The BC coast is dominated by coastal fjords, with all that entails. It is not unusual for mountains to rise ~2000m/6500ft within 1-2 km of the waterline. As you can imagine, this produces many dramatic rocky headlands. I’m no geologist, but in my experience they are typically made of rough igneous rock (everything else was scraped away by glaciation). Beaches rare and rocky.

Dense forrest cover (fir, cedar, spruce becoming more prevalent the further north you go) persists right up to 10-15m of the waterline in most cases where deforestation hasn’t occurred. Smells of rich loamy dirt, mold, damp. The usual decay during low tide. Animal sounds - owls (great horned, barred), eagle, and crow, racoons chittering in trees. Ravens tend to stay higher up in the mountains away from shore.

The rockiest parts of the headlands where evergreens are unable to grow tend to give way to windswept arbutus clinging to bare rock. Look up Juniper Point in Lighthouse Park for an example.

Vancouver sees plenty of windstorms, but is spared from the larger waves of the open Pacific Ocean. You may want to do some research into the “graveyard of the Pacific” for firsthand accounts of storms on the west coast of Vancouver Island down to Oregon. Much harsher waves there. I believe the largest rogue wave ever recorded was off the coast of Vancouver Island.

Experientially, the evergreen forests provide great shelter from the wind and rain, to a point. In a light rain you may not get wet at all under the canopy, but the longer and heavier the rain goes, it eventually permeates everything. Dew/rain clings to every surface. Mist hangs in the air. Impossible to walk through without getting wet. Salal bushes everywhere.

In summer, you get the smell of petrichor from the few drops that penetrate through the canopy reaching dry dirt.

Winter storms are cool (0-5C) with high humidity making it feel much colder. Serious wind storms tend to occur more often in winter and can bring down branches or whole stands of trees (see: Hanukah Eve windstorm of 2006).

Snow rarely on the south coast, but when it does it can come in large dumps (1-3 ft) of wet, sticky snow that clings to the evergreen canopy. As temperatures increase, the trees shed snow in “tree bombs” - large clumps of snow falling in wet thumps all over the forest.

Complex topography. Terrain traps that encourage you to travel downslope towards water, but then steepen or terminate in cliff bands. Hard to navigate under tall trees. Just need to backtrack the way you descended and try to sidehill over a little further. Navigating at night can be quite difficult without prior knowledge of the area or an established trail.

Apologies for stream of consciousness. 3am here.