Rainbow Family hippie gathering looking for new venue after B.C. closes park to them

So, exit the Rainbow Family from Raft Cove. Where will they go now?

B.C. Parks is helping dozens of neo-hippie campers, who'd descended on the remote Vancouver Island provincial park for a festival of peace and love, leave after closing it down over concerns about environmental damage.

The Environment Ministry, which ordered the closure Saturday and posted a notice on its website, was also apparently worried the 21st-century counter-culture crowd wasn't prepared to survive for a month in the rugged north-island coastal forest with little access to fresh water or supplies.

“The West Coast is about as extreme as it gets when it comes to surviving and camping,” Grant Cromer of Campbell River Search and Rescue told CTV News.

“So certainly [there’s] a big concern for somebody with little to no experience hiking along that trail, spending nights out with lower temperatures, not being able to have fires.”

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Reports estimated the so-called Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes, which has been held annually around the world since the early 1970s, would draw anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand people. U.S. gatherings have drawn as many as 20,000.

But Raft Cove Provincial Park, which is less than 800 hectares and whose beach is reachable only via a two-kilometre hike along a logging road, doesn't have the facilities to cope with any more than a handful of campers. There are only two outhouses and no reliable source of drinking water.

"The closure was prompted as impacts from a large increase in the number of visitors in this remote and rugged location would significantly increase the risk to public health and safety, the protection of the natural environment and the preservation of park values," B.C. Parks said in its notice.

The ministry estimated just over 100 participants were camping in the park as of Sunday. Those who'd hitchhiked in would get a ride out.

“For those [who] don’t have their own transportation, B.C. Parks staff have offered to shuttle rainbow gatherers from the park to Port Hardy via the North Coast Trail Shuttle,” a spokesman for the ministry told the Victoria Times Colonist on Sunday.

The decision came as a relief to local residents who'd been pushing the government to head off the gathering.

“Our goal was the protection of the park — and it’s being handled," resident Terry Eissfeldt, who started the original Facebook page against the gathering, told the Times Colonist. "It still makes me upset that there are 106 people in there, but B.C. Parks is doing their job."

The Canadian Press reported Essfeldt said campers had dug a latrine close to a salmon-bearing stream, cleared shrubs for camp sites and picked grass to make sun shades. Some had arrived without much in the way of camping supplies.

As late as Monday afternoon, confused would-be campers were posting on the Rainbow Gathering's Facebook page trying to confirm the closure.

"Can we please have an update on the site of the gathering?" one asked.

Another wondered if the month-long event had been moved south to Rainbow Beach in Tofino.

Good riddance, tweeted one.

So, what's the fallback plan?

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Well, after being stymied at Raft Cove, it seems to be a secret.

“Raft Cove [family] is relocating … all info has gone offline … please call who you know. Satellite phone on the way to the beach to connect fam … trust who you know … do NOT post info you receive,” stated one posting on a Rainbow Family site, according to the Globe and Mail.

“I did hear some of them say they were going to San Jo,” pub operator Pat Gwynne of nearby Hoberg, told the Globe, referring to San Josef Bay in nearby Cape Scott Provincial Park.

Gwynne said the Rainbow Family campers who stopped by after the closure were disappointed but otherwise “very nice and polite," except for one guy who'd come all the way from New Zealand for the gathering.