Adventurer Jaye Edwards is heading home to Australia with a love for Powell River.
Edwards spent two of her six weeks in Canada exploring Powell River, Lund and the Sunshine Coast Trail.
She came to visit friends in Nanaimo and to check out Canada’s reputation for being an “outdoor playground.” She was not disappointed.
Edwards is a social worker and an experienced hiker from Perth, a city in Western Australia surrounded by desert.
Before coming to Canada she spent two months walking the 1,000-kilometre Bibbulmun Track, a trail that leads from Perth to Albany.
Though spending the majority of her stay in and around Vancouver Island, Edwards ventured out to Jasper National Park and did some high-altitude camping and hiking. She saw snow for the first time.
“It doesn’t snow in Western Australia,” she explained. “Winters are mild.”
Edwards spent four days on Vancouver Island’s Juan de Fuca Trail before making her way up island to Powell River.
She said she has enjoyed BC’s coastal climate. Summertime in Perth can be very hot. “We’ll have 20 consecutive days with temperatures over 35°C,” she said. “Somewhere like here suits me.”
Edwards came to Powell River after she started investigating the Sunshine Coast Trail.
“From the moment I got off the ferry, I’ve been impressed,” she said. “Everyone smiles and waves, the bus drivers are friendly. There’s community here and you can just feel it.”
She entered Tourism Powell River’s Picture Yourself Here contest and won $1,000 in vouchers which included two nights’ accommodation at Boxwood Cottage, meals at local restaurants, gifts from Breakwater Books and Coffee and Paperworks Gift Gallery and kayaking in Lund, among others.
Edwards has been away from Australia for six months. She said that her trip to Powell River comes at the very end of her holiday and winning the contest gave her the chance to “live it up some.”
“It’s just so easy to fall in love with the place,” she said. “It’s close enough that if you want the city it’s there, but it’s also isolated enough that you can get away.”
A highlight of her trip was spending four days on the Sunshine Coast Trail and meeting Eagle Walz and the PRPAWS (Powell River Parks and Wilderness Society) trail-building team.
She took BC Transit’s Stillwater bus to Saltery Bay to the Sunshine Coast Trail head and walked beyond Fairview Bay and Rainy Day Lake up Mount Troubridge.
“I got to see the trail building in action and all the people responsible for it,” she said, adding that she thinks the free hut-to-hut trail is “beautiful and first-rate.”
Edwards is already thinking about coming back to complete the whole trail and working her way around the Powell Forest Canoe Route. Looking back on her whole experience, “It was really cool,” she said.
