East Sooke Trail 03/05/09

Erez on the East Sooke Trail:
“On a cloudy Sunday, Phil, Iris and I took the Ferry to Vancouver Island, drove past Victoria to East Sooke to the Aylard Farm trailhead of the East Sooke coast trail. The entire trail is about 11 km, but since we had only one car we hiked only to Cabin Point, taking the interior trail back to Aylard Farm. It took us about 1.5 hours to reach Beech head (a bluff overlooking the ocean), and another 1.5 hours or so to get to Cabin Point. The interior trail from there back to Aylard Farm turned out to be rather short and after an hour we were back in the car. Although it does not have any serious elevation gain the trail is not level and goes up and down quite often. The scenery was great – thin forest, green meadows, lots of Arbutus trees, emerald-coloured ocean, little coves, all made the trail quite interesting to walk on. We saw a woodpecker, a couple of eagles, and interrupted a sleeping seal at Cabin Point. There were very few people hiking the trail with us. Our only regret was not to have two cars so we could have hiked the entire trail. Oh well, next time.”