5-DAYS - SOLO CAMPING IN RAINSTORM // West Coast Trail

Good morning. Just waking up after night two on the West Coast Trail over a five day trip. It poured rain all last night and it's not supposed to let up for the next three days. The first two days were beautiful. I got on the ferry at Gordon River, went across the river and started off at the very first ladder of the trip. There's a ton of ladders on the West Coast Trail. You use them to get up and down through valleys and dips in the trail. They can be a lot of fun but are also very scary. There's a lot of infrastructure on the West Coast Trail because the terrain is so crazy to navigate. Over those first two days I also got to cross this crazy bridge that almost made me pee my pants. The West Coast Trail is 75 kilometers long and the beginning of the trail is known for being super muddy and wet. The trail alternates between going through a very lush rainforest here on Vancouver Island and then going down to the ocean and walking along the ocean. When you're in the forest there's a lot of mud. It's very wet. You're having to skip and jump between logs and roots in order to dance your way along the trail. I personally really enjoy these muddy sections because I kind of feel like a like a ninja as I'm going along them but it's also really nice to get down to the beach and do some of the ocean side walking. On day one and two you experience some very beautiful ocean landscapes as you're walking along the beach. There's the Owen Caves which are just phenomenal. One of the crown jewels of the West Coast Trail and I got to experience them at the perfect tide level. You have to time your walks on the ocean well so that you're walking on the rock tidal shelves and not in the ocean. There's also some beautiful beach walking. I got to walk along some gigantic beaches, see some really cool rock formations and generally feel like I was on a beach vacation while out on the West Coast Trail. Those first two days were amazing. I was super happy to experience them in the sun but now we're in for the grueling part of the trip with three days of rain. So I just saw a rescue helicopter booting back down the coast towards Civilization. That's the second rescue helicopter I've seen on the trip so far. I saw another one yesterday in the middle of the day. Parks Canada says that they rescue someone on average from the trail every other day so that's a lot of injuries that are happening especially when you consider that only 60 people are starting the trail each day. Because of that I'm going to be extra careful at going up and down these ladders. They're a little treacherous on a good day but when they're wet like this they're dangerous. Speaking of, there's another one that is crazy. Second one of the day and that's actually circling really close by. Hopefully everyone's okay. For this trip rain gear is super important and I put a lot of thought into it. I ended up picking up the Enlightened Equipment Vist jacket. I also wanted to get the pants but they were out of stock so I'm wearing the Outdoor Research Helium pants. The Vist jacket has been awesome so far. It's waterproof, it's breathable and it has armpit zip so I'm able to dump heat that way as well. If you guys are interested in the gear that I'm using on this trip go check out the video description where I'll have a link to my lighter pack that lists off all the gear that I'm using. As well once we get to camp we'll unzip the Vist here and see how dry it can be. As I'm filling up water here you can see there the helicopter that we saw earlier it has its sling out. I don't see anyone in the sling but it's going around. It looks like it's trying to find somebody that's maybe in the forest so you can either take the forest route or the beach route for a lot of the trail and if you're in the forest route there the logs, the ladders, the bridges they're all super slippery and it'd be really easy to get injured. The rain right now is insane. I don't know if I've been in rain this strong ever before so I'm definitely going to be careful heading down these ladders as we get down to the beach. I'm really happy to be back on the beach. It's pretty treacherous in the forest there. Like I said all those roots and bridges and then that spot was following a like a blot or a cliff so there's spots where I was trying to jump across a slippery route and if I slipped I'm falling off the cliff into the ocean. Pretty sketchy. Luckily most of the rest of the day is on the beach so hopefully that keeps me a little bit safer. It's more exposed to the rain but I'm willing to take that trade off. So I was just hiking that beautiful beach over there. We had this trail in 2017 with a big group. We nicknamed it Proposal Beach because it's just so beautiful, iconic, great place to get engaged and I don't know if it's the fact that it's just before lunch or the rain or just how beautiful this trail is but it's got me really really missing Stephanie. This is the first big trip that we did together and while I love solo trips and going out backpacking by myself this is the kind of trail that is just really special and not much better with someone else and sharing that experience. It's still raining. It's supposed to rain pretty much continuously for the next 36 hours and my objective in that time period is to stay as dry and warm as possible and that's no easy task. We're getting pretty close to camp for tonight. I see it just along the beach there. We're gonna head there and get set up. So just had dinner inside a cave with a school group that was camping here. I'm going to head into the tent and hunker down for the rest of the night. I took down the tarp because it got really windy and the tarp was starting to blow away so we'll just be dealing with the tent. One of the hardest things with getting into the tent when it's raining is you don't want to be bringing all of your wet gear in the tent with