The Tseshaht and Hupacasath peoples have lived in the Alberni Valley for thousands of years, and many local place names carry Nuu-chah-nulth origins: Somass means 'washing,' Kitsuksis means 'log across mouth of creek,' and Pacheena means 'foamy.' Ancient petroglyphs at Sproat Lake testify to the depth of this habitation. European contact came in 1787, when Captain Charles William Barkley explored the sound that now bears his name, accompanied by his 17-year-old bride Frances -- the first European woman to visit what would become British Columbia. In 1856, Scottish fur trader Adam Horne, working for the Hudson's Bay Company, followed an Indigenous trail from Qualicum to the Alberni Valley, opening the route that settlers would use for decades.

The first sawmill at the mouth of the Somass River began cutting on May 22, 1861, producing 14,000 board feet a day for export -- the first mill in British Columbia built specifically to ship lumber overseas. That original operation failed, but the pattern was set. By the mid-twentieth century, Port Alberni's forestry workers were among the highest paid in Canada. The kraft pulp mill opened in 1946, paper machines followed in 1957, and the valley hummed with the sound of saws and the smell of fresh-cut fir. The decline, when it came, was gradual but devastating. Over the past several decades, the forestry labor force has contracted sharply, and the city has pivoted toward tourism, fishing, and its role as the gateway to Tofino, Ucluelet, and Pacific Rim National Park.

Port Alberni sits in seismically active territory, and it has the scars to prove it. On June 23, 1946, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck with its epicenter in the Forbidden Plateau area north of the city -- a rare crustal event rather than the more common plate-boundary quake. Shaking was felt from Portland, Oregon, to Prince Rupert, making it one of the most damaging earthquakes in British Columbia's history. Then, on Good Friday 1964, a tsunami generated by the great Alaskan earthquake sent water surging up Alberni Inlet. The wave rose above the high-water mark in about a minute, damaging 375 homes and washing away 55 entirely. Remarkably, no one was killed or seriously injured -- a piece of luck that still seems improbable.

From 1900 until 1973, the Alberni Indian Residential School operated on the west bank of the Somass River, just north of Port Alberni. Run by the Presbyterian and United Churches with federal government support, the school forcibly separated Indigenous children from their families and communities. Children were poorly fed -- at one point deliberately, as part of a government malnutrition experiment -- and subjected to abuse. The school was demolished in 2009. Today, the art installation 'Strength from Within' by Connie Watts stands in Port Alberni, depicting two thunderbirds adorned with West Coast designs alongside a third stripped of all cultural symbols, representing the devastation of the residential school era. The installation honors both survivors and those who did not survive.

From the air, Port Alberni reveals its unusual geography: a city split into two centers -- the former Alberni ('North Port') and the former Port Alberni ('South Port') -- stitched together by Highway 4 and bisected by creeks and ravines. The Alberni Inlet stretches south to Barkley Sound and the Broken Group Islands, one of the world's premier kayaking destinations. Sproat Lake spreads to the west, once home to the legendary Martin Mars water bombers. Mt. Arrowsmith and the Beaufort Range ring the valley with snow-capped peaks. The city earned the World Fishing Network's 'Ultimate Fishing Town' designation in 2010, and its waters hold all five Pacific salmon species plus steelhead and halibut. Port Alberni is not a place you pass through. It is a place the landscape holds in place.