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Schooner Cove, at the north end of Long Beach.
9. In the Park’s Embrace
THE HIGH rounded pile taking shape before us is like a Provençal haystack in a Van Gogh painting. Only we’re not in France, and it’s not a stack of hay. We’re at the top of Radar Hill, and the stack is Scotch broom. I’m part of a team of about a dozen volunteers who have come for a “broom bash,” an attempt to eradicate a foreign invader, from this hilltop at least. During the Cold War, while radar technicians and other military personnel were preoccupied monitoring the skies and seas for any suspicious activity, right under their noses another foreign menace was sinking its roots into the soil around the radar station.
The vibrant yellow peavine-like flowers of the Scotch broom are a familiar sight to anyone travelling on southern Vancouver Island. Every spring, the bright, cheery-looking bushes, typically one to three metres (three to ten feet) tall, splash colour along rural roadsides, logging cutblocks, uncultivated fields, ditches, and vacant city lots. It took just three seeds of this perennial shrub, germinated in the soils of Sooke in 1850, to start a botanical conflagration. Captain Walter Colquhoun Grant, an immigrant from Scotland perhaps pining for the yellow hills of home, brought the broom to Vancouver Island, and they’ve been flinging their seeds with vigorous abandon ever since. On hot dry days, the plant’s slender black pods snap open, catapulting the seeds in every direction. Even one new seedling establishing on a patch of soil can make a big impact. A mature shrub can produce 15,000 seeds annually, any of which can remain viable in the soil for up to 30 years, ready to sprout when conditions are right. And on Vancouver Island, that’s often. For more than 150 years, the plant has been slowly and insidiously taking over native habitat, crowding and choking out indigenous plants.
In total, the results of our assault filled five large dump trucks with broom that day, and only constant vigilance by retired park naturalist Barry Campbell in the years since has kept the scourge under control. Still, it’s a war that’s far from over. Even after our intensive efforts on the site, Campbell has pulled another 96,000 seedlings from there as of summer 2011.
When does an introduced plant species become a pest? For ecologists, it’s when the species out-competes native plants for habitat, hogging water, food, land, or all three, often reproducing unchecked in the absence of natural controls. Changing the environment in a way that alters native plants and topographies is another sign that a new species can become a problem—for example, the way that European beach grass has afflicted Long Beach’s sand dunes. Not all introduced species bother us. If they’re edible, like Japanese oysters and clams, or beautiful, like the flowers that fill our gardens, we may welcome them. It is all a matter of perspective.
Humans at Long Beach are arguably as much of an introduced species as Scotch broom and European beach grass in the Long Beach area. Their impact on the west coast’s natural environment, from its ocean waters, tidal zones, and rivers to its mudflats, beaches, bogs, and forests, has varied widely over the millennia. We may therefore ask ourselves: Are we invasive or beneficial? Part of the problem or just part of a continuum of change?
The Park Idea: Slow Speed Ahead
Word of Long Beach being made into a national park had been circulating widely in the late 1960s, but it certainly wasn’t the first time the idea had been floated. The Canadian National Parks Association had made a resolution supporting the idea of a Long Beach national park in 1929. Two years later, in February 1931, Gertrude Jackson had three visitors drop in and sign her guest book: F.D. Mulholland, chief, Surveys Division for the BC Forest Service; H.T. Garden, B.C. land surveyor; and J.M. Wardle, chief engineer for the National Parks of Canada. The men spent several days touring the Long Beach area to assess its worthiness for national park status.
In his follow-up report, Wardle described the beach at Long Bay as one of the finest he had seen (“compares very favourably with some of the better known beaches... of Oregon and California”), but his list of drawbacks outweighed the pluses: no suitable location for a wharf on the Long Bay side (thus precluding boating)... water too cold for bathing... summer fogs that didn’t dissipate until noon... the prevailing westerly wind... a dangerous undertow.
