Yellow Point Lodge: A Timeless Vancouver Island Escape

My friend Mary and I started visiting Yellow Point Lodge the year we turned 30, just over a quarter century ago now. I remember gazing upon the other guests—most of them in late middle age or well into their golden years—and smiling condescendingly. So nice to see old people having fun in such a lovely setting. We wore our relative youth with the smug confidence of new professionals for whom aging was merely a theory.

Eventually, responsibilities interfered and we had to give up our spot. I tried to book again over the years, but guests tend to cling to their annual dates and I couldn’t find my way in. I eventually moved on.

Then came the post-pandemic period and a deep yearning for stability, which I found back at Yellow Point Lodge.

The lodge—near Ladysmith, about a half an hour south of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island—is wonderfully, even subversively, untrendy. Since its founding in the 1930s, it has stubbornly resisted change—and been rewarded with some of the most loyal guests in Canada. Apparently it offered something of a party scene until the late ’60s, but the contemporary Yellow Point experience is decidedly mellow. It’s about simple, well-prepared food and lots of it. Think full roast beef dinner with Yorkshire pudding on Saturdays, turkey dinner with all the sides on Sundays, fluffy scrambled eggs on a homemade biscuit with cheese for breakfast and lunch features—spanakopita!—that will make you weak at the knees. It’s also about reading, taking naps, playing board games and doing nothing at all from the confines of a comfortable chair.

Since wiggling my way back in, I have managed to score three annual visits. I go alone each spring and fall, and with friends in the winter. Now that I’m considerably older, I appreciate even more the abundant charm, the tremendous value (each guest pays a flat fee for accommodation and food), and the fact that Yellow Point Lodge doesn’t embrace every little trend, such as the internet. (Guests are asked to refrain from using devices in the main lodge and the dining room and there’s no wifi.)

Guests stay in cabins offering various levels of rusticity or in the lodge. Some of the cabins are tiny and contain only a bed, a chair and a mini woodstove. The adventurers who stay in them walk across a lawn to the washrooms and outdoor showers. Waterfront bunks have fronts that open to the ocean, while other cabins range from large to modest. Rebuilt in the ’80s after a fire, the lodge has a great room where guests gather to socialize or gaze into the massive fireplace, and a basement stuffed with games, including darts and ping pong as well as memorabilia.

The grounds are nothing short of spectacular. Slabs of rock extend into water that is sometimes grey and sometimes crystalline. There are small white beaches and acres of rainforest trails, an outdoor hot tub and a fitness centre, sauna and, most gloriously, an in-ground saltwater pool made of natural rock and cement.

Now, as when I first began going to Yellow Point Lodge, the guests skew older. I imagine newcomers looking at me with my grey hair and thinking, Oh, look at that lady of a certain age enjoying herself. Isn’t that lovely for her? And you know what? It is lovely. For me, and for everyone else who gets to spend precious time here

Read more: Pamela Anderson’s Ladysmith Home Is a Whimsical, ‘Funky Grandma’ Dream Come True

This travel story was originally published in the October/November 2025 print issue of Western Living magazine.