Victoria, Vancouver Island, British Columbia
Vancouver Island, as a place of natural beauty, is an incredible place to be. Below are a few places we like to take most of our visitors when we get the chance. In fact, the Port of Victoria has adopted out catch phrase, ‘The Most Beautiful Place to Dock a Cruise Ship in Canada’.

Ogden Point
The Ogden Point Breakwater is where I completed my Instructors Cerification in 1999 and is home to some of the finest, most accessible scuba diving in the Pacific Northwest. There are a number of entry points along the breakwater which allow entrance at a wide variety of depths, but the farther you go, the harder it is to get there with a dive tank strapped to your back on the walk out. However, the farther out you go, the greater the variety of sea life.

Recently, we completed a series of ecologically oriented panels geared at providing education to the local public and the 400,000 Cruise Ship visitors which visit Victoria annually. As a Member of the Board of Directors of the Ogden Point Enhancement Society, I created their web site and the series of panels through the collboaration of many individuals and businesses.

Botanical Beach, Port Renfrew, Vancouver Island
Botanical Beach offers really great opportunities to view intertidal marine creatures and plants on Vancouver Island and is on my list of one of the Top Ten Things To Do on Vancouver Island. It is one of the most amazing places on the entire West Coast, particularly at low tide. This is when you can walk a long way out across flat sandstone and granite outcroppings to view tide pools filled like jewel boxes with brightly coloured marine animals. Purple, red and orange starfish and sea urchins, blue mussel shells, white gooseneck barnacles, and green sea anemones only begin to hint at the spectrum of intertidal life that thrives here.
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Craigdarroch Castle
Craigdarroch Castle is a Victoria landmark in my opinion. Craigdarroch was built between 1887-1890 for Robert Dunsmuir, a Scottish immigrant who made his fortune from Vancouver Island coal. This legendary Victorian mansion, built on a hill overlooking the City of Victoria (Craigdarroch means "rocky, oak place" in Gaelic) announced to the world that Robert Dunsmuir was the richest and most important man in Western Canada.
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Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary
The marsh around Swan Lake provides good habitat for many birds and small animals, including muskrat, river otter and mink. They make their homes in the rock walls, marsh grasses and cattails beside the lake. Swan Lake's water comes from a large watershed to the north and the east, which includes Blenkinsop Lake. The water drains west from the lake into the Colquitz River and drains into the Pacific Ocean at Portage Inlet. Check out their website here >

Ucluelet
The only highway to Pacific Rim National Park is Highway 4, which starts at Parksville, travels through Port Alberni and on to Ucluelet and Tofino, 1 40km (86.6 miles) away. From Port Alberni, the Pacific Rim Highway (Highway 4) leads west through the rugged mountain scenery of the Mackenzie Range, past the rushing waters of Kennedy River and the shores of Kennedy Lake, to the west coast of Vancouver Island. At the edge where land meets the Pacific Ocean lies Ucluelet.

Ucluelet is surrounded by the spectacular beauty of Canada's temperate rainforest and the Pacific Ocean. Some of British Columbia's largest inventories of red cedar stand adjacent to the town. They enjoy a fairly temperate climate with year-round temperature ranges from 5º C to 20º C. Snowfall is minimal, and Ucluelet has 328 frost-free days and over 1800 hours of sunshine a year.
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Race Rocks
Race Rocks is a Vancouver Island Marine Park off Metchosin. Cody, Yim and I rented a small boat one day to go check it out and were confronted by hundreds of Stellar Sea Lions and HUGE males. I mean monstrous when they are 20 feet away from you and 'mooing' at you to leave.

The Sooke Potholes
The Sooke Potholes is a set of naturally formed pools and unique rock formations carved into the sandstone bedrock along Sooke River. The water in the potholes has a beautiful aqua-green colour and cascades through sets of waterfalls into deep clear pools offering just an excellent array of swimming holes.
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Goldstream Park
Massive trees, majestic waterfalls, a meandering river that meets the sea, flowers, birds and fascinating fish are but a few of the attractions that draw people to Goldstream Provincial Park, a mere 16 km from downtown Victoria on southern Vancouver Island.

It’s a world that seems far removed from the urban adventures of British Columbia's capital city whether the visitor is a hiker seeking inspiration from this magnificent example of the great outdoors or a naturalist looking to add to their notebook. There’s something new, different and exciting every month of the year at Goldstream Park.
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