Things to find in Canada

What the map holds here

• Abraham Lake and the frozen bubbles Legend
  The lake is not natural: Calgary Power, now TransAlta, put the Bighorn Dam across the North Saskatchewan in 1972 and filled 53.7 square kilometres, 32 kilometres long. It took the glacial blue of the real mountain lakes anyway,...
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• Alberta petrified wood Gem & mineral ground
  Alberta made petrified wood its official stone in 1977, which means the province’s emblem is a fossil, and that is not a technicality. It formed when microcrystalline quartz filled the pores and cells of trees that fell in the...
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• Ammolite on the St. Mary River Gem & mineral ground
  The only gem on Earth made of a dinosaur-age animal: ammolite is the iridescent aragonite shell of Placenticeras ammonites that died in the Western Interior Seaway and were buried in the bentonite mud that became the Bearpaw...
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• Angikuni Lake Legend
  The story says a trapper named Joe Labelle walked into an Inuit village on this lake in 1930 and found it empty, shirts still on needles, food over the fire pits, seven dead sled dogs and a grave disturbed. Emmett E. Kelleher...
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• Athabasca Falls Legend
  Not a tall waterfall, a heavy one. The drop is 24 metres, the longest single fall of it 20, and the river is 46 metres across at the lip, but the Athabasca runs an average of 113 cubic metres a second through that gap and you...
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• Aísínai’pi, Writing-on-Stone Legend
  The Milk River cut a valley of hoodoos and sandstone cliffs here, and people have been carving and painting on those cliffs for a very long time: more than 50 petroglyph sites and thousands of individual works, one of the largest...
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• Bancroft, the mineral capital of Canada Gem & mineral ground
  Bancroft calls itself the Mineral Capital of Canada and earns it: the pegmatites and marble of the region hold more than 1,600 mineral occurrences, blue sodalite, green amazonite, red garnet, apatite, and the town throws the...
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• Bay of Fundy amethyst Gem & mineral ground
  The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides on Earth, up to sixteen metres, and twice a day they scour the basalt cliffs of the Nova Scotia shore and drop amethyst, agate and zeolite crystals onto the beaches. The shore around...
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• Blairmorite, the Crowsnest volcanics Gem & mineral ground
  There is a rock named after a town in the Crowsnest Pass, and it is one of the rarest on the planet: BLAIRMORITE, known from the Crowsnest Formation here and from a single locality in Mozambique, and from nowhere else at all. It...
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• Bonanza Creek and the Klondike Legend
  On 16 August 1896 Keish (Skookum Jim Mason), Kaágoo (Dawson Charlie) and George Carmack found coarse gold on Rabbit Creek, renamed Bonanza, and within two years a hundred thousand people had set out for the Yukon. Most never...
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• Bonanza Creek, the Klondike Gem & mineral ground
  The richest placer creek in the history of the world. When George Carmack and his party struck gold on Bonanza (then Rabbit) Creek in August 1896, they set off the Klondike stampede, and the Klondike gold was so concentrated that...
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• British Columbia jade Gem & mineral ground
  Canada is the largest producer of nephrite jade on Earth, and nearly all of it comes from British Columbia, from the mountains around Dease Lake, Cassiar and the Fraser, where boulders of deep-green jade the size of cars are...
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• Cadomin Cave Legend
  The largest known bat hibernaculum in Alberta, high on the mountain above the old coal hamlet of Cadomin, and it is CLOSED. A ministerial order shut it on 14 May 2010 to slow white-nose syndrome, the fungus that has killed bats...
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• Canada Olympic Park Legend
  The hill on the west edge of Calgary with the ski jumps on it was the main venue of the 1988 Winter Olympics: bobsleigh and luge on the track, plus Nordic combined, ski jumping and the freestyle events, aerials and ballet, when...
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• Canyon Creek Ice Cave
  A limestone cave on the flank of Moose Mountain that holds ice all year, also called the Bragg Creek or Moose Mountain ice cave. Water widened the fractures in the rock and then freeze-and-thaw frost wedging tore the entrance...
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• Castleguard Cave Legend
  Canada’s second longest cave, 21,311 metres of surveyed passage as of 2024 and 388 metres deep, running north from its entrance in Banff National Park until it ends UNDERNEATH the Columbia Icefield. Plugs of glacial ice have been...
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• Château Frontenac Haunted place
  The great copper-roofed castle-hotel on the cliff above the St. Lawrence at Quebec City, the most photographed hotel in the world, and haunted, they say, by the Comte de Frontenac himself and by a “Lady in White,” a bride who...