Even if the chief engineer for national parks wasn’t keen on a Long Beach national park, plenty of local boosters were, lobbying even back then for a park to protect the land for the public. Some efforts were made in that direction by the provincial government (setting Green Point aside, for example, in 1948), but the majority of people saw little need to protect the area for the public when relatively few actually visited. Not until the mounting bedlam on the beach became impossible to ignore in the 1960s did the need to protect the land from the public gain serious attention. Establishment of Wickaninnish Provincial Park in 1962 at Long Beach, with its campground at Green Point and a few beachfront sections, was a start.
Calls for a national park continued, however, with local communities making the loudest noise. Arthur Laing, the federal minister responsible for parks at the time, let it be known he thought Mount Garibaldi north of Vancouver might be a great location for a new national park in British Columbia. Tofino’s Tom Gibson and others representing west coast businesses registered their vehement disagreement, saying there were more than enough mountain parks in the province but no national parks that preserved and celebrated the ocean and seashore. Given all they had had to endure in the post-road years, beach residents were also asking for a park just to protect the beach from, as Peg Whittington put it, “hoodlums and rough people and racing on the beach.” Plus, she added, “We needed toilets. The beach stunk.”
By September 1966, it seemed as if the provincial and federal governments were close to a deal, sweetened when the province offered Wickaninnish Provincial Park as the nucleus of a larger coastal national park. Minister Laing told the provincial recreation minister, Ken Kiernan, he would “act with the speed of light” to move the deal forward.
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On busy summer weekends, cars and campers often covered Long Beach, especially near beach access points. This photo was taken during the Long Beach Fly In. During the annual spring event, flying clubs descended on the airport, and sometimes the beach. The Long Beach Curling Club coordinated the entertainment with a fundraising crab feast and dance.
The initial idea was to expand the existing provincial park, adding the coastline from Schooner Cove to Cox Bay, but the federal government felt this was too small an area for a national park. It therefore sent a team to British Columbia in the spring of 1967 to look for other options. In Tofino, the team was sought out by one of the most enthusiastic boosters of a national park, Howard McDiarmid, a local doctor. McDiarmid was also a rookie MLA in the Social Credit Party, having won the Alberni constituency the previous fall. A key part of McDiarmid’s electoral platform had been to secure national park status for Long Beach, and when he won his seat in the provincial legislature he wasted no time moving on the cause.
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Lifestyle preferences, age, and general world outlook tended to separate where people lived and vacationed in the Long Beach area. Florencia (Wreck) Bay and more secluded beaches at Radar Beach or Schooner Cove were the main draw for youth and those with “alternative” ideas.
In one of his more memorable speeches, delivered at the provincial legislature in February 1968, McDiarmid decried the lack of control provincial park officials had over the activities taking place on Long Beach, and he reiterated his position that a national park was the only way to rein in the chaos of cars, planes, and campers threatening to ruin the area.
“Are you aware, Mr. Speaker,” McDiarmid began, “that on July 1 of last year there were 7,000 campers tenting on Long Beach provincial park, crammed in cheek by jowl, defecating, micturating and copulating—not separated by so much as a blade of grass, Mr. Speaker? In fact, barely a grain of sand. Motorcycles racing up and down the beach, airplanes landing and taking off, no water and two toilets for 7,000 people?”
His message, as he’d intended, received extensive media attention. (McDiarmid later wrote in his memoirs that he’d resorted to using medical terminology in that speech so the Speaker of the House wouldn’t rule him out of order for using the “common descriptions” of the activities he was describing.) McDiarmid also deplored the inability of the government to do much about the squatters. On another occasion, he held up an article from the Vancouver Sun that showed a man and woman, both naked, walking hand in hand on the beach. “Public nudity occurs particularly on the beach known locally as Wreck Bay... and while I understand that this form of rapport with nature is fairly widespread... in the Scandinavian countries, Wreck Bay is neither Sweden nor the Garden of Eden. I think it is a fair statement to say that most Canadians are rather embarrassed and intimidated by this form of behaviour.”
