Tofino and Clayoquot Sound by Margaret Horsfield

Author:Margaret Horsfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781550176827
Publisher: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
Published: 2014-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

The early road between Tofino and Ucluelet, late 1920s. Completed in 1928 after decades of effort, for many years part of the journey required vehicles to drive a considerable distance on Long Beach, rejoining the road at the other end of the beach. Image NA05425 courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives

Anthony Guppy recalled the Tofino road of his childhood days as “nothing more than a rough gravel trail that began at the government dock in the village and wound its way through the village into the woods. This trail...continued on for some three more miles [five kilometres]...then turned into a sort of rough road bed that led through the forest to Long Beach.” Overgrown with flourishing vegetation, this “so-called road remained an almost unusable trail, winding up and down steep little hills and through marshy land.” In winter, any car foolish enough to venture out of town “would sink to its axles in the soft brown quagmire” before reaching Chesterman Beach.

Slogging through thick mud is an apt metaphor for the road. The Tofino–Long Beach section became infamous for its washouts, axle-deep mud, and waist-deep sinkholes. After that came the easy part—driving many kilometres on the sands of Long Beach before joining up with the better, but still very rough, road to Ucluelet.

Rough or not, vehicles began to make the journey. In early June 1928, the Daily Colonist noted that “H.T. Fredrickson brought the 1st tourist car over the road from Ucluelet to Long Beach,” and two months later Peter Hillier of Ucluelet seized the opportunity and established an occasional bus service to carry sightseers from Ucluelet to Long Beach in the summer months. Tom Scales and J.R. Tindall of Vancouver drove a motorcycle at 145 kilometres per hour across the sands of Long Beach in August 1930, proclaiming it “the finest speedway ever seen.” The following month, Arthur Lovekin, who had bought 244.5 hectares of land fronting on Long Beach a few years earlier, had a car shipped to Ucluelet. After driving it up to Long Beach, he took a spin along the sand accompanied by his wife and daughter, driving at speeds up to 112 kilometres per hour. The Lovekins had built a large house and extensive gardens on their property, and used the place as a summer residence for thirty-five years; Lovekin confidently expected development would follow them to Long Beach, once declaring it to be “the playground of the Western World.”

Travelling by road in and out of Tofino remained a nightmare for many years. Ronald MacLeod remembered that “by the late 1930s, if the summer was dry, a truck could make its way to Ucluelet with great difficulty but only if the driver had an axe to cut poles and branches to lay across the sinkholes.” Yet residents stubbornly clung to the road dream. After all, ever since 1926 a sign had stood near the government dock proclaiming the location to be the “Pacific Terminus of the Trans-Canada Highway.” Surely one day this would come true.

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