Why go out on your own to meet a bear in the woods when you can tag along behind an expert guide and then retire to your tent, cozy with Persian rugs and, if you like, afternoon tea? Yes, nature is grand—David Rakoff discovers that it's all the grander when experienced from the newly sophisticated lodges of British Columbia

The ten-minute ride by minivan from Vancouver's main airport to its south terminal—home to the tiny carriers that serve nearby Vancouver Island—is a trip back to the days before multiculturalism. Everyone in the south terminal seems to be white. And male. Many appear to be on their way to fishing adventures. Almost to a man, they wear baseball caps and nylon shells, and display that signal physiognomy of potbelly cantilevered out over counterintuitively skinny legs. The place looks like a casting call for King of the Hill. Or, more appropriately, for The Red Fisher Show, a television program from my childhood years in Canada in which the eponymous host and his guest—invariably some hockey hall-of-famer I didn't recognize—sat watching silent Super-8 footage of a recent fishing trip the two had taken together and narrating desultorily. Mr. Fisher's was a program of such magnificent stultification as to border on the conceptual.

These are the associations I have when I hear the words Canadian fishing lodge. I think precisely of that Red Fisher scenario of a group of men out in the wilderness, standing in waders and drinking beer, or sitting in a boat and drinking beer, as they effortlessly pull in fish after fish from the bounteous waters. There is even a term for these places: whack 'em stack 'ems, rude dwellings with only the most cursory relationship to decorum, amenity, or hygiene; a weekend of corned-beef hash from a can and the necessary emulation of that timeless rhetorical question about bears in the woods. So, if the south terminal does not enchant me, neither does it surprise me.

I am on my way to Vancouver Island's western coast, to the town of Tofino (population 1,200). Rather to the Clayoquot Wilderness Resorts, just outside it. I am not a fisherman by any stretch of the imagination, but that doesn't matter: The new lodges in British Columbia that I've come to visit cater to the all-around ecotourist looking for high-end outdoor adventure.

The sheer size of my native land never fails to overwhelm me. Canada is enormous—way bigger than the continental United States (something that was drilled into us in primary school). This is made abundantly clear during the one-hour flight to Tofino on a small seven-seat plane. Although just off the coast of the mainland, and serving as a bit of a bedroom community for Vancouver, Vancouver Island is in no way Brooklyn. It is almost the length of England and seems to go on forever. Ridge after ridge of mountains recedes into the distance. When, one wonders, is the continent going to run out as advertised? Run out it eventually does, and all that's left is the even more overwhelming hugeness of the Pacific.

From the airport it's a twenty-minute drive to Tofino itself, a hodgepodge of surf shacks—nearby long Beach is said to have world-class waves—and summer beach-town gift shops. The overall feeling is both twee and stoned. (The reputedly primo bud grown all over British Columbia is the province's largest industry, I am told by more than a few patchouli-scented individuals who speak with confidence-uninspiring slowness. How astonishing, then, to find out that they're absolutely right. According to a December 2000 intelligence brief put out by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the province's cannabis cultivation yields a cool billion—that's U.S. dollars—per annum.) Then, from Tofino, there is a twenty-minute high-speed motorboat ride through a landscape of piney mountains coming down to meet dark water, all under blue sky and billowing Maxfield Parrish clouds. British Columbia is unfailingly, achingly, insanely beautiful. Over the next ten days, I alternate between regularly exclaiming an incredulous but direct 'Holy shit!' and sounding like Bertie Wooster's insufferable erstwhile fiancé, Madeline Bassett, who was given to insipid pronouncements like 'The stars are God's daisy chain!'