Qualla: Alberni Inlet

Alberni Inlet: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Qwexcxewq, CC BY 4.0. Just after midnight on March 28, 1964, the water in Alberni Inlet began to rise, and it kept rising. The source was 2,000 kilometres north, where a magnitude 9.2 earthquake had torn open the seafloor off Alaska hours earlier. Out in the open Pacific, the wave it launched was almost unnoticeable. But Alberni Inlet is narrow and long and ends in a dead end, and a fjord shaped like that does to a wave what a megaphone does to a voice. The first surge reached Port Alberni at 2.44 metres. An hour later a second one arrived at 3.05 metres. Fifty-eight properties were destroyed outright and another 320 damaged. Nobody in Canada died, largely because residents woke their neighbours and got them uphill before the bigger wave came.

Read more: Alberni Inlet on Qualla

Image: Qwexcxewq | CC BY 4.0

Alberni Inlet: The Long Cut

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Qwexcxewq, CC BY 4.0. Alberni Inlet runs 54.3 kilometres from Barkley Sound on the open Pacific to Port Alberni, driving so deep into Vancouver Island that the town at its head sits nearly at the island's centre. It is narrow along its entire length, a green corridor of steep timbered slopes dropping ...

Read more: Alberni Inlet on Qualla

Image: Qwexcxewq | CC BY 4.0

Alberni Inlet: A Word Problem

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Logantech, CC BY 2.0. For most of its charted life the waterway was called Alberni Canal, which was accurate in the old sense of the word and badly misleading in the new one. In 1931 someone made the reasonable observation that foreign shipping companies might read a chart, see the word canal, and ass...

Read more: Alberni Inlet on Qualla

Image: Logantech | CC BY 2.0

Alberni Inlet: Written in Basalt

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Qwexcxewq, CC BY 4.0. The trench itself is a fjord, gouged by an outlet glacier that drained the Pleistocene ice caps sitting on Vancouver Island's mountainous interior. When the Last Glacial Maximum ended and sea level climbed, the ocean flooded the valley the ice had carved and made a saltwater arm ...

Read more: Alberni Inlet on Qualla

Image: Qwexcxewq | CC BY 4.0

Alberni Inlet: Sarita and the Long Memory

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Markus Gregory, CC BY-SA 3.0. About halfway down the eastern shore, on a low sand beach, stands the Huu-ay-aht village of Sarita. Beaches are good places to live if you fish, land canoes, and want flat ground. They are poor places to be when the inlet focuses a wave. Sarita has been struck by tsunamis repeate...

Read more: Alberni Inlet on Qualla

Image: Markus Gregory | CC BY-SA 3.0

Alberni Inlet: A Working Corridor

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dave Bonser, CC BY-SA 3.0. Today the inlet is a highway. Deep-draft vessels run its length to the port at the head, and the Somass estuary funnels returning salmon through some of the most heavily fished water on the island. Fog collects in the corridor and burns off in patches. Wind gets channelled by the...

Read more: Alberni Inlet on Qualla

Image: Dave Bonser | CC BY-SA 3.0