Walking the trails at Miracle Beach and the Oyster River Nature Park

by Keith and Heather Nicol

Heather and Christine walking along a Miracle Beach trail

     On Saturday, February 14 we decided to take advantage of the sunny, warm day to try some of the short hiking trails in the Miracle Beach – Oyster River area of  eastern Vancouver Island. This area is just north of Comox and we met Christine Gorvall at her beach front house near Miracle Beach Provincial Park who offered to be our guide for the afternoon.  We parked near Black Creek at coordinates 10 U 03449017E 5523999N and Christine lead us down a trail along the creek to the broad sandy beach. There were lots of other people out enjoying the exceptionally nice winter weather. We heard sea lions barking in the distance and saw ducks dabbled along the shore. The trail that we took was just 650 meters long (1 way) and although we returned along the same route there were many other trail options and overall there are about 2 km of trail in the park.  Christine mentioned that in the summer this is a very popular place to walk, swim and camp. For more information see: http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/bcparks/explore/parkpgs/miracle_bch/ 

Miracle Beach looks out on to Georgia Strait and the mountains of the B.C. Coast

From Miracle Beach we headed to Oyster River Nature Park where we parked at the trail head  at coordinates 10 U 0347154E 5526427N. Here we did a looped trail which wound through tall second growth forest. Along the way we could see huge stumps which showed just how large the original trees in this area must have been. Even though we have just come off several days of rain the trail was generally quite dry except for the occasional wet spots. We ended up at the ocean where the Oyster River spills into the sea. There were lots of wave washed trees along the shore and several people sat in the sun on some of the south facing logs. We returned along a trail that paralleled the river. Over all the trail was about 2.8 km return. For more information see: http://csd.nic.bc.ca/~g112/oyster.html.  Both of these areas are suited to a wide variety of walkers and we look forward to coming back to explore them more in the future. 

A foot bridge along one of the Oyster River Nature Park trails