An Epic Adventure on B.C.’s Vancouver Island
On British Columbia’s stormy outer limits lies a verdant coastal oasis, ready to be discovered.
Thomas J. Story
Driving over the mountains from the east coast of Canada’s Vancouver Island, I smack into a violent squall. Seriously, it’s like someone is dropping bucketfuls of gravel on my windshield. As the highway nears the ocean and enters the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, though, the rain slows to a drizzle. At the sight of a sign that says, simply, “Rain Forest,” I pull over without hesitation and step into one of the only true rain forests in temperate North America.
The hood of my jacket zipped tight, I follow an elevated cedar-plank boardwalk through lime-green ferns and red cedars hung with garlands of moss and lichen. The boardwalk may be practical—designed to protect the fragile forest floor—but it’s also kind of magical, morphing into a staircase that twists up between two massive tree trunks, then dropping down into a murmuring creek basin. Without anyone else around, I breathe deep, drawing in the rich, spicy hint of cedar in the air. It’s instant Zen—save for the low rumble of gas-guzzlers speeding along the nearby highway. But hold on a second. Tuning in more closely, I realize it’s too regular and insistent to be traffic. Nope, it’s actually waves crashing on the beach at least half a mile away—another reminder, if any was needed, that it’s storm season in the North Pacific.
Which is why I’m here. On this remote coast, three meters of rain come down every year, most of it pretty cold water that falls between November and March. Summer, it’s true, is the busy season, when visitors from near and far show up in search of surf breaks, whale-watching tours, fishing charters, beachfront camp-grounds, and posh hotels perched on sea cliffs. But if you’re going to immerse yourself in one of the wettest places in North America, why not go all in and see it at its most waterlogged? So here I am, ready to get soaked.
Thomas J. Story
It’s still sprinkling when I reach the town of Tofino, where Highway 4 dead-ends on a peninsula sandwiched between the open ocean and the island-dotted Clayoquot Sound. Flipping through the guest book in my hotel room, it’s clear I’m not the first to come to Tofino in search of wet weather. “Lucked out and got a storm,” says one recent entry. “Woke up this morning to a power outage; there was a terrific storm all night…look forward to another visit,” writes another guest.
While I’d heard that “storm watching” was a not-uncommon pursuit up here, I have to admit I was skeptical, imagining lonely men hunched over in rain ponchos, recording tidal measurements and barometric pressures in soggy notebooks. Maybe that’s because until 1959, isolation was the name of the game in Tofino. The only way to get here was by ship; even now, if you want to go further north, you need to hop on a boat or a single-engine floatplane that buzzes away from the docks. Once the highway opened, though, hippies flocked here in droves. “In the 1960s, every Volkswagen from Manitoba to Vancouver drove to ‘the end of the road,’” says Charles McDiarmid, a trim 61-year-old with preternaturally youthful looks who runs Tofino’s Wickaninnish Inn. We’re standing on a massive old wooden dock down at the harbor, looking toward emerald-green mountains that jut right out of the Clayoquot Sound. The rain’s stopped, and he’s showing me around this town of about 2,000 year-round residents, explaining why people around here actually root for downpours.
Thomas J. Story
“One of the really great things I remember as a kid only happens when you get a big storm and a big high tide at the same time,” he says. “Right at the peak of high tide, the ocean will come 30 or 40 feet into the forest. The logs that have been sitting on the beach run right into the rocks and become like giant tuning forks. They emit a low sound unlike anything else. You hear it and you think: What the heck is that? It’s these giant logs, just shuddering.”
In 1996, he built a luxury hotel on his family’s land above Chesterman Beach, where the bluff provides an excellent vantage point for spotting tree-sized driftwood thundering in on 30-foot waves. “After, you put on your rubber boots and try to be the first on the beach to see what’s washed ashore,” he says with the enthusiasm of a treasure hunter. “You might find one of those Japanese glass fishing floats, which only survive if they wash onto a sandy beach. The beach is wiped clean, and all new things are there.”
To see it all firsthand, I head 40 miles south at the crack of dawn the following day to Ucluelet, historically a working-class town where loggers and fishermen settled to keep their distance from Tofino’s hippies, activists, and artsy types. It’s also home to a network of hiking paths collectively called the Wild Pacific Trail. At the halfway point of the trail’s Lighthouse Loop, I perch above boiling waves that seethe and foam over black sea rocks (there’s a reason this stretch of ocean was once called “the graveyard of the Pacific”). Below Ucluelet’s boxy little lighthouse are heaps of bull kelp fronds, wrenched from their foundations and left on the rocks at high tide— speaking to even mightier seas.
These swelling waves are mesmerizing. At one moment, a massive wall of water will build and at the last second slosh against the shore, while another more sneaky operator will thunder in and send spray a dozen feet into the air. Honestly, I could do this all morning, with nothing but a clanging buoy in the background and the off-kilter squawks of the gulls to keep me company.
Thomas J. Story
Eventually, curiosity about what’s under all that water gets to me, so I drive downtown to check out one of the world’s first catch-and-release aquariums. The Ucluelet Aquarium is also something of a community effort: Bartenders made the boardwalk that leads through green and purple anemones, pale jellyfish, and multicolored rockfish swimming in pure, untreated seawater pumped in from the harbor. And every winter, the aquarium throws a big party, where locals turn up to nudge starfish and surfperch back into the ocean. From there, Mother Nature takes over, and animals that spurn the relative calm of the town’s inlet are tossed in violent surf that pushes oxygen into the water. This encourages the growth of nutrient-filled algae and makes the intertidal zone rich with life. The powerful winter storms also knock old shellfish off the rocks, creating habitat for the next generation.
For that and many other reasons, says the aquarium’s 33-year-old curator, Laura Griffith-Cochrane, folks around here tend to make a party out of the rain. For example, one year a fierce weather system knocked out power to most of Ucluelet, so she and some friends decamped to Black Rock Oceanfront Resort, which over- looks the coast and is equipped with a generator. “There was really nothing we could do,” says Griffith-Cochrane. “So we all had dark ’n’ stormies and watched the waves smashing against the shore. It felt like half the town was in the bar together.”
In my case, though, the next few days only see the weather “improving.” As the sun begins to shine, I find myself missing the clouds that often hang like billowing fabric, as if posing for some ancient Japanese ink-and-brush landscape. The good news is that when it stops raining, it’s much easier to get out on the water itself.
