One of my Geocities neighbours has a page devoted to  waterfalls.   He wrote and asked if we had any waterfalls on Vancouver Island.  I was taken aback!  How could I have missed them?  We have all sorts of waterfalls on the island.  I promised  him I would do a page on them.
 

If you have not read my geology pages,  you should rush off and do so immediately!  Until you do that, I will give you the bare bones of it here.  Vancouver Island is largely composed of great granite batholists.  These have been thrust up above the surface of the ocean.  The backbone of the island is a mountain range.   We get an enormous amount of rain each year especially from October through to April.  That rain has to go somewhere.  It cannot sink into the granite.  It finds itself on land that slopes towards the sea on all sides so it heads out in that direction.  The path leads downwards over a mountainous terraine.  Waterfalls are inevitable.  They exist on virtually every creek and river.   We even have the highest fall in Canada.

Della Falls is a series of three cascades from Della Lake to the valley of Drinkwater Creek on Vancouver Island. They are located approximately 37 miles (60 km) northwest of Port Alberni and about the same distance  southwest of Courtenay.  At 440 meters, they are the highest falls in Canada.  (don't forget we share the glory of Niagara.)  So why haven't you heard of Della Falls?    Well to quote from the encyclopedia Britannica:

The status of the major waterfalls of the world is based not only on the height of the fall, but also on the volume of water flow. For this reason, Della Falls, the highest in Canada, is not regarded, in world literature, as a major waterfall. Niagara Falls, on the other hand, is acknowledged as one of the world's greatest cataracts because of the estimated mean annual flow of 6000 m3/s.

So  you see, the problem is that our island creeks and rivers, like their human neighbours are rugged individualists.  They do not stick around to see if they can find company on their trip to sea level. On the mainland of British Columbia most minor players are content to flow into one of those corporate entity type rivers...the Fraser, the Columbia, the Stikine.  But not so with our independent island streams.  They each do their own thing.  So we have all these lovely little falls.  Some of them may be quite high.   Typically though they do not involve a lot of water and often they may subside to little more than a trickle when the summer dry spell hits.
 

 But let's not diminish these falls. They may not be "world class" but they are delightful. If you were to contact our Ministry of Tourism to ask about hiking on the island, half of the trails they would direct you to would end at a waterfall. Haven't you noticed that if you are hiking along a river, you feel you  have reached a destination when you come to a fall? It is just such a natural place to refresh weary spirits or weary feet.