The Birth of Western Canada’s Storm-Watching Region

Growing up on Vancouver Island’s remote Pacific coast, Charles McDiarmid prayed each winter for storms. Great big storms that lashed at the windows and sent roiling waves exploding toward the heavens, which a young McDiarmid would watch starry-eyed from the warm confines of his family’s battened-down cabin in Tofino, an isolated maritime trading town until the 1950s. Because of the geography of this rocky stretch of the world and the openness of the sea around it—there’s little between Tofino and Japan but open ocean—storms can roll in with the ferocity of a Category 1 hurricane. In such moments, 30-foot logs, normally parked on the beach, easily rise on the crests of 25-foot waves before slamming into the beach and surrounding bedrock.

“Those logs become giant tuning forks, and you hear a very low bass sound, which travels through the shrieking sound of wind and waves,” McDiarmid said. “There’s nothing like being in a giant storm.”