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• Cobalt, the silver in the streets Gem & mineral ground
  The silver of Cobalt was so rich when the railway cut through in 1903 that men picked native silver, wire and sheet and slabs of it, right off the rock; a nugget the size of a stove lid was pried from a lake bed. The great Cobalt...
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• Devil’s Coulee Fossil ground
  Late Cretaceous
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• Dinosaur Provincial Park Fossil ground
  Late Cretaceous, 76.5-74.8 mya
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• Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park Fossil ground
  Early Eocene, about 51.8 mya
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• Dunvegan Legend
  The Peace cuts a valley 200 metres deep through the farmland up here and Dunvegan is where everybody has always crossed it. Archibald Norman McLeod of the North West Company put a fort on this flat in 1805 and named it for...
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• Elk Island National Park Legend
  A fenced island of aspen parkland 35 kilometres east of Edmonton, 194 square kilometres of it, and one of the reasons there are still bison. It took federal park status in 1913 and became the refuge that carried plains bison...
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• Fort Chipewyan Legend
  The North West Company put a post here in 1788 on the west end of Lake Athabasca, and it became the hinge of the whole northwest: furs, goods and men moving between the Peace, the Slave, the Athabasca and the Mackenzie basins all...
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• Fort Edmonton Park Legend
  A hundred and fifty-eight acres of Edmonton’s river valley rebuilt as four different decades, and the largest living history museum in the country by area. You walk in through the 1846 fur trade fort, come out onto 1885 Street as...
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• Fort Henry Haunted place
  The great stone fort above Kingston, built after the War of 1812 to guard the Rideau canal and the naval yard, and used later as a prison camp. Restored as a living-history site with its garrison in red coats, it is also one of...
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• Fort Whoop-Up Legend
  In 1869 two Montana traders, John J. Healy and Alfred B. Hamilton, put up a post they called Fort Hamilton on the Oldman: eleven cabins, burned out within a year, rebuilt properly for 25,000 dollars. Everybody called it Whoop-Up....
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• Franklin’s lost expedition Legend
  Sir John Franklin sailed in 1845 with 129 men to force the Northwest Passage and every one of them died. HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were beset in the ice off King William Island; the crews abandoned ship and walked, and the...
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• Gargantua Legend
  Under the Andy Good Plateau, on the line between Alberta and British Columbia, is a limestone cave with 6,001 metres of known passage as of 2002, running 286 metres deep, and inside it is the LARGEST NATURAL CAVERN IN CANADA: a...
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• Genesee, where Alberta stopped burning coal Legend
  Forty kilometres east of Drayton Valley stood the last coal-fired power station in Alberta. Genesee burned coal from the mine beside it for decades, and on 16 June 2024 it stopped: all three units running on natural gas, more...
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• Giant Mine and the arsenic under Yellowknife Legend
  Giant Mine produced more than seven million ounces of gold beside Yellowknife between 1948 and 2004, and roasting the arsenopyrite ore to get it out left 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust stored in chambers underground. It...
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• Gold on the North Saskatchewan Gem & mineral ground
  There is real gold in this river and there always has been. James Hector of the Palliser Expedition reported it in 1859 after being shown samples found near Fort Edmonton, and men came for it: pans first, then a home-made sluice...
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• Grassi Lakes Legend
  Two small lakes above Canmore the colour of cut glass, and a trail up to them that a coal miner built with his own hands. Lawrence Grassi came to Canada in 1912, worked for the Canadian Pacific, went underground in the Canmore...
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• Grotto Canyon Legend
  A slot cut into the limestone between Exshaw and Canmore with paintings on its walls: human figures, animals and a flute player who looks a great deal like Kokopelli, which is why one theory has Hopi visitors making them. They...
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• Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Legend
  A sandstone cliff 300 metres long, 18 kilometres west of Fort Macleod, dropping about ten metres at its highest, that the peoples of the plains used for 5,500 years to take bison. Calling it a cliff undersells it, because the...
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• Horne Lake Caves Cave
  A set of limestone caves on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in old-growth forest, ranging from two you can explore on your own with a headlamp to guided trips deep into crystal-lined passages and down to an underground...
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• Horseshoe Canyon Fossil ground
  Late Cretaceous, Horseshoe Canyon Formation
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• Iniskim Umaapi, the Majorville medicine wheel Legend
  On a ridge above the Bow south of Bassano lies a stone cairn nine metres across, ringed by a cobble circle 27 metres wide, with 28 stone spokes running out from the middle to the rim. It is a Blackfoot site and the Blackfoot name...