While the idea of a national park on the west coast was now firmly in the minds of British Columbia citizens and their politicians, the negotiations between the two levels of government dragged, lumbered down by disagreement over who would pay for land acquisition. “About that speed of light” a Vancouver Sun editorial read on March 1, 1968, calling Laing on his promise for a fast resolution on a park and asking why British Columbians should put up with “slum conditions on their sole major ocean beach for still another year.”
The turning point came in the summer of 1968, when Jean Chrétien replaced Laing as minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, with responsibility for national parks. The province was keen to have Chrétien visit the coast to see it first-hand, and provincial minister Kiernan extended an invitation. Chrétien accepted, and the visit was set for November 25, 1968.
Closing the Deal
At Long Beach and in the local communities, the real possibility of a national park was positive news to most. With a park would come the necessary infrastructure to support thousands of visitors, as well as rules over what was acceptable behavior in the area and what was not. And most residents living at and near the beach believed that for them the status quo would be maintained. National parks in the Rocky Mountains—Banff and Jasper—had set a precedent for the inclusion of town sites, cottages, and businesses within the park boundary. Surely that would be the case here.
Chrétien arrived amid much excitement and great expectations. After being toured up the coast by helicopter to view the other sections being considered for the park, his party was set down at Long Beach. The local chambers of commerce had organized a luncheon at the Wickaninnish Inn, a spot that would give the federal minister a front-row seat overlooking the beach while he enjoyed his clam chowder.
Following a meeting between Chrétien and Kiernan the next day, the west coast was a solid handshake closer to its first big park. In March 1969, the British Columbia legislature passed the West Coast National Parks Act, which provided the legal vehicle for creating a park with three units. Long Beach would be developed first, with the units in Barkley Sound and between Cape Beale and Port Renfrew (the West Coast Trail) following later. The two levels of government had agreed to split the cost of acquiring land.
It took another year before the deal was sealed with the federal partner. In April 1970, Kiernan and Chrétien signed the agreement formalizing the park’s creation. The park boundaries extended from Wya Point south of Florencia Bay to the south end of Cox Bay and across Esowista Peninsula to Grice Bay. The new park protected the land from further development and also installed a new landlord—the federal government—which could provide staff and some capital to deal with the pressing issues of overcrowding and lack of facilities.
At Long Beach, the announcement made little difference to day-to-day life. All of the work at this stage was in the hands of bureaucrats, hammering out the minutiae and legal details about boundaries, land acquisitions, and payment sharing. On the beach, it was pretty much business as usual. Resorts were booked solid during the tourist season, and the campground overflowed onto the beach. Weekends, particularly long weekends, stretched the skeleton provincial park staff. Adding to the stress of having to deal with too many people and cars was the growing concern over what was happening to the area’s natural resources. The extent of razor clam harvesting had long been cause for alarm. As one employee reported, “Clammers equipped with clam guns and shovels flock onto the lower beach during low tides and indiscriminately gather hundreds of pounds of razor clams. Many times this summer I caught people with two or three large garbage cans full of clams.”
Another issue was the collecting of sea stars. “It seems campers needed a starfish to prove they had visited British Columbia’s West Coast,” wrote one park employee, adding that many of the marine animals were then simply abandoned after someone had dried, or attempted to dry, them in the sun. “The maintenance staff tell me they have found as many as fifty dead starfishes in garbage cans in one day.”
Peg Whittington had watched many changes over her thirty years at Long Beach, but nothing like this distressing state of affairs: the vehicles, the parties, the amount of garbage, the mindless destruction. She was supportive of the infrastructure and control a national park might offer even as she realized that such a change might come at a personal cost to her. (As an example of her generosity, she worked closely with park staff, allowing naturalists to hold early evening talks at her resort. Some of the early park staff lived in her cabins.) The Lovekin family and other longtime residents shared Peg’s sentiments and recognized the dilemma. As Steve Lovekin, grandson of A.C. and Helen, summed it up, “We could see that land was either going to be sold off to developers, with hotels soon lining the beach, or it was going to be park.” In the end, however, protection of their beloved beach trumped the alternatives.
