All the Island Spirit Legacy Caches are within a 2 steps of the trail, unless otherwise noted. There is no need to bushwack or trample the vegetation.
Logging Cowichan
In 1886 the last spike of the new E&N Railway between Victoria and Nanaimo was hammered in with a silver hammer. But it wasn't until 1906 that there were rumours of the line extending west to Lake Cowichan. Six years later it finally reached the lake and with it the logging industry exploded. Lumber companies used the rail line to transport the wood from the lake and with the logging reaching farther from town and the number of labour involved in harvesting the timber, several logging camps grew up around the lake. Some still exist today such as Caycuse. It's estimated that the E&N Railway transported over 400,000 cars of lumber out of the Lake Cowichan. Although logging is still very active in the Lake Cowichan area, the mills are gone and the E&N no longer runs, one thing that has certainly stayed the same over the last century. Lake Cowichan is a tourism hotspot between fishing, boating, hiking and most recently, Tubing to the Mega...I mean down the Cowichan River.