View from the Zeballos dock

Vancouver Island's small coastal communities grow, boom, shrink, rally, dwindle, grow, and dwindle again; the terrain is challenging, access limited, the weather mostly wet, and the hazards (fire, flood, earthquakes, landslides) unpredictable. Zeballos is a good example.

I drove in to Zeballos last Sunday. The last time I was there was about 45 years ago; we drove in on a logging road from Woss, also on a Sunday; Dad had to get permission from the logging company. It was slow going. At one point the road was so steep that the car's motor boiled over, and we all had to get out and walk to the top of the hill, and the next steep hill after that, picking and eating huckleberries as we went. There were 9 of us in that car, mostly kids. In those days, there were no seat belts, and kids sat on adults' laps.

Before that, it was 1955 when I was a regular visitor. Every Sunday; Dad was preaching in a store-front church there.

Zeballos dock, as I saw it last Sunday, on a rainy afternoon.

To take this photo, I went to the spot where my brothers and I would go down on Sunday afternoons to the log dump; the end of the wharf where logging trucks would dump their loads into the ocean to be boomed and hauled away. It was a bit different back then. The road was gravel, but mostly covered several inches deep with chips of bark and shredded wood. There were no railings on the dock; it was not meant for people. Here and there rusty old pieces of machinery waited until they were wanted. We climbed on some of them. There was a small float dock on the far side, where we tied up our boat.

Zeballos was a small settlement until gold was discovered, in the 1930's. The mine was extremely productive, and the town grew to around 1500 people. Then WWII came, and the men went away to war. When they came back, the price of gold had dropped, and the mines never recovered.

In the beginning, the miners carried the sacks of ore out on their backs down the narrow, slippery trails, through the mud and windfalls to the Zeballos River. From there the ore was transported downstream in a flat bottom boat to the mouth of the river where it was again backpacked over land to the beach. (Zeballos: Golden Gate to the West Coast)

The hotel, thriving in the gold rush days, closed in 1948. The population shrunk to 35. That's how I remember it, in 1955; I rarely saw any people on the street; there were only a few inhabited houses. I remember setting up chairs for Sunday service; a dozen or fifteen chairs were enough, even including our family of 5. We would have a morning service, then lunch (Spam, canned peas, instant potatoes, canned fruit, tea) heated on the wood stove, then go back to our boat and home, an hour's ride away. There was no other way, except by float plane, to reach the town. Food and mail were brought in on the Princess Maquinna weekly, to this town and to us, back on Nootka Island.

By then, logging was providing an income. The town grew again. There was a school. The hotel re-opened. And closed again. In 1964, the Alaska earthquake shook the town, and the ensuing tsunami flooded it. (There are still signs along the road near the docks warning visitors of tsunami hazards.)

In 1970, Tahsis Company (logging) built the road we drove in on a few years later, "... eliminating Zeballos' outport status ..." (Vanishing BC)

The hotel burned down in 2008. Last year, an out of control forest fire on the mountain overlooking the town forced an evacuation order. Wikipedia gives the 2016 population as 107 people. But there is a school, a clinic, a museum, a library, well cared for nature trails, one (1) store, a few B&Bs, fishing and ecotourism guides: the town is far from dead.

I"ll go back someday, on a sunny day; I'd like to explore the estuary nature trail.