Carmana Hike

Hey All

Its the beginning of the reading break and it has been awesome so far! This Monday and Tuesday Jer, Tom, Kurt, Chels, Rach, Abby and I went on a hike to the Carmana Valley. If you don't know where that is, it is a valley on the other side of the West Side of the Island out past Lake Cowichan. We made it a 2 day trip out and back the next day. It was a 4 hour drive out to the West Coast of the island and 3 hours of it was offroading too!! They let me drive there and back. I would have to say driving offroad is one of the funnest things you can do! Mind you it is pretty tiring driving for 3 hours on a dirt road.
Anyways we drover through sun, fog and rain, but when we got to the valley it was just cloudy. The first day was a very nice hike amongst the massive old growth forests. Some of these trees you could probably fit 10-20 people around them. About 4-5 hour in we found a spot that looked nice and set up camp. It took us a while to get our tarps and hammics up but eventually managed. We turned in early that evening cause it was too dark to do anything else and also it started to rain.
That night it rained and rained and rained. Jer and I slept very well in our hammics but as for Tom and Kurt, not such a great night. Not very long into the night Jer and Kurts hammic string broke so they had to restring it. Not too bad just a minor hickup. After that though we had all fallen asleep and the string holding Tom and Kurt up broke and they were both on the ground. That also was holding part of the tarps up and sent a pile of water down on both of them. The rest of the night they both spent on the ground huddled up and wet.
The rest of us woke up later that morning and started to pack up because it was still raining. By the time we finished packing we were already soaking wet, luckily I had my rain gear with me. Later on it didnt matter though because we soon figured out that it had rained at least 6 inches that night if not more. The path we had originally taken to get to our spot had turned into a river about ancle hight and the rivers that we had easily passed over before were at least twice in size. We started off trying to make our way around without getting wet until Tom took a swim in a marsh by accident and almost lost his gear. Jer and I ended up making it about half way without getting wet but eventually found it worthless to try. The water was at least waist high on me most of the time. I was beyond caring at this point cause we were soo wet already.
Even though the rain could have made things very horrible we all kept our spirits and had a great time. I really enjoyed myself, mind you I wouldn't want to do it again :P

Aaron