Photo: Clear cuts on mountains above Hisnit Inlet.

From Tahsis we headed south down Tahsis Inlet towards Nootka Sound with a strong outflow wind behind us. A few miles south it died to nothing and we motored down Tahsis Inlet to Nootka Sound then found some wind to sail to Hisnit Inlet.

When we first visited Hisnit Inlet in 1984, it looked like a pristine bay: thick forests and a view of snow capped mountains in the distance. Now much of it has been clear cut. These are "new style" clear cuts. Instead of clearcutting the whole slope, they cut it in patches with corridors of forests left between. It's supposed to be better for the forest ecology but it still looks like a clear cut.

A marble quarry operated here in the early 1900s. On our last visit here, we had walked a trail along the quarries, looking into pools with terraced cuts. But when we went ashore this time, we were discouraged to find that although the loggers had not cut the quarry site itself, they had cut immediately above it. Without a buffer for a windbreak, trees had blown down across the quarries, hiding most completely. We still found piles of discarded marble on the beach, a huge boulder in the shape of a human head and blocks of marble covered with moss in the forest. And if we looked up the stream at the inlet's head we could still see distant mountains. But to enjoy all this you would have to ignore the clear cuts.

Although according to author and historian George Nicholson, the marble for the parliament building in Victoria came from here, I have not been able to confirm this. When we took a tour of the Parliament Building, the guides insisted the marble came from Tennessee.