Qualla: Storm Bay

Storm Bay: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geordie.birch, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1980, an RCMP officer at the Sechelt detachment was asked how many communes were still operating on the Sunshine Coast. He could think of one. Storm Bay, a notch of shoreline near the mouth of Narrows Inlet with no road to it and no plans for one, had outlasted every other back-to-the-land experiment in the region - and its residents, characteristically, objected to the term. They were not a commune, they said. They were a neighbourhood. That distinction has held for more than half a century now, through the deaths of founders and the arrival of second generations, in a bay that can only be reached by boat or floatplane and where the mail does not come at all.

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Image: Geordie.birch | CC BY-SA 4.0

Storm Bay: Eight Thousand Years of Shell

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geordie Birch, CC BY 4.0. The bay's newcomers arrived in the 1960s. Everyone else had been here considerably longer. Storm Bay lies in shíshálh territory - specifically that of the téwánkw, the group associated with the Sechelt, Narrows, and Salmon Inlets - and the archaeological evidence puts continuous ...

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Image: Geordie Birch | CC BY 4.0

Storm Bay: The Brickworks That Wouldn't

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geordie Birch, CC BY 4.0. The twentieth century arrived with saws and ambitions. Storm Bay was logged hard and homesteaded early, and the stumps left behind still carry the rectangular springboard notches where fallers wedged in planks to stand on above the swollen base of a tree. In 1907 the Sechelt Bric...

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Image: Geordie Birch | CC BY 4.0

Storm Bay: Not a Commune

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geordie Birch, CC BY 4.0. What arrived next was harder to categorize. Beginning in the late 1960s, people loosely connected to the intentional community movement began settling Storm Bay, and an unusual number of them turned out to matter to Canadian art. Kate Craig, who co-founded Vancouver's Western Fro...

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Image: Geordie Birch | CC BY 4.0

Storm Bay: Rain, Moss, and No Road

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Geordie, CC BY-SA 4.0. The setting does most of the persuading. Storm Bay sits in the wet coastal forest of the British Columbia mainland, the kind of dense, moss-laden temperate rainforest where the light arrives filtered green and the ground never entirely dries. Sechelt Inlet is a long fjord system ...

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Image: User:Geordie | CC BY-SA 4.0

Storm Bay: What Endures Here

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geordie Birch, CC BY 4.0. Three settlements have now been attempted in this bay. The oldest is still the most successful by an enormous margin - eight thousand years of shíshálh presence against two brickworks that lasted a combined handful of seasons. The artists' community sits somewhere in between, six...

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Image: Geordie Birch | CC BY 4.0