The West Coast Trail is 75 km of ladders, cable cars, and surge-channel scrambling along Vancouver Island’s Pacific edge — 1,850 m of gain that undersells the effort completely, because most of it is vertical ladder rungs rather than trail. We took the full seven days against a 5–7 range and were glad for every extra hour.
Low tide is not a suggestion here — several sections are only passable, or only safely passable, at low tide, and Parks Canada’s tide tables become the actual clock your whole day runs on rather than the sun.
The ladders
Nobody warns you enough about the ladders. Some sections stack 40-plus vertical metres of wet wooden rungs bolted to a cliff face, with a full pack on. Trekking poles get lashed to the pack and hands stay free — anyone who tried to descend holding poles in one trip ahead of us regretted it within the first hour.