Western Canada's Wilderness Is More Dangerous Than You Think

A mountain lake held up by a wall of cooled lava 300 metres thick. Lytton hit 49.6°C, and the next day it burned. At Rogers Pass, one avalanche killed 58 railwaymen near midnight. In Port Alberni, a wave from Alaska washed 55 homes away. And in 1981, British Columbia looked at that lake and moved a village out from under it. What's beneath YOUR town? Personalized 15-page report — the rock, the name, the vanished places, your town's oldest map → https://hiddenprovinces.com Thirty of the most dangerous places in Western Canada, counted down to the lake. The 2021 heat dome and the 619 dead on the coast. Vancouver Island's cougars and Paul Beier's attack record. Calgary's Hail Alley and the cloud-seeding planes the insurers pay for. The wreck of the Valencia and the Graveyard of the Pacific. The Regina Cyclone of 1912, Canada's deadliest tornado. The Syncrude ducks, the prairie rattlesnake, the Hells Gate slide of 1914 and the salmon it nearly killed. Elie, Manitoba, and Canada's only F5. The Big Hill and the Spiral Tunnels, Anyox's dead hills, the 1910 Rogers Pass avalanche and the howitzers that still fire on the pass every winter. Edmonton's Black Friday, the Hoop and Holler breach, Hillcrest, Sumas Lake coming back in 2021, Britannia's copper, the Lodgepole sour gas blowout, Lake Winnipeg's blooms, the 2013 Bow flood, the M Creek bridge, the Fort McMurray Beast, the Hope Slide, the Elliot Creek tsunami, the 1964 wave at Port Alberni, the Cheekye fan and its 115-million-dollar wall, Haida Gwaii's earthquakes, Richmond's liquefiable delta, the slow earthquakes under Vancouver Island, and the Barrier above Garibaldi. Sources include the BC Coroners Service, the Insurance Bureau of Canada, the University of Victoria, Paul Beier (1991), the Northern Hail Project at Western University, Environment Canada, the Canadian Encyclopedia, Parks Canada and National Defence (Operation PALACI), the Geological Survey of Canada, Geertsema et al. in Geophysical Research Letters, the District of Squamish hazard reports, the Government of British Columbia, and the Global Nature Fund. Where sources disagree, on the Valencia toll, the Britannia dead, Regina's debt and the Barrier's risk, the narration says so. Subscribe to The Hidden Provinces — beneath the map.