They say that a friend with mead is a friend indeed. I say strangers with mead and some sweet single-track mountain biking in their back yard are friends to be. So when I hear that Middle Mountain Mead, a maker of the honey-based fermented alcohol, is on Hornby Island—which is also home to a network of exceptional mountain biking trails—I decide to make the trip. Plus, there’s this toilet I want to check out…

A few weeks later, in early October, my friend Paul and I drive to Buckley Bay—an hour north of Nanaimo—and catch a ferry to Denman Island. We cruise Denman’s country roads, heading for the Hornby ferry terminal. There, we ditch the car and bike aboard.

There’s something about a ferry ride that slows down the pace of life. So while we left Vancouver Island on a bustling Tuesday morning, after two ferries, Hornby’s shores feel like Sunday. We are the only people on the main road as we pedal away from the ferry terminal and start climbing toward the summit of Mount Geoffrey.

We grunt up a steep road and onto a trail that follows the first of two angled ledges zigzagging to the top. The trail weaves back and forth between the forest and a cliff edge that looks straight down at the ferry terminal. It’s a vertigo-inducing view, so we keep our eyes on the mountains of Vancouver Island, lit up with the morning sun.

The zig passes pretty quickly, but the zag is a different story. This ledge is steeper, and the trail is narrower and spends a lot of time hugging the cliff edge. The views keep getting better, inspiring us to push upward, but our tired legs resist. I keep trying to drop my bike into a lower gear—my granny gear isn’t cutting it. “I wish I had a great-granny gear,” I tell Paul at the top of one rise.

“I wish I had a great-great-granny gear,” he replies.

We stick with it and eventually top out at a fork in the path, where we consult the trailside map. (Hornby’s trails are well marked and mapped, and are rated green, blue, and black, like ski runs.) We plot our route down, aiming to exit the trails strategically—as close to the meadery as possible. Then we head into the forest trail, chasing one another. The trails here are easier than most coastal rides. They’re wicked fast. We swing onto Purgatory, and the geography pitches like we’re heading for hell. Our hands grab our brakes tighter and tighter. Then the angle eases and we’re riding fun, flowing single track, culminating with No Horses. Banked corners swing back and forth, swooping and diving in and out of a gully. It’s so much fun that we’re giggling as we skid onto Strachan Road; we can’t believe we’re the only people out here. We’re close to the meadery now.

It’s the off-season at Middle Mountain Mead, so the place is pretty quiet when we arrive. Owner Helen Grond and manager Darryl Bohn are working, but they drop what they’re doing and lead us into the tasting room. A few tables are positioned to enjoy the view south and east across the tropical-looking waters off Hornby, and further out over the Strait of Georgia and the Coast Range beyond.

As Grond pours us free tasters, she tells us the meadery was something of an accident. In 2000, Grond bought 2,000 lavender seeds and sowed them on her cleared hillside with no real purpose in mind. “When it’s in bloom [in June and July], it’s like the aurora borealis on the ground,” Bohn says.

With thousands of lavender plants, Grond didn’t know what to do with them all. While searching for uses, she stumbled across references to mead—alcohol made with buckets of honey instead of spoonfuls of sugar. Soaking herbs like lavender in mead as it ferments is a traditional European way of creating medicine. “It was a keyhole into a vast room of riches,” she says of what she discovered. Grond and Bohn brewed their first batch of lavender mead in 2001 and kept on experimenting, adding and mixing different fruits and herbs. They now have nine varieties and have trouble keeping bottles in stock.

With cheeks glowing, and having made a promise to return with a car so that we can take some bottles home, we hit the road, heading back for the summit of Mount Geoffrey. This time, we follow easier trails down, which spit us out onto the gravel bike path that runs parallel to Central Road, Hornby’s main road. We quickly turn off for another diversion, the Hornby Island Recycling Depot—the island’s dump with a twist.

Residents pay per bag to dump garbage, so they go to great pains to chuck as little as possible, producing a third less garbage than the average British Columbian. Anything reusable goes to the “free store” (a thrift store that doesn’t charge), compost happens, and recyclables and the few things that are left over are trucked off the island to be dumped.

Since the island’s residents have to come here regularly, it’s a busy spot. A toilet was needed. In keeping with the ethos of producing little waste, the recycling depot decided to build an oxymoron—a wasteless toilet. Liquids evaporate, worms process solid waste into soil, and water comes from rainfall.

“It’s the ultimate in reusing and recycling,” says Annie Nagel, who co-manages the depot. “We reused materials that would have been recycled to build a toilet that will produce no waste.” Eighty percent of the material used in the structure came from the recycling centre: a hot-water tank; crushed tin cans and stacked cardboard for the walls; broken tiles for the floor; and beach logs to support the roof.

From the outside, it looks like an African hut. Inside, it just might be the coolest outhouse on Earth. “I like to see people’s look of delight when they see what we’ve done,” says Ed Hoeppner, the designer and builder of the toilet, who is putting the final touches on it when we stop by. “They leave with a smile and [are] inspired.”

We certainly are as we race to catch the ferry home, only five hours after we left our car.

Access: You can reach Hornby Island via B.C. Ferries from Buckley Bay, which is one hour north of Departure Bay in Nanaimo and 20 minutes south of the Comox airport. It takes about an hour to get to Hornby Island via Denman Island. (See www.bcferries.com/.) There’s a map of Mount Geoffrey’s trails at www.comoxstrathcona.ca/section_parks/ under Brochures and Maps. Mountain bikes can be rented from the island’s only bike shop, Hornby Island Outdoor Sports (1-877-977-BIKE).

Information on accommodation—which includes B & Bs and camping—can be found at hornbyisland.com/. Campsite reservations are recommended year-round, and are mandatory in July and August. Information about Middle Mountain Mead can be found at www.middlemountainmead.com/.