I feel like summer gets shorter every year that I live in Vancouver, but my bucket list of summer activities only gets longer. I love kayaking, but the alpine backpacking season is so short that I often forget to schedule in kayaking adventures. I always go kayaking with Seth, and we can’t take our dog with us, so it’s hard to find someone to look after her every time we want to go out. But we celebrated our 5 year wedding anniversary in August, and I was determined to go on an overnight trip!
We’ve done lots of kayaking in Indian Arm, more recently known as Say Nuth Khaw Yum Provincial Park or Selilwet, which is located right in the middle of the lower mainland and easily accessible from both the North Shore and Belcarra. Our favourite day trip is to launch from Belcarra and paddle up to Jug Island and Ferrar Cove, but we’ve never spent an overnight in the Arm. There’s 3 campsites scattered along the route and I’ve wanted to paddle up to the end for many years. Twin Islands is located at the southern end and is the most popular site. There are 2 more BC Parks sites at the northern end: Berg’s Landing and Granite Falls. We’ve paddled to Twin Islands a few times, but I really wanted to get to Granite Falls at the far end of Selilwet.
The first thing to be aware of is that this is an extremely popular trip. We planned it for a Saturday night, so we knew it would be busy with both kayakers and pleasure boaters (anything with a motor). If you’re able to go on a weeknight, I think it would be a much nicer experience. You can rent kayaks from either Deep Cove Kayaks or Takaya Tours in Cates Park. Deep Cove Kayaks seems to be the most popular option as they have a huge fleet and it’s a shorter paddling distance, but Takaya is also a great option to avoid crowded Deep Cove and support an indigenous owned company.
I wish we could start our trip out of Belcarra, which is the same paddling distance as Deep Cove and much closer to our home, but unfortunately there’s no overnight parking from Belcarra or Barnet Marine, so Deep Cove or Cates Park are the only options. Deep Cove gets insanely busy in the summer, so we got up really early on Saturday morning to beat the traffic. I dropped off Seth and the kayaks at the loading zone and then found parking. The nearby parking is 3 hours maximum, so it’s a bit of a walk, but it was relatively easy for me to find parking at 7:30am. It was insanely crowded when we returned the following day in the mid-afternoon, so definitely go early.
We were on the water around 8:30am and Seth dropped a crab trap at the mouth of Deep Cove. Selilwet is a beautiful place to paddle, but the second perk of getting up early is that the conditions are much better for paddling in the morning. The Arm gets a notoriously strong southerly wind in the afternoon and it can get quite choppy. We had a really enjoyable paddle out of Deep Cove and ended up paddling ~7.5km to Thywates Landing before taking a break. There were lots of kayakers on the water, but most of them weren’t going further than Twin Islands.
Another option for paddling is to stop at Jug Island or the campsite at Twin Islands, but both options require an open water crossing, which I usually try and avoid having to do too many times, so it depends what route you prefer. The thing I don’t like about paddling in the Arm is that there aren’t a lot of public rest locations. When the tide is low there are some places you can stop, but a lot of the beaches seem to be attached to people’s properties. In most cases, you can’t own the beach (unless your property is really old and you’ve been grandfathered into old bylaws), so you can pretty much stop wherever you want, but I’m never really sure and try to stick to public spaces.
Thywates Landing is a really great option on the west side of Selilwet. It’s a small beach, but it’s owned by Metro Vancouver Regional Parks, so it’s primarily meant as a stopping place for paddlers. There’s a short walk (100m) up to a little waterfall and pool, which is really nice. The water was still really flat by the time we got to Thywates Landing, so we only took a short break to take advantage of the optimal paddling conditions. We started seeing a few more paddlers heading up the Arm and the pleasure boaters increased throughout the day, stirring up wake.
We paddled another 7.5km to Berg’s Landing, which is the second campground owned by BC Parks. Along the way we passed Silver Falls, which is a real highlight going up the Arm. There’s lots of space at Berg’s Landing and there was only one other tent there when we arrived. I’m sure the campsite got busier later, but Granite Falls definitely seems to be the more popular of the two sites. We stopped at Berg’s Landing for lunch at noon, right around when the wind started to pick up. It’s another ~2km to Granite Falls (for 17km in total from Deep Cove). It was choppy for the last 30 minutes of paddling, but at least we had a tailwind!
Granite Falls was already quite busy when we arrived at 1pm, but there is a lot of space for tents and we didn’t have trouble finding a site. As a kayaker, you’re never going to beat the people in motorboats, so leave early enough that you don’t have to fight the waves on the way up. There’s always going to be a bunch of novice paddlers that show up much later in the afternoon and evening, so just do your best.
