Tuesday, November 7, 2023

Vancouver Island Trip - Cathedral Grove

On October 26th the guys and I took a drive south on the Island Highway to Parksville, and then headed west on Highway 4.  This is the highway out to Tofino and Pacific Rim, though we didn't get nearly that far, and had no plans to do so.
We visited Cathedral Grove, in  MacMillan Provincial Park, on the shore of Cameron Lake.  Here there is a grove of old growth cedar trees that are among the largest and oldest on the island.  I believe the oldest one in the grove is about 800 years old.
There were beautiful fall colors on all the Bigleaf Maples in the understory.  A yellow filter would have been ideal to bring up the values in the leaves, on black and white film.  To my dismay I discovered that my yellow filter did not service the incident at the Fanny Bay Inn when the strap broke on my backpack, and it crashed to the ground.  I checked everything else and the only other item that did not survive was a small piece of frosted glass that I occasionally use as a diffuser.  I had Yellow-Green and Orange filters that survived, so I used those instead.  The look is slightly different, but close enough that it was not a major issue.
It was rather cold in the morning when we first arrived, and the boardwalks were very slippery with frost.  It melted off, and the morning mist and fog slowly lifting.  We spent several hours here photographing the magnificent trees.  By the time we finished up and moved on, it was already 2:00 in the afternoon.  This forced us to rethink our plans for the rest of the day, and we had to prioritize what we could do with the time remaining.






















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