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History of Beyond

Beyond Malibu began in the early 1970s when Barney Dobson, a Vancouver, B.C. Young Life leader, caught a vision for taking kids into the mountains surrounding the Princess Louisa Inlet and Young Life’s Malibu Club. Barney wanted to take kids “Beyond” the normal camp setting. In 1970, the Beyond experiment began when three groups each climbed what would eventually become the One Eye Route. Those first three trips were a great success. So the following summer Beyond began its first official season of trips.

In 1971 Beyond set up a base camp on the Jervis Inlet at the mouth of Potato Creek. They had a small staff of pioneers, enough to lead just one trip each week during the summer, so some trips had as many as 20 campers. In 1972, Beyond more than doubled its staff and with it the number of trips into the mountains. This growth allowed Beyond to shrink the size of the groups and begin to customize trips to the unique dynamics of each group.

That same summer, 1972, Beyond left Potato Creek and transformed an old logging camp in the heart of the Princess Louisa Inlet into its new base camp. Today, more than forty years later, that same small strip of land continues to serve as the home base for Beyond’s mountain ministry. But a lot has changed since 1972. In 1998, after leasing the property for twenty-six years, Young Life purchased that old logging camp. Since then we have remodeled the barn and extended its roofline, torn down and rebuilt the red house and the long house, added five new buildings including the sauna and the luggage sheltert, and completed three of seven campsite structures.

Beyond continues to grow. In 1998 Beyond added a sea kayaking program and with it a new base of operations in Egmont. Today, Beyond has as many as eight mountain trips and two sea kayaking trips exploring the mountains and inlets of British Columbia’s wild coastline each week. With improvements in the Princess Louisa base camp came the opportunity, beginning in 2008, for some midweek base camp service trips and rustic camp experiences for Capernaum (Young Life’s ministry to special needs populations), college, and adult Young Life groups. In the next few years we hope to increase the size of our staff and the number of our trips, build four more campsite structures, and so much more. The history of Beyond is most easily tracked through these tangible growths and changes. But the real history exists in the lives that have been moved and utterly transformed by God’s presence in these mountains, and on these waters. Come be a part of Beyond’s history, any way you can.

Beyond Malibu
PO Box 15662
Seattle, WA, 98115-0662
USA Directions

CALL US: (206) 525-0791
FAX: (206) 525-1207

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