pore over for planning this time round.
WCT_EN_2023_webThe original map is available on the Parks Canada website here.
At this point, I should give a shout out to Brett Marl’s West Coast Trail app, given how much I rely on it for my planning! He launched the full version of this app last year, and it has massively simplified the planning process. It contains detailed info on campsites, etc., but the real gamechanger is that you can plug in your dates and campsites and it spits out a detailed a day-by-day summary of your trip, even including relevant tide times for each day. You can keep reviewing and tweaking until you have a route that works for you.
Just to be clear, I have no affiliation, and the free version includes everything you need for planning (although personally, I’m really happy to be supporting this Vancouver Island local 🙂 ).
Some considerations for route planning this year:
- The technical difficulty of the first few days, when we’ll have heavy packs and untrained muscles
- Adding on a day to spend 8 days / 7 nights on the trail and really lean into the experience
- Spending a night on Carmanah Beach – such a beautiful spot that we didn’t stop at last time
After a couple of happy hours on the WCT app, with Blister and Bliss beside me, I have an initial plan that I am happy with. Me being me, I’ve put it all into a spreadsheet… Hmm, apparently to embed a spreadsheet, I need to first upload it to OneDrive. Ok, I might tackle this later, but right now I’m out of steam, so here’s a screenshot of the details page:
Until next time 🙂
