Pacifc Rim Highway #4 (Tofino to Ucluelet) Driving Through

In this video I drive from Ucluelet to Tofino a few times showcasing this amazing highway. I also drive through Surf Grove. Highway 4 is the longest east–west main vehicle route on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, with a total length of 162 km. It is known locally as the Alberni Highway to the east of Port Alberni and the Pacific Rim Highway to the west. More about the Pacific Coast Highway: In the decades before Pacific Rim National Park was born in 1970, this moss-laden landscape of mist and surf was a little-known outpost, a world apart. If adventurers managed to coax a vehicle across the tortuous road that led west from Port Alberni to the isolated sister ports of Tofino and Ucluelet, finding a bed was a simple matter at one of the few local inns. The alternative was constructing a driftwood shelter on one of the fabulous beaches nearby. Just west of Parksville on the east coast of Vancouver Island, the Pacific Rim Highway (Highway 4) begins to wind across the spine of the Vancouver Island Mountains to Port Alberni and the open ocean at Ucluelet and Tofino, all three of which are sheltered harbours. This is the route to the Pacific Rim National Park. One million visitors a year now make this same journey on black-topped Highway 4 (Pacific Rim Highway) to experience the romantic isolation of the region. It’s a tribute to the scale of this environment that so many travellers can be absorbed into it and still leave it so (apparently) empty. The open ocean stretches off unbroken and vacant, while the elemental forces at play here – the winds and tides, the sun and rain – excite within visitors a deep-seated resonance, a sense of belonging to this place. Undoubtedly, the same chaos that reigns in winter during gale-force storms mimics, on a microcosmic scale at least, the fury of the Big Bang. And on eternal summer evenings, when a magenta sunset ignites the ocean’s serene surface, there’s a peace so prevalent that you could almost bottle it and call it salvation. Take your pick of moods; they’re both soul-satisfying.