Berg’s Landing is mostly a big field with some campsites around the edges and a big beach. Granite Falls is more popular because it has a bunch of campsites along the coast and it has a large freshwater source in the form of the waterfall cascading down from the mountain. I have visited Granite Falls once before by zodiac in June and there is a big difference in the water flow in the Spring and late Summer. When I visited in June, the Falls were a violent, rushing cascade of water, versus in mid-August when it’s much more of a trickle. There’s a nice pool at the bottom that you can swim in and there were a lot of yachters visiting for the day. There used to be a public wharf, but it’s gone now, so it’s a bit trickier for the pleasure cruisers to access.
Granite Falls has 2 new outhouses and a bear cache. Unfortunately neither are really appropriate for this type of site. While Granite Falls attracts all kinds of campers, it’s a backcountry site that gets treated like a frontcountry site. By which I mean, it gets a lot of inexperienced campers and it’s not treated with the respect it deserves. I wanted to love the site – it’s very beautiful – but the other campers left me feeling frustrated. It’s a wilderness campsite that could easily be frequented by bears, but because it’s easy to access by motorized boat, it attracts a lot of party people and it gets treated like an urban picnic site. People bring in large coolers of food and beer and don’t bother to secure anything. I could easily see the public losing access to this campground in the future from misuse.
For this reason, I didn’t think the facilities were appropriate. There are only 4 small bear bins and there were easily 50 people staying at the site on Saturday night. So even if people practiced bear safety, there still wouldn’t be enough space for everyone. Several groups were hauling in coolers of beer, which they left unattended all night. Hard shell coolers are not bear proof, so either leave them on your yacht or at home. We overheard another camper say to their friend, “We’re not worried about bears are we? There’s so many of us.” Please, it’s not about being worried about bears. Bear safety is about avoiding opportunities for bears to become food habituated, which almost always results in the death of the bear and sometimes, the closure of the site.
The outhouses were actually really nice. They’re the urine diverting outhouses with the conveyor belt pump. Unfortunately, no one seemed to have any idea how to use them and people were not pumping the belt after using it, so they quickly became clogged. Bless Seth, he tried for the better part of 20 minutes to unclog the toilet using a stick, but had no success. I think they just need a bit more educational info in the stalls. But this technology might be too advanced for the party people. To be fair – a lot of the people at the site were very respectful, but a few large groups can really ruin it.
So I did leave this trip feeling a bit annoyed, but overall, I enjoyed the experience. Because of the paddling conditions, we arrived at the site early in the day and had lots of time to relax. We spent some time exploring the waterfall and we went for a swim in the ocean, which is really warm at this time of year. Seth took a nap in the shade and I read my book. It’s easier to bring fresh food when kayaking, so we had tahini yam and halloumi tacos for supper, which I had made the evening before. We went for a short evening paddle before sunrise, which is always a highlight for me. It was super warm since we were at sea level, and we went to bed early to prepare for an early rise.
We had bad luck in that we got a surprise rain shower right when we were getting up at 6am. It didn’t rain a lot, but enough to make all our equipment wet while we were packing it up. We were on the water by 7:30am. It’s tiring to get up so early, but I do love having an early start!
We paddled on the west side of the Arm on the way in, so we decided to stick to the east side going back. There’s definitely more places to take a break on the west side, but the water was flat, so we were pretty fast and didn’t need a lot of breaks. We paddled 8km to Buntzen Bay and pulled out on a small rocky beach for a break. It’s not a public area, but the mountain gets really steep after that, so it was the last opportunity to pull out. You get to pass by two hydroelectric facilities, which are a neat feature of the Arm. The northern facility is still in use and draws water from Buntzen Lake via a large penstock. The southern facility is decommissioned, but is an interesting piece of architecture. It was 4.5km from Buntzen Bay to Twin Islands, where we stopped on the South Island for lunch.
The wind did start to pick up again after noon, but it was very manageable. We paddled to Raccoon Island and then crossed back to the west side to kayak into Deep Cove. I drank a lot of iced tea at lunch and it caught up with me at this point, so I had to do a hurried paddle into Deep Cove to use the washroom while Seth checked his crab trap. He got 6 crabs, but only 1 that he was able to keep. We’ve only caught dungeness crab in the past, so this was our first time catching rock crab. It was smaller, but still yummy! We paired it with some Newfoundland cod tongues at home, along with local corn and beets.
We arrived in Deep Cove at 1pm. There were people everywhere and it was chaotic landing on the beach and moving our kayaks to the loading area. I had 3 cars fighting over my parking spot when I left and we had to load the kayaks really quickly (while also getting stopped every 3 minutes by people trying to take our spot, not realizing it was 15min parking). Overall, it was a fun trip and Selilwet is really beautiful, but I don’t think I’ll be in a rush to do it again. It’s one of the most accessible sea kayaking trips from Vancouver, but it’s a very different experience than, say, Desolation Sound or the Gulf Islands. Worth doing, but maybe only once.
