Browsing “Super, Neighbours in BC”

Welcome to the latest series of Super, Neighbours blog posts where we highlight incredible travel destinations in British Columbia! In this series I took you on a trip to Tofino to stay at the iconic and lovely Wickaninnish Inn. The first post was about GETTING THERE via BC Ferries and a wonderful drive, the second was about THE ACCOMMODATIONS and storm watching, the third was a DINNER at The Pointe Restaurant (which yesterday was named “Best Resort Dining 2012″ by Vancouver Magazine!) with the Inn’s co-founder, Charles McDiarmid. Last week in my CreativeMornings/Vancouver talk I came out publicly as a sportfisherman, tying creativity in with the Pacific Salmon Foundation, the Fraser River Sturgeon Conservation Society and a backyard trout project I’m helping Bodega Ridge Resort with. This fourth and final post about my trip to Tofino came about thanks to another person involved in the world of sportfishing who makes a living creatively: Blake Klopfenstein from Cleanline Sportfishing.

When I was first put in touch with Blake through our mutual friend, photographer Jeremy Koreski (who shot the amazing photos below), I was super keen on going out onto the ocean and catching a halibut. My favourite type of fish to eat, and one that I’ve never caught myself, I had big dreams of coming back from Tofino with 50 pounds of meat for my family to live off of for the next 8 months. But instead of heading out onto the high seas, Blake pitched something else at me: a Wilderness River Drift Experience.

Yes, it’s as wondrous as its title suggests and, yes, this photo below captures much of the awe that I felt as we were about to land on this remote lake on Vancouver Island in a 1955 de Havilland Beaver floatplane. As the lake is in a protected park that only a few people are granted permission to access by the local first nations and BC Parks, I’m not even allowed to tell you the name of it because they don’t want people flying into it. There are no halibut up here but I wouldn’t trade a thousand pounds of them for the memories I brought back from this adventure.

All photos: Jeremy Koreski

We landed on this unnamed secret lake and waved goodbye to the Beaver and watched it disappear over the mountain as it headed back to Tofino. Then? Just silence. Blake set up the raft at the mouth of the river leading out of the lake and Jeremy set up his underwater housing unit that he uses for “over/under” photos. I can’t tell you how fortunate I am that Jeremy came along with us to shoot. If you’re unfamiliar, he’s known internationally as one of the best surf photographers in the game, as well as one of Patagonia’s roving field photographers. View his work at JeremyKoreski.com.

After we were all set with the raft, we set course on an 8 hour drift down the river, getting out and wading in the water flyfishing for steelhead at different points and at time throwing a line from the raft. In this photo I have an 8 pounder on the line. I didn’t land any during the trip but not matter; it’s catch and release in these waters and a major part of it is just being out there and experiencing the drift, breathing in the air and absorbing the beauty of this place that few will ever see.

Some of the best 8 hours of my life, to be certain. …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Welcome to the latest series of Super, Neighbours blog posts where we highlight incredible travel destinations in British Columbia! In this current series we’re taking a trip to Tofino to stay at the Wickaninnish Inn and go fishing! The first post was about GETTING THERE via BC Ferries and a wonderful drive, the second concerned STAYING AT THE WICK and storm watching, and this third is all about dinner at The Pointe Restaurant at the Wikcaninnish Inn. I’m going to tie this post into my 50 Coffees series where I sit down with interesting people and write about them because while of course I want to tell you about how great the food is what I really want to do is introduce you to my friend, Charles McDiarmid. COFFEE #30 Name: Charles McDiarmid Occupation: Managing Director Beverage: House made ginger beer

On his business card it says that my 50 Coffees subject #30, Charles, is the Managing Director of the Wickaninnish Inn. That tells you that he’s in charge but what it doesn’t tell you is that he founded this place with his father, Howie, and while he may not be solely responsible for all of its successes he makes the Wick what it is. I’m not sure if he does this with all travel media who pass through but every time I visit he takes the time to share a meal with me at The Pointe and to let me know about all of the stuff happening at Chesterman Beach and beyond. If you checked out my PREVIOUS post about the renovations what I didn’t write is that on top of all of Charles’ responsibilities he essentially worked as the general contractor of their renovation project and made sure that the finest of details were handled. It’s that type of rolling up of sleeves that I feel puts Charles, and The Wick, one step beyond awesome.

