By John Kimantas / July 2007

I eased off my boot – my first chance to stretch my toes after a long day of hiking – and watched a cloud of steam rise from the insole. The image was unexpected, but fitting after a day of hiking with hot, wet feet on a cool, wet day.

My partner Leanne Chetcuti and I were among the first hikers to leave Bamfield to hike the West Coast Trail this year. The trail opening was delayed two weeks until May 15 to aid the cleanup after winter windstorms ripped along the coast last November, toppling hundreds of trees along the trail and ripping out bridges and cable cars.

It didn't take us long to get a sense of the devastation. The first portion of the trail between Bamfield and the Pachena Point lighthouse is the easiest along the 75-km route, but several new diversions were necessary to make our way around the trunks of some monster trees. We could see stretches where the wind had cut a swath, laying a once-rich forest essentially bare.

Parks Canada workers had been busy, though, and the condition of the trail wasn't the biggest hurdle we would face. That came from us.

This year is the hundredth anniversary of the West Coast Trail, created in 1907 after one particularly dark event in B.C.'s history – the 1906 sinking of the Valencia , an iron steamer with 160 passengers aboard. It ran aground along the isolated outer coast of Vancouver Island at its namesake bluff. The Valencia sank over several days, with 133 people unable to make it to safety through the pounding surf.

With the West Coast Lifesaving Trail and a new lighthouse at Pachena Point built the following year, vast improvements in marine safety meant the trail saw little of its intended use. Instead over the years it evolved into an adventure hike, gaining a reputation as one of Canada 's best. Today the trail tends to evoke two contrasting responses. One is an almost religious awe and reverence for the difficulty and the beautiful scenery. The other tends to come from hikers who knew the trail before its present-day popularity. Most don't speak to kindly of the ladders, boardwalks and bridges have tamed the rugged terrain. During the summer a train of hikers now meander through areas once limited to an exclusive few.

Give Parks Canada credit, though. They've introduced a quota system to limit the impact of people on the trail. They've put ladders where feet would erode steep banks. They built boardwalks and safety features in the places prone to injuries.

The reservation system makes it difficult to spontaneously decide to hike the trail, but start your hike early in the year – in May or June before the peak season – and you can avoid both the crowds and the need to reserve a spot.

The biggest project in this spring's cleanup for Parks Canada was to replace the 100-metre suspension bridge over Logan Creek at the 56 km mark. The original was left dangling and twisted at the river bottom of the ravine by the winter storms. The shiny new bridge presented just one problem for us: my partner is terrified of suspension bridges.

If there is just one suspension bridge to evoke terror, the one at Logan Creek makes a good finalist. It is single planks of wood laid down one after another, all connected by two sturdy cables – insubstantial enough to breed instant fear in anyone scared of the idea of walking on two-inch-thick planks a hundred feet in the air. But after 56 kilometres, you can't simply turn back. You have to meet your fears. So Leanne stepped across, one shaking foot at a time, urging herself forward while mumbling incomprehensible words of encouragement interspersed by the occasional sob of anguish.

The emotion quickly shifted to happy relief once she safely crossed.

Perhaps the range of emotions it inspires makes the West Coast Trail so dynamic. One minute you can be walking along a serene sand beach, watching the pounding surf on the nearby rocky reefs in a way seemingly unique to Vancouver Island 's West Coast. Or you can be in a forest of old-growth trees, marveling at monsters that were already old when Christopher Columbus first arrived on North American soil.

Then the next minute you can be facing the personal challenge of a lifetime.

My own personal challenge came unexpectedly 53 kilometres into the trail at Walbran Creek. Like the Logan Creek suspension bridge, cable cars are an intrinsic part of the character of the West Coast Trail. Normally there is a cable car at Klanawa River at 23 kilometres, but it had yet to be replaced, leaving the Walbran as my first cable car ride. Leanne and I climbed the 10 metres up the ladder to the cable car platform then pulled the car into position from its resting place in the middle of the river. I stepped inside first.

The result wasn't what I expected. My weight caused the cable car to sink plus swing away from the platform. I suddenly found myself suspended over air – a moment of sheer terror as I tried to readjust my balance.

It took several tries before I was safely seated, with the idea of safety being relative when you're being held up by one metal cable across a river. Worse yet, we bumped into the platform on the far side, sagging too low to glide over the top. We were overweight. Leanne had to carefully sidle out onto a narrow portion of protruding ledge. Once she was out the car, it rose and I was able to pull the car fully onto the platform.

Again, more outpouring of relief once we were safely across.

From cable cars to caves, every few miles the trail has a different attraction. One of the oddest is Monique's, a restaurant on a Ditidaht reserve near Carmanah Point at 44 kilometres. There's a general buzz among hikers as you get nearer, and we were getting regular updates. “Hamburgers for lunch today.” The next group: “Soup's on the menu this time.”

Perhaps not surprisingly most of the earliest hikers we encountered were Europeans – Germans mostly, but add Belgians, a couple of Fins, plus some Aussies and even two Kiwis. But initially very few Canadians.

Then finally there was the school group, 17 Canadians in all, with one of the chaperones an elderly gentleman carrying a huge packpack under a rain parka and a yellow umbrella in his hand. Not only was the umbrella bright yellow, it appeared perfectly clean, despite make his way through one of the most difficult portions of the trail. Not to mention the wettest and muddiest.

At every difficult portion of the trip after that, I had to think to myself: if that fellow with the yellow umbrella made it, I can too.

And difficult it did get. A few days of rain had swelled the Bog, the notoriously hard portion of the trail between kilometres 51 and 62. Boardwalks sat submerged. Gurgling creeks grew into raging rivers without bridges. Logs placed to avoid mud floated in the mire.

Our pace slowed to well below a kilometre an hour. But there was nothing we could do but plod on, with the relief coming at the end of the day when we could vent some steam from the unusual location of our shoes and socks.

On our sixth day we emerged at Gordon River in Port Renfrew muddy, tired but exuberant. Add two more to the list of the many to complete the West Coast Trail over the last century.

And for the record, my impression will remain one of awe and reverence.

This article originally appeared in More Living Magazine.