Getting to Telegraph Cove was a nightmare. We were running late leaving Gold River because the floatplane trip took longer than planned, so we decided to take the 84Km logging road to Woss rather than take Highway 28 back east 92 km to Campbell River then north on highway 19 for 129 km to get to the same place - we figured it would cut half-an-hour to an hour from our travel time. We had been assured by a local that the logging road was better than the one to Tahsis, which had been slow going but manageable.

About 40 minutes into the drive I was getting panicky as the road certainly wasn’t better than the Tahsis road - it was horrific, we hadn’t passed a single car for 35 minutes, and there hadn’t been any little roadside signs directing us towards Highway 19 for about the same length of time. Added to that we seemed to be climbing further up a mountain, the posts marking how many kms we’d done didn’t seem to match the actual kms of the Woss road, and my Spidey senses were telling me that we were driving in the wrong direction. It was decision time - carry on and risk getting totally lost on a deserted mountain at night, with no cell phone signal, a gps which didn’t help at all and the knowledge that if we broke down no one would pass us and no one would know we were missing, or turn back and take the long way round to Woss - that would be 40 minutes back on the logging road, plus 3 and a half hours on the highways to Telegraph Cove.

After a bit of arguing we chose the safest option and turned back. Towards the end of the road, we looked extra hard at the last junction we had passed before getting lost up the mountain. The junction had a big sign directing people towards a lake 5 kms down the road, which we had seen. Next to that sign, and half hidden behind a bush was a tiny sign pointing to Highway 19. We were so annoyed but laughed because we were so relieved that we had found the right road. So we took it, and wished to god that we hadn’t as it was an arduous drive and nearly killed our poor little hire car. It took forever, and we got to Woss about an hour and a half later than we would have if we’d had taken the longer highway route in the first place. Then we had another hour’s drive to Telegraph Cove where we were staying. The husband fell into bed as soon as we arrived at our accommodation, poor monkey.

We learned that day never to take logging roads for more than about 10kms without a four-wheel drive, and definitely not to take them unless we have a backcountry road map with us. The maps I saw over the next couple of days didn’t have the road we were travelling on marked at all, but I finally found one that showed me that if we had carried on on that road we would either have ended up at a dead end by a lake at the top of the mountain, or if we had taken a different fork we would have eventually driven back down onto, highway 28 but only about 30kms along from Gold River - so it would have taken us over 2 hours to get 30 kms east.