Saying Goodbye
At last, Long Beach was in the embrace of national park protection where it would be, in keeping with Canada’s National Park Act, “maintained and made use of so as to leave [it] unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” But what of the present generation that now found itself living within a national park?
The answer to that question had in fact been revealed shortly before the formal announcement in April 1970. In a presentation in Ucluelet about the new park that January, William McKim, regional director of the National and Historic Parks Branch, made it clear that they would be assembling land “free of encumbrances,” meaning that most of the residents currently living in the park were expected to be out (“relocated”) by 1972.
“This news just came out of the blue,” recalls Neil Buckle, owner of The Combers Resort. He, like many of the residents and business owners, had assumed they would be grandfathered in or that the resorts, cottages, and even the small community of Long Beach would be permitted to co-exist within park boundaries. However, the philosophy of national parks had shifted since the days when those in Banff and Jasper had been formed in the early 1900s. In the 1970s, the view was that national parks should be maintained as wilderness areas, as free of development as possible.
The idea of a wilderness park free of encumbrances and permanent residents also extended to First Nations, at least at first. When park boundaries and lands were being determined, the fate of the reserves that fell within those boundaries was on government minds. They considered different arrangements, including purchasing the lands or swapping them for similar-sized parcels elsewhere. For the most part, this came as a surprise to the area’s First Nations, who once again saw a government discussing the future of their lands without meaningful consultation. In the end, the reserve lands were not expropriated.
CLEARING OUT LONG BEACH
By the time Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau helicoptered into Long Beach for a visit on June 16, 1970, residents and businesses within the boundary of the park had received the expected letter: “A perusal of the map indicates that your property comes within the National Park boundary and consequently Bill 73 [the West Coast National Parks Act], which is attached, now takes effect.” Lands, stated the act, could be acquired by “purchase, gift, exchange or expropriation.”
Surveyors arrived to measure out the lots in private hands on behalf of the government, and some landowners had their own surveys done as well. Then the negotiations began. The task of assembling the land fell to provincial authorities, in this case the Department of Highways and Department of Recreation and Conservation, Parks Branch. For some property owners, being booted out of the coming park was great news. Those who rarely if ever visited their property were happy for the effortless cash. For other owners, it was a devastating prospect and meant walking away from a lifetime home, a retirement dream, or an established family business.
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Despite having received letters from the government notifying them they had to leave their Long Beach homes, residents graciously welcomed Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau on his visit in 1970.
Settlements varied from property to property. Often, the final figure depended on the landowner’s willingness to spend time and money preparing counter-offers. In one case, an owner was offered $11,354 per acre, a figure arrived at by averaging the sale of the two lots of comparable land on either side: the owner on the left had received $7,778 per acre, whereas the owner on the right had received $14,930 per acre. Several landowners scored a coup when they discovered they actually owned more land than they had originally acquired. The lot that had once been in Ada Leverson’s name (bought for her by her husband in 1908) was a case in point. By 1971, when the land acquisition deals were underway, it was owned by Monashee Enterprises. The surveyors found the lot had grown by 2.37 hectares (5.87 acres) thanks to decades’ worth of accretion of sand on the beachfront. Monashee had the time and finances to fight to be paid for the bonus area, and the Supreme Court ruled in its favour on that one.
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While visiting Long Beach, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau tried surfing for the first time. He borrowed a wetsuit and a board from Robin Fells and staff at the Wickaninnish Inn and, true to form, stood up on his first attempt.
Robin Fells at Wickaninnish Inn was determined not to give up his land without a fight, and he had many supporters to back him up. As soon as word got out that the inn might be closed, the letter writing by past clientele began, urging the government to allow the inn to remain open. For Fells, as for many others faced with losing their businesses, it wasn’t so much the money as the loss of a way of life. In the end, however, Fells had to give in, saying, “They’ll say they didn’t expropriate me, but what choice did I have?” He and his business partner were eventually bought out, but they also received a concession. The government, bowing to public pressure, agreed to lease the entire inn back to Fells for a five-year term. The arrangement was problematic, at least as far as Fells was concerned, and he left after a year, frustrated by an overly bureaucratic landlord who, among other things, wrote a formal letter chastising Fells for being out one penny in his lease payment calculation.
