The name Clo-oose comes from the Nuu-chah-nulth language -- tluu7uus -- and means camping beach or landing place. The Ditidaht First Nation, whose traditional territory encompasses this coast, used Clo-oose as a stopping point during canoe travel between their main villages: Whyac, three kilometers to the north, and Qua-ba-diwa at Carmanah, seven kilometers south. When the ship Columbia called at this coast in 1791, the people were already scarred by smallpox. By 1906, the combined population of Whyac and Clo-oose was 198. By 1964, fewer than 30 remained. In the early 1900s, the federal Indian Department encouraged the Ditidaht-speaking peoples to consolidate at Clo-oose, which received a coastal steamboat every ten days. When that service ended in 1952, many left. Federal initiatives in the 1960s pushed consolidation further, to the head of Nitinat Lake where logging roads provided the access that Clo-oose never had.

Europeans had visited the coast since the maritime fur trade of the 1700s, but the first settler was G.F. Groves, who purchased land on the Cheewhat River in 1892, raised cattle, and ran a trading post. In 1894, he persuaded David and Sarah Logan to manage the operation while he returned to Australia. Groves never came back. David Logan became the inaugural postmaster in 1911, a post he held until 1938, doubling as justice of the peace, telegraph linesman, and cattle rancher. The Logans' subdivision was optimistically named Clovelly, though Clo-oose remained the postal address. Throughout the 1920s, rum-running vessels bound for California during American Prohibition stopped along this coast, and servicing their trade offered Clo-oose's tiny population questionable but tangible income. The increased drunkenness that followed attracted a provincial police presence -- the first real government attention the settlement had received in years.

The waters off Clo-oose belong to the Graveyard of the Pacific. In 1906, the barkentine Skagit wrecked on a reef to the northwest, killing two. Earlier that same year, the SS Valencia sank 17 kilometers up the coast with the loss of more than 125 lives, a disaster so devastating that the federal government established a lifesaving station at Clo-oose in 1907 and strung a telegraph line along the coast. The purse seiner Renfrew wrecked at the Nitinat Narrows in 1918, drowning 13. The SS Santa Rita hit a reef to the southeast in 1923 with no casualties, and the schooner Raita broke apart at Whyac Point in 1925, also without loss of life. The trail that connected these lifesaving stations -- a muddy, root-tangled path hacked through the coastal forest -- became, in 1973, the West Coast Trail. At kilometer 35, Clo-oose sits almost exactly in the middle.

After the steamboat stopped coming in 1952, Clo-oose's decline was swift and final. Without road access, only a missionary and a telegraph linesman remained, though the Ordway family arrived in 1953 and stayed on. Helen Dorothy Ordway ran a teahouse for hikers in the 1960s and served as the final postmaster from 1961 to 1966. Another woman offered her homemade beer to passing trekkers. By the late 1960s, only three families lived there for any part of the year. In 1970, the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve absorbed the locality. Parks Canada required residents to live full-time -- an impossible demand in a place with no road, no store, and no regular transportation. The last holdouts gave up. Today, gardens have returned to wilderness. A single decrepit cabin stands beside the West Coast Trail. English ivy and foxglove grow among the sword ferns and salal, the exotic plants outlasting the people who planted them. The old telegraph line rusts in the treetops, connecting nothing to nowhere.