A victorious holler cascaded across the crashing waves at Vancouver Island’s Chesterman Beach as adventurer Bruce Shouldice triumphantly stomped his foot in the tide.
The ecstatic celebration completed Shouldice’s epic accomplishment of putting his foot in all three oceans touching Canada over a 48-day solo-saga. Driving his Nissan Xterra with a small trailer in tow, he started with the Arctic and then the Atlantic before wrapping it all up in the Pacific near Tofino.
“I love Tofino. The first time I came to Tofino, I actually stopped because I caught Long Beach out of the corner of my eye. It almost feels like you’ve left Canada. You’re not even sure where you are,” he said.
“Of all the places I’ve been across all of Canada, Tofino was my ending point and I did that for a reason; just because people that haven’t seen Tofino really have to see Tofino. It’s just amazing out here and you don’t know until you know.”
Shouldice spoke to the Westerly News immediately after walking out of the surf at Chesterman to conclude his adventure on Oct. 18.
He said he began his adventure from his West Kelowna home on Sept 1, documenting his journey through his YouTube channel: WestCoastAdventuresBC that has since reached 189,000 subscribers with 759 videos posted as of Thursday, Jan. 8.
“I don’t know, maybe it’s a midlife crisis. I just love adventures and some of the YouTube channels I see are kind of lacking,” he said. “This trip was kind of inspired by YouTube. I thought why not try all three oceans right across Canada all in one shot…You might not ever get the chance in life again to do it.”
He navigated his way through Kamloops into Northern B.C. and then the Yukon where he split off into the Kluane Mountain Range where, he said he experienced some of his most breathtakingly beautiful and terrifying moments.
“I rented a little plane and a pilot flew me over the Kluane Mountain Range. I actually had a panic attack up there 39 minutes in. I wanted out, but you can’t get out. It was the worst feeling of my life. Greatest to start and epic footage, just unreal. I thought we were just going to fly over the first mountains. I didn’t realize he was flying me through the clouds and we were ending up in total snow and ice fields,” he said.
He then travelled on through the Klondike Highway to Dawson City and then connected onto the Dempster Highway into The Northwest Territories into Inuvik and then on to Tuktoyaktuk, nearly turning back on Day-19 after suffering three flat tires but realizing that giving up was no easier than the road ahead.
“It’s one way up and one way out; pretty much 750 kilometres of brutal gravel, shale, crumbling roads, three flat tires on my trailer and a broken axle…I almost wanted to cancel the trip and head back, but then I said to myself, ‘There’s no exit button. I’ve got to drive myself out of here for the next seven days probably.’ So really, even if you give up, there’s no easy way out,” he said.
“I found the north really haunting. I heard stories up there that the north likes to grab you and not let you go and sometimes things happen to people and they end up living in the north. I swear, with all the different things that happened, the north had its hand on me,” he said.
“I was excited to get out of the north, but it’s a super amazing place too and I’ll never forget it for the rest of my life.”
Shouldice made his way to Edmonton where he found a mechanic to help with repairs before he continued on to the Atlantic Ocean off Prince Edward Island and then back to the Pacific, capturing footage along the way and publishing YouTube shorts at each stop to update his growing number of fans and followers.
“This is probably the craziest trip I’ve ever done. I find it’s extremes. There’s no in-the-middle. It’s either super amazing or super bad, like all of a sudden you’re stranded with a flat tire in the middle of nowhere with no cellphone signal for 18 hours, or you’re at the most beautiful beach that you just stumbled upon. It’s extremes.
“It’s hard to have a middle-ground. I find it’s either excellent or you just want out,” he said.
“I filmed everything along the way. I’ve got drone footage of all kinds of animals and landscapes across Canada…I tried to take in as many historical sites and cool spots that I possibly could and all different types of land. I’m excited for the 4K drone footage. I’m super pumped for it.”
He added a variety of his growing fanbase reached out to him during and after his travels, encouraging him on and thanking him for inspiring them.
“It’s super neat. People following these adventures and maybe I inspire them to do some of these crazy trips themselves…I would love to motivate people to travel,” he said.
“It gets to a point sometimes in life that if you sit stagnate, you stay stagnate. Sometimes you’ve got to take a chance in life and go and have some fun.”