Fells’s former employee John Allan and two partners took over running the business. When the lease again came up in 1977, the government seemed determined to end commercial enterprise in the park. Controversy over the state of the inn had been brewing for a while. Supporters argued that it was an asset to the area, a much-needed amenity and a stellar experience. But others insisted that the quality of the inn had slid drastically, and it was little more than a party palace for its staff, with a few customers along to foot the bill. The truth likely fell somewhere in between. In the end, Bill Billings—the last stalwart miner of Wreck Bay—was the final resident of the Wickaninnish Inn. After having to leave Wreck Bay, where he had lived in a cabin and doggedly sifted the sands for gold since the 1940s, he was living in a converted bread truck, but park officials asked him to caretake the inn buildings when it closed. Later, he would be allowed to live in a small cabin along the Long Beach Road. “The park let me down in a lot of ways,” recalled Robin Fells, “but they let Billings stay in a house for the rest of his life; that was a good thing.”
By the fall of 1977, the inn was closed. Parks Canada eventually converted the building into an interpretive centre and restaurant.
CLEARING OUT WRECK BAY
At Wreck Bay, the park designation had little effect at first. Most of the beach dwellers knew they would eventually be kicked out, but no great effort had yet been launched to do that. On the plus side, the park’s new status meant the beach was somewhat cleaner. Surfer Bruce Atkey had won a contract to provide garbage removal services at Wreck Bay and also to build some outhouses.
It was what one Vancouver Sun reporter called a meeting between “the squatters and the squares.” In May 1971, park superintendent George Trachuk asked the people living at Wreck Bay and other beaches to gather at the platform that had been erected at Green Point for the official park opening. Speaking from the plywood deck, he laid out the plan for the park and told the squatters that they needed to vacate their dwellings by September 30. He added that they’d be welcome to stay at the new beachfront campsite planned for Schooner Cove for $1.50 a night. To people able to live on $1.50 a week and quite content where they were, Trachuk’s invitation fell flat. As for their beach and forest homes, Trachuk went on, all would be torn down. The squatters argued back—and even offered Trachuk a swig from a jug of red wine—saying that they were not hurting anyone and that their beach was more environmentally sound than Long Beach, where trucks, campers, and cars rode roughshod over the place. It was to no avail. The government’s decision would not be subverted.
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When Princess Anne officially opened the new park on May 4, 1971, longtime Wreck Bay dweller Godfrey Stephens presented her with a wood sculpture that park officials had commissioned him to carve for the occasion. His fee: enough to cover the cost of a Klepper folding kayak. This photo shows the princess with Jean Chrétien, standing behind.
And indeed by the late fall of 1971, most of the shelters from Wreck Bay were gone. Anyone with a place had been offered $20 to $50 to destroy the structure and clean up the area before leaving. Many complied; others just walked away. A few resisted to the bitter end only to watch as park staff cleared the remaining shacks of their possessions before burning the structures down.
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Merlin and Linda Bradley were one couple evicted from Wreck Bay. Five weeks after the meeting at Green Point, Linda gave birth to a son, Aaron, in the family’s cabin. In honour of the birth, this abstract pole, carved by Paul Jeffries, Daniel Lowry, Merlin Bradley, and Tom Richardson, was raised. It remained at Wreck Bay for several decades until winter storms washed it away in the early 2000s.
Growing Pains
The squatters were ousted, and land acquisition continued, but the situation in the park would get worse before it got better. Park staff may have had some ability to impose controls on their visitors’ activities now, but their efforts to do so—erecting speed signs on the beach, for example—were hard to impose and regulate on a beach that had been pretty much rule-free.
