British Columbia Coast Trek

Port Hardy · Canada

Challenging6 daysNorth America~£1,800 est.

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Overview

The North Coast Trail is the wilder sibling of the West Coast Trail: 43 km along the top of Vancouver Island from Shushartie Bay to Nissen Bight, where it joins the Cape Scott trail network for the walk out to San Josef Bay. There is no road at the start — a water taxi from Port Hardy drops you at Shushartie and leaves — and what follows is genuinely hard travel: bottomless mud, root ladders, rope-assisted descents, cable-car river crossings, and long stretches of boulder and sand beach walked to tide timing. Miss a tide window at a headland and you wait. The reward is the rawest coast in British Columbia: sea stacks off Cape Sutil (the island's northernmost point), wolf tracks on morning sand, black bears grazing the beach sedge at a distance, humpbacks blowing offshore. Carry a tide table and know how to read it — it is the single variable that wrecks schedules. Every camp needs bear-safe food storage (canisters or the fixed caches), and everything you own should live in dry bags. Allow five to seven days, budget about £1,800 including the water taxi in and the shuttle back from the San Josef trailhead, and treat the forecast as fiction.