But of course you want to know about the menu at The Pointe, right? It’s Pacific Northwest themed, masterminded by Chef Nicholas Nutting. And while the restaurant has a 240 degree view of the ocean (perfect for storm watching!) you’re actually going to want to keep your eyes on the table. Pictured top left in this photo below you’ll see one of my favourite fine details in the custom, locally sourced, sparkling water coaster. Little things like this add to the atmosphere while the food made with farm-fresh, organic Vancouver Island ingredients make it worth the price tag.

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Welcome to the latest series of Super, Neighbours blog posts where we highlight incredible travel destinations in British Columbia! I was recently invited back to stay at the absolutely wonderful Wickaninnish Inn and in last week’s post I took you on the journey involved in getting there, as I always do in these travel features. That thing that they say about it being “all about the journey” is true to a certain extent but when we’re talking about the marvel of Tofino, well… that’s only partially true. I returned to “The Wick” (as the locals call it) for the most part to check out their newly renovated rooms in the Pointe building. The resort is made up of two main buildings: the Beach building, which looks out onto Chesterman Beach, and the Pointe building which is, appropriately, right on the point looking out onto the open ocean. If you’re excited about storm watching then the latter is the building that holds a slightly better view of that for you.

Over the past few months Charles McDiarmid and his team had been working on improving the insides of these rooms in the Pointe building, and even as he was walking me through all of the renovations they had completed I kept being drawn to the window, and this:

Enjoy that one minute and twelve second view, minus the sound of the waves crashing. I wanted to give you a taste but you really have to experience it; a quick video clip could never do it justice.

The rooms weren’t quite ready to be inhabited when I was there but here are a couple of shots they provided of the show suite we toured through. I don’t know that “updated” would be the proper term for what they’ve done inside as they’ve essentially redone the entire place top to bottom. From the drywall to the glass walls in the showers to the floating flatscreen TVs that pop up out of the dressers, everything has been done over, and it is somehow stunning yet not over-the-top. I think that view might have something to do with it.

And for reference, I shot that video from the window on the left.

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Welcome to the latest series of Super, Neighbours blog posts where we highlight incredible travel destinations in British Columbia! For my most recent adventure I was invited back to stay at the absolutely wonderful Wickaninnish Inn in Tofino which I brought you to a little over a year ago (HERE are the 6 posts on that trip). My previous trip was taken a little too early in the season to get a good storm watching experience in so I was excited to be able to visit again and witness some real storm action as well as check out the renovations they’ve done to the Pointe building there. I might have mentioned it before but in the past I thought that “storm watching” was some sort of elaborate hoax that was cooked up by the tourism industry and meant to trick people into visiting Tofino during the slow months. It only took one trip there to reverse this thinking, and now after a few years of visiting this great Vancouver Island town I’ve come to view storm watching season as my absolute favourite time to visit.

Totally unpredictable weather during this season means you could wake up to a beautiful sunrise in the morning followed by torrential rain in the afternoon and head high waves that you can watch crash down from the comfort of your room or near the rocks that they dramatically break upon. It. Is. Awesome.

And the fishing part of this series? I promise it will be the next level beyond what you’re expecting. Blake from Cleanline Sportfishing took me on an adventure I will never forget.

But I’m putting the cart before the horse here because first I need to take you on the great journey that is the Getting There post! BC Ferries was kind enough to get me and my car onto a ferry so that I could experience what is arguably better than flying, and that is the journey from Horseshoe Bay to Nanaimo by ferry and then a drive across the entire width of Vancouver Island through some incredible scenery. It starts with marine views like this one below, shot from the ferry.

