Little Qualicum Falls

There’s a gem of a campground on Vancouver Island I’ve been going to since forever. It’s called Little Qualicum Falls, and a family weekend there at the beginning of June was my second BC ferry trip of the summer.

Qualicum, or Quallchum, means “where the dog salmon run.” Dog salmon (also known as chum) is one of the five major species of the BC salmon fishery.

We lucked out with absolute picture-perfect weather for our Qualicum weekend, which we were all incredibly grateful for. A year ago, we were in the thick of a more typical Juneuary and our plans to go to Qualicum were scuttled before we even got into the car.

The provincial park sits alongside the Little Qualicum River and around Cameron Lake. It’s a great family campground with lots of trails to explore, lots of swimming holes to jump into, and then, of course, there are the falls.

As we often do, we took a quick side trip to Cathedral Grove on our last day before turning around to head to the ferry. Driving along Highway 4, we noticed a helicopter with a heli-bucket scooping water up from Cameron Lake. We rounded a bend in the road, and then we saw it — the wildfire on top of one of the mountains along the highway.

It was a small one, but it grew, as wildfires do, and a day or two later, that same highway we had driven on was closed for two weeks, completely shutting off the coastal communities of western Vancouver Island from the rest of the province. A detour over logging roads was put in place, but it was a rough route and not recommended for tourist traffic.

The highway reopened once the wildfire was no longer burning, but assessments of the mountain slopes above the highway have deemed them unstable. And so, beginning Monday, Highway 4 will be closed for most of the day between 9 and 5 to allow crews to do rock scaling above the highway. They figure the work will take at least a month, which is really going to mess up the tourist season for Tofino and Ucluelet.

I’m glad we got our Island weekend, but I feel for all those whose summer plans are being thwarted by a wildfire that has long been put out.