you. So I had to change out of my wet rain gear inside the vestibule, leave it all outside there so I wasn't bringing water inside the tent. My clothing underneath the rain gear was in pretty good shape. I promised to let you know how my shirt was and it's pretty much dry. This rain jacket did a very good job of protecting me from the rain and it is definitely raining. It's also super windy. The wind is just coming right off the ocean and pummeling the shoreline and there's not really a lot of protection here. Tomorrow we're expecting more rain and whenever you're dealing with multiple days of rain it makes it exponentially harder to keep your gear dry and stay warm and safe. So tomorrow is going to be interesting and we'll see what happens. My tent pegs just blew out. I'm gonna have to get out in this rain and try and reinforce everything because the wind is picking up. So that was pretty close to being a disaster with the tent. If one peg goes then that really throws off the structural stability of the entire tent. So with this corner just out and flapping in the wind I was really worried that the entire tent was just going to lift off but I managed to get basically naked, run off the tent and then get that tent peg put back in and reinforce all the other ones. So I think I'm pretty solid for some pretty good wind. I have some big rocks and logs in all the corners and as long as these trekking poles don't snap then I should be good for the rest of the night. That was crazy. Good morning. It's still raining. Last night it poured rain but that was an issue. The issue was the wind. It was windier and rainier than I've ever experienced before. Not only backpacking but in life. There's times where this pole was bending the entire tent felt like it was going to come down but luckily all the reinforcements I did at the stakeout points kept the tent up and I survived the night. It's supposed to continue raining all day again today. I'm hoping that the next camp has a bit more shelter at it because I'd like to be able to keep my tarp set up and kind of be in a more protected area. This outhouse might have the nicest view out of any outhouse I've ever been in. I'm gonna leave that door open because this is nice. All packed up, ready to hit the trail. It's going to be interesting to see how wet the trail is and then how slippery those ladders are. We started off the back with some of the most intense ladders of the entire trip. This is a full river and this is a long cable car. It's going to be a pain in the butt to do by myself. Like I was saying before, this trip is really nice with other people but I'm having a lot of fun by myself. If you guys followed me on the Great Divide Trail you know that bad weather kind of gets me down but right now I'm feeling great. It's not raining super hard and my spirits are up. The fact that the West Coast Trail is so beautiful and kind of magical, I don't really know how else to describe it other than the fact that just has this vibe about it that just makes it really special. So we've made it to camp. This is the Darling River Campground, last campsite of the trip. Let's go see if we can find a place to hunker down, something that's a little bit protected and a place I can easily set up my Those trees over there look pretty good. Let's go check it out. Oh yeah, I think this will do. I'll set my tent up over there and then have the tarp sheltering me over here and then have a little hangout area and it's pretty protected from the wind as well and a lot of good tree cover. Let's get it set up and then I'll show you what it all looks like and I'll also take you into my sleep system because I have a very specific sleep system for this trip. Got the X-Mid tent just kind of tucked away in the corner there and have this nice living area underneath here with my hammock geared tarp on top. Both the tarp and the tent are made with sil-poly so they absorb very little water relative to sil-nylon and that was a purposeful decision for this trip and right now even though they got drenched yesterday they're drying off very quickly with this little bit of wind and then I have this corner of the tarp down a little bit because that's where the wind is coming from right off the ocean so it's providing a little bit of a wind break for when I set up my chair and cook a little kitchen in here. So here we have my sleep system. I have the 2022 version of the Nemo Tensor with an R-value of 4.2 and I'm using the Trekology 2.0 pillow with the pad strap on there and my quilt is the Katabatic Flex 22 quilt. So this has hydrophobic down in it which makes it perform a lot better in wet and humid conditions. The down is just able to keep its loft a little bit longer. Something I was a little bit worried about this last leg of the trip was that this river, Darling River, is prone to flash flooding and with all the rain we had I thought that maybe it would be a lot deeper and a lot quicker. Right now it's not too bad, easily crossable, but hopefully we don't get a ton of rain tonight and then that makes this river uncrossable tomorrow morning. Good morning. Having this tarp system over top of the front end of my tent has been awesome. I can get in and out of my tent without getting wet. I can leave the fly open and that way I get a lot of good ventilation. I've started getting packed up. I have my sleep system all packed up in there. I've eaten some breakfast, some beautiful breakfast underneath the tarp looking out over the ocean. It's been amazing and I think I nailed the gear for this trip. A lot of rain happened on me. It was a little bit tough at times, but we made it through. I'm going to go check out what the river levels are of Darling River, make sure I can cross it, then I'm going to finish off the trail. If you want to go check out my dedicated gear list for this video, go look at it right up there. It goes over everything that I brought with me and why.