Cathedral Grove

Cathedral Grove sits directly on Highway 4 between Port Alberni and Parksville, on the way to Tofino, which means an enormous number of people drive within a hundred metres of it without stopping. I nearly did the same thing on my first trip across the island before a friend physically made me pull over, and I’ve been grateful to her ever since — this is one of the last stands of low-elevation old-growth Douglas fir left on southern Vancouver Island, part of MacMillan Provincial Park, and it takes about fifteen minutes to walk through and will reorganize your sense of scale for the rest of the day.

The trees on the north side of the highway are the real draw — some Douglas firs here are estimated at eight hundred years old, over seventy metres tall, with trunks so wide that a person standing beside one looks like they’ve wandered into the wrong scale of photograph entirely. This land is within the traditional territory of the Hul’qumi’num and Nuu-chah-nulth peoples, who have lived among and used these forests for millennia, and interpretive signage along the boardwalk trail does a reasonable job acknowledging that this grove is a remnant, not a wilderness — less than one percent of BC’s original low-elevation old-growth Douglas fir forest remains, most of it logged over the past century and a half.

A windstorm in 1997 knocked down a number of the grove’s largest trees, and rather than clear them away entirely, park management left several fallen giants in place along the trail, nurse logs slowly becoming host to new hemlock and cedar seedlings growing directly out of the decaying wood — a visible demonstration of how these forests actually regenerate that no amount of reading about it prepares you for. I stood next to one fallen trunk that was taller than me lying on its side and tried, unsuccessfully, to get a sense of its full length in one photograph.

When to go: Any time of year — it’s a short roadside stop rather than a hike, so weather matters less than elsewhere. Early morning avoids the tour buses that stop through midday in July and August.