We meet at the Ballpark in Gillies Bay at 10:00am.
Last week we decided to do some exploring again and headed south up onto the high ground and all the way down the Cook Bay Road finally parking at the gated entrance to the large private property. Taking the road to the beach that starts at the gate we hiked downhill to a pont where we seemed to be close to the extensive area of open bluffs I knew extended between the road and the coastline to the south west. At first we were following winding deer trails through open forest that eventually opened out onto grassy areas and we found if easy to climb to a high spot we could see on the GPS. None of us had been into this area ever before and it was very pleasant to sit in the sun to eating lunch and looking down on Lasqueti Island from a different viewpoint.
Instead of returning by the same route we used to reach the high point we decided to return to the road a different way and found we had problems with steep cliffs and patches of dense vegetation. My photo shows just how hard it can be to make a new trail through dense evergreen huckleberry, Vaccinium ovatum. This is not to be confused with the related red huckleberry, Vaccinium parvifolium, which is a smaller deciduous shrub not nearly as common on Texada as the evergreen species. Both have edible berries and both are tasty, but the black ones are less tart than the red.
JD.
Cutting a new trail though a particularly tall patch of Evergreen Huckleberry.
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