THE INN THAT BUILT TOFINO

How a tiny town on the continent’s westernmost edge went from stormy outpost to revered eco-tourism destination

How a tiny town on the edge of the continent went from stormy outpost to revered eco-tourism hot spot

NOT FAR DOWN Chesterman Beach from the Wickaninnish Inn in Tofino, B.C., is a small woodcarver’s shed, set back from the piles of storm-tossed driftwood in the first line of Sitka spruce trees and salal shrubs. Charles Mcdiarmid, the inn’s founder and managing director, still visits the hut often, sometimes on his way to a morning surfing session. It belonged to Henry Nolla, a long-bearded hippie and expert carpenter and carver who appeared in the tiny west-coast Vancouver Island town in the early 1960s. He died in 2004, but his carving bench and handmade tools are still there, and the shed is now used by his protégés. One can imagine him adzing beams in his workshop, or out on the beach helping his friend Roy Henry Vickers, a First Nations artist with a gallery in town, hollow out a cedar canoe. Mcdiarmid, now 62, was just a young boy when Nolla arrived on the scene, but his family’s friendship with the hippie lasted for decades. The woodworker was hired by Mcdiarmid’s parents, Howard and Lynn, to build their cabin, and later lived rent-free as caretaker on their long beachfront property. At Mcdiarmid’s request, Nolla left his mark on the Wickaninnish Inn as it went up in the mid-1990s, too — from the main handcarved cedar doors and fireplace mantels in the guest rooms to carvings in the public areas — a few of many local touches in a luxurious eco-resort crafted to reflect its coastal surroundings. Putting a high-end inn on the family beach was one thing; figuring out how to inspire enough people to make the pilgrimage to such a far-flung place and stay in it was another. Howard, a doctor and Social Credit MLA for the area whose legacy includes spearheading the 1970 establishment of nearby Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, had always said that Tofino could and should be a world-class tourist destination, but the Wickaninnish’s opening month — August 1996 — was slow. Charles, who had developed the plan for the inn, secured investors and moved back to his hometown after working abroad for years as a hotelier, decided he had to try something crazy: promote the worst weather during what was traditionally the worst season for everyone but surfers in thick wetsuits. (Tofino is pummelled from November to March every year by south-rolling storms generated over the Bering Sea.) “We thought, maybe, just maybe, there were people out there who would come to enjoy the big dramatic winter gales, rains and waves we always looked forward to,” he says. And come they did. Media coverage of the beautiful oceanside resort in the little town with all the storms appeared regionally, then nationally and internationally, and before the inn’s first winter was out, says Mcdiarmid, the phones