Once you get into Nanaimo you head North, through Coombs (or “Goats On A Roof Country” as I call it, which I’ll bring you to in a future series) and some other small towns. Not too far into the 3 hour drive you’ll start seeing signs for Cathedral Grove, which is an incredible piece of rain forest that you can admire on the way through or get out of your car for a quick stretching of your legs. Below is pictured one of the trails that’s a quick ten minute loop with a bathroom at the end, or the beginning, depending on how you look at the “loop”… or depending on how bad you’ve got to go.

I went by myself on this trip so I don’t have a 3-year-old child to illustrate the size of these trees like I normally do, bust rest assured they are hundreds of years old and massive. So massive and old that they’re often falling during a windstorm, so be careful! …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

A few days back I made THIS POST about our stay at the Listel Hotel on Robson Street, noting it was a bit of a departure from our regularly scheduled Super, Neighbours programming as it’s located right here in the city and not another municipality. While I may have had an excuse to have never stayed at their hotel before, not ever having dined at the hotel restaurant, O’Doul’s, now seems like it should have been deemed a criminal act. Their focus is on Pacific Northwest Coast cuisine and we were lucky to be hosted for a fabulous dinner as well as breakfast the next morning. I have a friend who quit her job as an editor in order to go to cooking school and become a chef so that she can then become a food writer, so I always feel a little weird when writing about my dining experiences. Not being a schooled and eloquent food writer my primary area of expertise lays in simply putting food experiences to the “awesome” test for you…

…so as per my usual technique of “food writing” I simply sat down and enjoyed the meals, shot photos of them, and will share a summary of the experiences overall. The summary is that O’Doul’s falls well within our “If it’s awesome, we write about it” mandate, and the photos below will show you the quality of the presentation which you can use your imagination to come up with all of the incredible tastes that were present.

Dungeness Crab Chowder with Whiskey Cured Bacon

Canadian Rangeland Carpaccio with celeriac remoulade and cumin enriched smoked chocolate

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I decided to take a bit of a departure with this edition of Super, Neighbours and take you somewhere that I don’t have to preface with a “How we got there!” blog post; this one isn’t a travel destination in a neighbouring town in BC but is in fact right under your nose on Robson Street. It’s an experience that I’d recommend to people visiting as well as you folks that we write for, you citizens of Vancouver. It’s a stay at the Listel Hotel, who were kind enough to host us for a night recently. “Our dream for this book is that it will give our guests an experience of Vancouver beyond the typical tourist fare, beyond the stuff of oceans and mountain vistas.”. That’s the first sentence in the foreword to the book, The Vancouver Stories, co-published by Raincoast Books and the Listel. A collection of 15 short stories introduced by Douglas Coupland it is properly touted as “the experience of Vancouver through the imagination of some of Canada’s most famous fiction stylists”. It’s in every single one of the rooms in the Listel, in the place of the standard Gideon Bible.

I’m not going to poop on anybody’s religion but if you’re inclined to read the bible I would imagine that, like many Christians and Catholics I know, you would probably bring your own. So why not replace it with a book filled with stories by the likes of George Bowering, Wayson Choy, Zsuzsi Gartner, William Gibson, Pauline Johnson and ten other notable Canadian authors?

The Listel is known as an “art-full” hotel, and beyond supporting and showcasing it by co-publishing the above book they’ve built it into every room and hallway of the place. We stayed in a suite on one of the Gallery Floors and our room was filled with original work by Otto Rogers, curated by the Buschlen Mowatt Galleries. Learn more about the Gallery Floors HERE.

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Welcome to the latest series of Super, Neighbours blog posts where we highlight incredible travel destinations in British Columbia! This is the last of 5 posts on our trip out to Harrison Hot Springs, a 90 minute drive from Vancouver. To break it down: PART 1 – Getting There PART 2 – Accommodations PART 3 – The Food PART 4 – The Spa I hinted about the awesomeness of my fishing adventure in almost all of the first 4 posts because it’s such a cool story, far beyond getting out and reeling in a big fish, though I will admit that’s a large part of it. If you look beyond this photo of us holding a 150 pound fish as a trophy (which we let go seconds after this photo was taken) you’ll see a story of conservation and of people coming together to help save a species.

