At this wilderness spa, you can swim in a glacial lake - and lick a slug

Back on the rock, she leads me through a set of flowing movements, and then she breaks out the hot chocolate. Way in the distance, around 1200 metres down in the valley where the lodge looks out over Bedwell inlet, the water glints as the morning sun’s rays finally reach it.

I have never felt this blissed out, and the day has just begun.

I am among the last group of guests who’ve flown in to Clayoquot (pronounced Kla-wot) Wilderness Lodge before its 25 luxury canvas guest tents, lining the water and dotted through the rainforest, must be dismantled and packed away for the winter, along with a circle of tents equipped for games, playing music and private dining.

A skeleton staff of six, including Poulin and long-time general manager Sarah Cruse will stay on with the lodge’s horses through the long freezing winter, but after five months together looking after up to 60 guests at a time, the rest of the 90 staff will leave – some to go home, others to work in Antarctica or to go travelling. All of them will carry Clayoquot Sound close to their hearts, and many will return next season.

For this is an extraordinary place. Acquired by Australia’s Baillie Lodges in 2020, the wilderness camp is on the mouth of the Bedwell River in Clayoquot Sound on the wild west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

One of the world’s last remaining intact coastal temperate rainforests, the sound’s 350,000 hectares of islands, old-growth forests, alpine peaks, lakes, rivers, estuaries, bays and beaches were designated a UNESCO Protected Biosphere Reserve in 2000 after protracted battles in the 1980s against logging.

Nine of the forested valleys remain untouched by logging or other industrial development, reports UNESCO, and the sound is a haven to nearly 300 species of flora and fauna, from the gray whale to the banana slug. A number of creatures are critically endangered, like the marbled murrelet, a seabird that nests in old-growth trees, laying just one egg high up on a moss cushion.

Back at the lodge after the glacial plunge, the rest of my full itinerary awaits me.

Next up is a massage at the Healing Grounds Spa, followed by a four-hour return hike up through the forest to Penny Falls, named after a nearby gold mine dating to the 1860s. Quite how they got heavy mining equipment up there is a mystery, considering my guide, Becca Walsh of Ontario, and I must haul ourselves up over challenging parts of the trail with ropes.

Above us light dapples through towering western hemlock, western red cedar and Sitka spruce. Around us dozens of young trees spring from fallen trunks known as nurse logs for the carbon they provide to new life. Walsh springs to pick up a banana slug, known as the composter of the forest for the work it does recycling nutrients and enriching the humus that lies deep on the forest floor.

“Do you want to lick it?” she asks. I decline, but other guests have, and ended up with numb lips and tongues from an anaesthetic in the slugs’ slime that protects them from predators. Not that the raccoons are bothered, says Walsh. They’ve learnt to roll the slugs in dirt before they eat them.

Also on the three-day itinerary are a morning ocean fishing, in supplied waterproof gear and gumboots, and a half-day cruise through the sound to see otters, sea lions, sea eagles and whales. (There are black bears and sea wolves too, but they’re not playing ball and we don’t see any.) Oh, and did I mention kayaking?

Being more a go-with-the-flow, flop-and-drop kind of holidaymaker, on arrival by seaplane from Vancouver I baulked at being handed a daily itinerary. But this is such an extraordinary place, why would you want to sleep in, even if the king-size beds in the vast tents are super comfortable and cosy? By the time coffee arrives every morning, delivered to the verandah of my tent as the sky lightens, I’m up and ready to go. I even sign up for an extra activity, yoga before sun-up in a studio fragrant with the perfume of red cedar, from which it is built.

In between all this bracing adventure and ahead of long, delicious meals in the Cookhouse – featuring produce grown in the camp’s garden matched with wines from British Columbia – I take my book to the Ivanhoe Lounge.

My intention is to get a few chapters under my belt over a pre-prandial cocktail or two – perhaps a Sea Wolf, mixed with Hornitos tequila and blood-orange San Pellegrino, or a Maverick, starring duck-fat washed Maker’s Mark bourbon and Bearface whiskey.

But there is such an air of conviviality in the Ivanhoe, as guests from around the world bubble with excitement over all they have done and seen that day, I abandon my book and just dive in to the general jollity, laughing loudly at their tales and breathing with gay abandon.

The writer was a guest of Clayoquot Wilderness Lodge.