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The early campground consisted of sites between the beach logs. On busy summer weekends, the beach was rimmed with cars, campers, and small tents. At times, cars and trucks became mired in the sand. Ruined vehicles were occasionally set on fire in a “car-be-que.”
In the fall of 1972, paving work on the road linking the west coast and Port Alberni was completed. The project had also removed the switchbacks from the route. The way was now open for virtually any vehicle, high slung or low slung, to make the trip out to the new park.
West coast residents may have cheered the improvement, but what it held in store for their park was bluntly revealed on Easter weekend the next spring. Park staff counted seventeen hundred camping parties. About a thousand of those were on Long Beach alone, where tents and campers packed in several rows deep in some stretches. Other campers set up at Schooner Cove and Wreck Bay. Summer hadn’t even started, and the park was already bursting with people.
But those figures were paltry once the May long weekend stormed in. An estimated ten thousand people arrived on the coast. One group of over three hundred people got so out of hand—even setting a car on fire and rolling it down the beach—that the RCMP invoked the Riot Act to gain order. The party ended with eleven people arrested.
The park’s plan to ban cars and camping on the beach altogether was more vital than ever. However, even the non-rowdy, non-partying crowd objected to this step. The idea that the bad behaviour of some should spoil the privileges of everyone angered many. Most irked were the locals and longtime visitors who had valued and respected open access to the huge beaches, the mudflats, and the adjacent forests to harvest clams or crabs, to hunt water fowl and deer, to collect mushrooms and berries, and even to cut firewood.
Talk of banning camping and driving on the beach also was the last in a long list of complaints against the area’s new landlord. Not only had the park authorities removed all of the places to rent a bed and buy a meal, fuel, or a container of milk within park boundaries, but now it seemed the goal was to remove people, too. Vancouver Sun columnist Bob Hunter referred to it as a “plot to steal Long Beach from the camping public.”
A Quiet Beach Again
Life was not easy for park staff in the early days, no matter how stunning their natural surroundings. They bore the brunt of local resentments as the changes occurred, even though many decisions came down from Ottawa or the regional office in Calgary with seemingly little understanding of, or willingness to accommodate, the situation on the ground.
Three items seemed symbolic of this. One was the razing of the Lovekin house. The Lovekin family suggested it would make the perfect life-saving station, given that most of the accidents in the park occurred in the waters out in front of the house. Whichever way the house might be put to use, locals saw it as a beautiful building that should be maintained for something. In fact, it had been left vacant for a long while and suffered damage from both vandalism and the damp climate. Another sore point was the loss of the cabin that Group of Seven artist Arthur Lismer had enjoyed for so many years. The third point perhaps hurt most. While many of the beach’s homeowners accepted their requirement to leave the beach, most could not forgive a bureaucracy that would separate Peg Whittington from her beloved beach and home of more than thirty years. If any exception was to be made, they felt, it should be to let Peg stay until the end of her life. In the end, all three went: the Lovekin house, the Lismer cabin, and Peg.
Through it all, the park authority held its course with an eye on the ultimate goal: that the park should be free of development and returned to as natural a state as possible. Once lands and buildings were legally acquired, houses and business premises were sold off (many homes in Tofino and Ucluelet today were moved from the beach) or burned down. Some stayed, becoming staff housing and offices. Little evidence of the homes and businesses formerly within the park remain today; in their place are hiking trails, picnic areas, and parking lots for day-use access to the beach.
Park officials finally closed the beach to camping and driving on Labour Day weekend 1975. Despite wide awareness of the reasons, the move was still controversial. Too little in the way of visitor services existed in Tofino and Ucluelet to support those coming to the area, and with the beach closed off except for walk-in camping at Schooner Cove, some people wondered if the fun and the attraction was gone, too.
At one point, a federal politician got an earful from frustrated residents when he arrived to check on the status of the park. He listened, but also tried to reassure the public that it would take time for a natural park to be appreciated—perhaps even twenty years.
He was, it turns out, right.