Pacific Rim National Park is where pounding surf meets the quiet solitude of the coastal rain forest. This national park is located on the West Coast of Vancouver Island. Inside the forest, silence envelopes you. Giant evergreens stretch toward the sky.

Pacific Rim National Park was founded in May 1970, and has three separate land and sea sections. The most northern section is Long Beach. It consists of 11 km. of sandy shoreline and a backdrop of evergreen forest.

Twenty kilometers south, a rocky cluster of one hundred islands in Barkley Sound form a section. Broken Group Islands are a protected national treasure. They give refuge to both sea creatures and humans.

The West Coast Trail

The third section is the 77-kilometer West Coast Trail at the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

The West Coast Trail was cut between 1907 and 1912. Cabins were built for sailors who were shipwrecked in the dangerous waters of Juan de Fuca. Telephones were installed in each cabin. Without these facilities along the trail, shipwrecked sailors died of exposure because they were unable to penetrate the thick, lush, coastal rainforest.

Ribbons of forest line both the West Coast Trail and Long Beach. Sitka spruce grows closest to the ocean. Their bent trunks and twisted branches give evidence of the gale force winds that pound the area as well as attest to the stamina of the trees themselves.

Shorter trees grow in clumps in the second section of forest. These trees are similar in shape to heads of cauliflower and grow on stagnant, pine, moss-covered bogs that are at least ten thousand years old.

The third forest region consists of dense rainforest. The canopy is so thick, that no sun whatsoever reaches the forest floor. The most common tree in this area is the western hemlock but the oldest is the western red cedar. One magnificent specimen is over a thousand years old and measures approximately seven feet in circumference and 140 feet high.