We used Campbell River as our headquarters for a visit to nearby Strathcona Provincial Park.  This is a big park and we’ll only scratch the surface, concentrating in the Buttle Lake area.  Our activities for the day became even less planned when we found out that the park does not have a staffed visitor center.  Normally, our plan is to chat up the folks in the visitor center for tips.  There’s really only a couple main roads so we just stopped at places that looked interesting.  This ended up working surprisingly well.  It turns out that much of the hiking in the park falls into one of two categories – (1) reasonable one to three hour hike or (2) crazy death march up to some insane elevation.  That made the decisions easier.

Our four stops in the park were Lupin Falls, Lower Myra Falls, Upper Myra Falls, and Karst Creek Day Area.  Each of these were neat to see.  In driving to the parking area for Upper Myra Falls, we stopped at some picnic tables and read about the nearby mine that we would be driving by.  It was interesting to see all the mining equipment since I can’t think of another time I was near a large scale active mining operation.   Had we gotten there just a little earlier, we could have gone in for a tour. 

After all of our hiking and sightseeing, we stopped at the Strathcona Lodge for a casual dinner with a great view of the mountains.  From there we returned to the hotel to pack up since tomorrow we leave for Nanaimo.

View all the trip photos here:

http://sanjoseabrams.com/photos/VancouverIslandAug2011/