I caught this 150 pound sturgeon. It’s about 75 years old. Wowza!

As a lifelong hobby fisherman of freshwater lakes, over the past three and a half decades I’ve spent what would amount to months of my life with a line in the water. Mostly pulling out rainbow trout that weigh less than a pound, fishing for sturgeon is something I never really put much thought into pursuing. I admit that up until I started researching for this series I didn’t see a point in sturgeon fishing because the white sturgeon of the Fraser (and Harrison) River is an endangered species and if you keep one you go to jail. Hell, not only did I not see a point in it but I saw it as a disservice to these prehistoric beasts; I wondered that why after we’ve pushed this species close to extinction that we now have to add insult to injury and pull them out of the water just to get our pictures taken with them.

Tony Nootebos, the proprietor of the BC Sportfishing Group which has a fleet of 22 fishing vessels, changed this entire perception I had of sturgeon fishing. As one of the many supporters of the Fraser River Sturgeon Conservation Society, along with chairman Rick Hansen (yes, the Man In Motion), he’s not only out on the river to make a livelihood but he’s there for the sake of conserving and restoring this fish stock.

The society is a not-for-profit dedicated to the conservation and restoration of wild Fraser River white sturgeon and it’s made up of charter operators, commercial fishermen, first nations and others. At the heart of what they do is tracking every single sturgeon that they reel in, and they input all of their stats into a database so that they can track their growth, their patterns, and how well they’re doing as a whole. If not for this not-for-profit nobody would be tracking this fish, the fish that is on the top of the food chain which reflects the overall health of the river system itself.

And not only do they track the fish but they build awareness as well: they introduced curriculum into a number of schools in 2005, teaching kids in the Lower Mainland about the history and the importance of the Fraser River white sturgeon. The hard costs of all of their work is paid for by donors and the provincial government and the lions share of work is done by volunteers, those who are basically re-investing in their own future by helping ensure the future of the white sturgeon.

I went along to catch a huge fish but I also went along to help Tony gather data which would then be input into the database. I went there (mostly) on a conservation mission.

So that’s the backstory. Let’s introduce you to the experience now, shall we?

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Welcome to the latest series of Super, Neighbours blog posts where we highlight incredible travel destinations in British Columbia! In the past 3 posts we’ve taken you to Harrison Hot Springs thanks to the kind folks at Tourism Harrison Hot Springs who hosted us for a winter weekend. In PART 1 I introduced you to the quick 90 minute drive there. PART 2 was a look at our totally sweet accommodations at Harrison Hot Springs Resort & Spa. PART 3 gave you a look at the incredible meals we ate. Now PART 4 is about the Spa part of the Harrison Hot Springs Resort & Spa. But to introduce you to it I first have skip ahead to PART 5 briefly and let you know that saving PART 5 for last has been ABSOLUTELY KILLING ME! PART 5 is all about an incredible fishing adventure that I had with Tony Nootebos of the BC Sportfishing Group. I will save the details of this epic adventure for my next post but must let you know that I spent an entire half an hour wrestling with a fish. When I got off the boat my muscles were so sore and I was blessed to be reminded that I had a massage scheduled about 15 minutes later.

Of course, greeting me on the door of the spa was a fish. Not the variety that I caught, but I still thought it was a good omen.

And inside its doors the Spa was as relaxing and rejuvenating as you would expect it to be. I applied a similar rule to my “don’t shoot photos of people in their bathing suits in the Hot Springs” that I spoke of in a previous post, only in the spa the rule was “don’t take photos of people in their robes”. So I didn’t take any photos inside save for this one in the room that I got my (totally awesome) massage in. It’s a fine detail that I’ve never seen before.
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