Long before any of this, the headland had a name. The Musqueam call it Ulksen - the nose - and the promontory has been hunting, fishing and logging ground and a place of spiritual significance for their people for a very long time. In Squamish the beach is Tsʼatʼlhm. The land is administered today by Metro Vancouver as part of Pacific Spirit Regional Park, more than 55 kilometres of trails wrapping the university endowment lands, but Indigenous claims to it are asserted repeatedly and particularly by the Musqueam Nation, whose reserve lies a short distance south along the river. The geography is unusual for a city beach: no seawall, no road access, no concession stands. Just sand, drift logs the Fraser delivers by the thousand, and a wall of eroding cliff at your back.

The convention of swimming without clothes here has a mundane origin. During the Great Depression, swimsuits cost money that people did not have, and men began gathering at Siwash Rock in Stanley Park to swim without them - away from the disapproval of neighbours whose standards were still essentially Victorian. From Siwash Rock the practice migrated west to Wreck Beach, which had the advantages of being farther from anywhere and much harder to reach. Through the following decades it stayed a quiet local habit. Then the 1960s arrived, the counterculture found the place, and the population of the beach on a summer afternoon stopped being quiet at all.

The 1970 raid was the flashpoint, and the nude-in that followed was one of those protests that works precisely because it is unanswerable: what, exactly, does a police force do with three thousand people doing the thing it has just arrested twelve people for? The charges went away. So did the enforcement. For the next two decades the beach existed in a legal grey zone that everyone understood and nobody wrote down, until 1991, when it was formally recognized as a nudist beach. It remains clothing-optional rather than clothing-prohibited, and the boundaries of the section are marked with signs, which is a very Canadian resolution to a question that has caused enormous trouble elsewhere.

On January 25, 1977, a group of beach regulars incorporated under that splendid name. It became the Wreck Beach Committee, and in 1983 the Wreck Beach Preservation Society, and the list of things it has fought off since would exhaust a professional lobbying firm. A twenty-million-cubic-metre dredging operation behind the North Arm breakwater. A proposal to barge millions of gallons of jet fuel past the beach every week. Condominium towers running from the cliff toe to the cliff top, floated in 2004. A seawall twenty feet high and ten feet wide, built over the beach it was supposedly protecting. Viewing platforms. The clearing of forty acres of cliff-face forest and the shaving of the cliffs beneath it. An RCMP service road down to the sand. Permanent outhouses finally arrived in 2012 - one of the few additions the society did not oppose.

The current fight is about height. The University of British Columbia has proposed a seventy-metre tower on the land above, and the Preservation Society is campaigning to hold the line at the fifty-three-metre restriction it says already applies, gathering petition signatures through 2025 and into 2026. Read cynically, this is a squabble over a few storeys. Read the other way, it is the same argument the society has been making since 1977: that what makes Wreck Beach worth anything is the absence of the city above it. The cliff, the forest on the cliff, and the stairs that make you earn the descent are not obstacles to the beach. They are the beach. Take away the sense of having stepped out of Vancouver, and what is left is just sand under a skyline.