Article written by Alexandra Marvar for Gulfstream Nonstop

Staring down the storm or venturing into the heart of the woods, Vancouver Island’s luxury hospitality scene embraces the outdoors, rain or shine.

The largest and most populous island on the west coast of the Americas and the 43rd largest island in the world, Canada’s Vancouver Island has long been celebrated for whale-watching expeditions, indigenous cultural sites, seemingly endless ancient cedar forests and luxurious retreats to secluded, smaller islands along its coasts. Increasingly, another type of wilderness tourism is emerging: one-of-a-kind experiences that embrace not only the beauty of the great outdoors, but its truly wild side – a side impossible to curate or control.

Here, on the North American continent’s rugged western edge, two different hospitality ventures show visitors a new view of nature: one deep in the heart of the forest, and one completely exposed to the elements.

Finding Calm In The Storm

One community on Vancouver Island’s Pacific Coast has turned its wildest element into its biggest draw. In 1955, the village of Tofino was so remote and undiscovered, it lacked even a road when Charles McDiarmid’s parents moved their young family there from the prairies of central Canada. McDiarmid, then a young boy, would look out at the horizon from his home on nearly 2 miles of private white sand beach, knowing there was nothing but open ocean between his home and Japan. It felt like the edge of the world, and adding to that feeling were Tofino’s otherworldly weather events: Tofino was, and today remains, in the prime position to receive the savage storms that form in the Bering Strait and pinwheel down North America’s Pacific Coast.

“I grew up with the storms,” McDiarmid says. “They were just a natural part of our everyday winter experience.” And a beloved one, at that. Long after his father- who was for a time Tofino’s lone doctor-retired from medicine, the family would gather for holidays at their property on the beach and hope a giant storm would roll in so they could experience it up close, just as he and his brothers did as children.

“You’ve got the giant 20-foot waves crashing on to the rocks, the wind howling,” McDiarmid says. “In a big storm with a high tide, all the driftwood is floating. Imagine a 30- to 40-foot log being driven by a 20-foot wave. It smacks into the beach or a rocky shore, and that whole log vibrates like a tuning fork”. Even in the middle of a roaring storm, the effect - a very low bass hum – reverberates through the shrieking wind and rain, a sound very few people get to hear in their lives.

McDiarmid calls these epic weather events “Mother Nature performing.” Now, guests fly in from around the world to experience the show.

In 1996, McDiarmid built the Wickaninnish Inn on his family’s property, that dramatic windswept stretch of beach, set against 100 acres of pristine, ancient cedar forest. He and his brother cleared the building’s footprint by hand, ensuring they would remove only the trees that were absolutely necessary. Now a Relais & Châteaux property ranked on Travel & Leisure’s World’s Best Resorts and Hotels list, the Wickaninnish Inn is perhaps the world’s premier spot for storm watching, and it is equipped accordingly: Nearly every room – each guest suite, each dining space, even the spa- has its own fireplace and a view of the ocean, while head-to-toe Helly Hansen apparel, designed specifically for storm watching, is provided for every guest.

With upwards of 120 inches of rain per year and only seldom hurricane-force winds, Tofino’s storms are generally safe to venture out into. Surrounded by two national parks, and within a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, this stretch of coast offers some magnificent vantages to experience the spectacle during prime storm-watching season, November through March. By McDiarmid’s estimate, some 15 to 20 “significant storms” will roll through the region during this time. Otherwise, the area is among the warmest places in Canada in the wintertime, he says, with the Japanese current not far offshore, making now relatively rare.

The most important thing to know when embarking for the first time, McDiarmid says, is that storm watching means many things to many people. If you’re like him, you will want to dive into the heart of it, walking the beach in the rain, leaning into the wind, fighting your way forward beside the crashing waves, and on the return, feeling the wind at your back.

After such a venture along Tofino’s private beach, guests shed soaked storm gear in a cozy “drying room” and sit by the fire with a comforting beverage: hot tea, a rum toddy, or coffee and Baileys.

For other people, storm watching is about harnessing calm, or as McDiarmid says, “You don’t have to get out in the thick of it. Bring two or three great books and prop your feet up on an ottoman by the window, tranquillity inside and the raging storm outside.” No matter what, he adds, the cardinal rule of this pastime is to arrive with an open mind. Everyone takes something different from the experience, but many share the realization that facing the unrestrained force of the planet face-on can put things in perspective.

Into The Woods

Across Vancouver Island, travellers can immerse themselves in the landscape in what that offer some of the same wonderment, with quite a different temperament. Take the meditative practice of “shinrinyoku” (in English, “forest bathing”). In the 1980s, the practice began to emerge in Japan as an eco-therapeutic antidote to a technology-laden lifestyle. Within 10 years, researchers had embarked on studies as to its psychological and physiological benefits. Now, guests can reap those benefits here, at the southern frontier of Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest.

Off Vancouver Island’s northeastern coast, some 120 miles as the crow flies from Tofino, sits the small, remote Berry Island in the Broughton Archipelago. Accessible only by a boat or seaplane from Port Hardy, this is the home of Farewell Harbour Lodge: part floating lodge, part rustic resort, with wide picture windows tucked into the island’s moss, stone, and the towering cedars of its old-growth rainforest.

A homestead in the 1940s, the lodge was grandfathered in and now is the only private holding in a 30,000-acre protected marine park. In 2016, co-owners Kelli McGrady and her husband Tim, along with two business partner-friends, opened Farewell Harbour. Like the Wickaninnish, the guest experience here is designed around a luxurious immersion in the natural world. Among their guided offerings-from bear viewing expeditions to sea kayaking to scuba diving- the most transformative, McGrady says, may be shinrin-yoku. When she first encountered the practice a few years ago with a colleague on a nearby smaller island off V.I., she knew she had to find a way to share it with guests.

The contemplative guided experience unfolds during a two- to three-hour walk through the woods on the stunning trails that curve inland from the coast. This time is woven through with guided meditations and space to think, and it closes a tea ceremony, all creating a nature experience meant to help participants absorb the science-backed psychological and physiological benefits a forest can provide.

McGrady channels what she learned from a six-month training and certification program via the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy: “One of the things that they say, when we’re doing our guides, is that the forest is the therapist, and the guide opens the door,” she says. “This series of guided meditations allows people to be fully present and open.

“It’s very simples, and it’s really moving at an incredibly slow pace-slower than people are used to,” McGrady adds. “I always say, ‘Just move a little bit,’ so that I can help people who have a hard time slowing down.”

This change of pace doesn’t just bring participants to a more meditative state. Studies have shown it has positive psychological effects, like boosting one’s mood and inciting creativity, as well as physiological results, from reducing stress and lowering one’s heart rate and blood pressure to supporting the immune system and accelerating recovery from illness.

Most immediately, McGrady says, shinrin-yoku offers an often welcomed change of perspective: “It helps people to step out of the busy world that we live in for a little while.”

Throughout Farewell Harbour’s season, from June to October, shinrin-yoku walks take place in the heat, rain, even snow. Whatever the forecast, the experience, like storm watching, is about a complete, unfiltered spell with the natural world, and what we can learn when we embrace not only its beauty, but its wild unpredictability – the things we cannot control.