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• Johnston Canyon Legend
  The canyon itself is a limestone slot that Johnston Creek is still cutting, and the reason it is one of the busiest walks in Banff is the engineering: a catwalk bolted to the canyon wall with rails and bridges carries you out...
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• La Chasse-galerie Legend
  The flying canoe. In the classic Quebec telling, lumberjacks stuck in a winter camp far from home make a pact with the devil so their canoe will fly them back for New Year, on conditions: do not speak God’s name, do not touch a...
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• Lake Louise Legend
  Less than a square kilometre of water, 70 metres deep at its deepest, and probably the most photographed thing in Canada. The colour is not a filter and it is not dissolved copper: glaciers above the lake grind rock into flour,...
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• Leduc No. 1 Legend
  On 13 February 1947 an Imperial Oil wildcat on Mike Turta’s farm, about 15 kilometres west of Leduc, came in. It was the 134th hole the company had drilled without success, and it found the Devonian reef play that runs under this...
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• Maligne Canyon Legend
  A slot in the limestone over 50 metres deep and, in places, about two metres wide, cut into the Palliser Formation by a river that mostly is not there. The Maligne runs as a full-sized river for about 15 kilometres upstream and...
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• Miette Hot Springs Legend
  The hottest springs in the Canadian Rockies. The water leaves the ground at about 52 degrees, which is too hot to sit in, so it is cooled to around 40 for the two hot pools; there are two cold plunges beside them, and the...
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• Minnewanka Landing, the town under the lake Legend
  There was a summer resort village on this shore from 1888: hotels, cottages, a wharf, boats running the lake. In 1941 the dam that still stands raised Lake Minnewanka 30 metres and put the whole of it underwater. The village is...
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• Mistaken Point Fossil ground
  Ediacaran
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• Moraine Lake, and the road that is shut Legend
  READ THIS BEFORE YOU DRIVE. Moraine Lake Road is closed to personal vehicles all year. Not busy, not permit-only: closed. The ways in are the Parks Canada shuttle, Roam public transit, or a licensed commercial operator, and the...
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• Mount Edith Cavell and the Angel Glacier Legend
  A 3,363 metre wall of rock standing over the Athabasca valley, named in 1916 for Edith Cavell, the British nurse the Germans executed for helping Allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium. Hanging on its north face is the Angel...
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• Oak Island and the Money Pit Legend
  The most famous treasure hunt on Earth. Since 1795, when three boys found a saucer-shaped depression under an old oak on this little island in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, people have dug for whatever lies at the bottom of the “Money...
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• Ogopogo of Okanagan Lake Legend
  The most famous lake monster in Canada lives, they say, in the deep, cold, 84-mile trench of Okanagan Lake in the British Columbia interior. The Syilx (Okanagan) people knew it as N’ha-a-itk, a spirit of the lake to be respected...
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• Plateau Mountain Legend
  A mountain in the Livingstone Range that looks like the Arctic, for a reason: the ice sheets never got over the top of it. Plateau Mountain is a nunatak, the second one on this map in Alberta after the Cypress Hills, and its...
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• Qajartalik Legend
  On Qikertaaluk Island in Nunavut, about 40 kilometres southeast of Kangiqsujuaq in Arctic Quebec, more than 150 faces look out of a trough of soapstone 130 metres long, 15 metres above the sea: the northernmost rock art known in...
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• Rat’s Nest Cave
  Four kilometres of passage inside Grotto Mountain above Canmore, dissolved out of the limestone by meltwater from old glaciers, and one of the longest caves in the country. It is a Provincial Historic Resource under Alberta’s...
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• Red Rock Coulee Legend
  Giant red spheres lying loose on a bare hillside in the dry country southwest of Medicine Hat, some of them 2.5 metres across, which puts them among the largest concretions on Earth. They are not boulders that rolled here. Each...
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• Rocky Mountain House Legend
  Two rival fur posts stood on this bend of the North Saskatchewan: Rocky Mountain House for the North West Company and Acton House for the Hudson’s Bay Company, both opened in 1799. They were the westernmost posts on the plains,...
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• Sasquatch, the wild man of the woods Legend
  The Pacific Northwest’s giant has its heartland in the wet, immense coastal forests of British Columbia, and the name we use, Sasquatch, is an anglicization of a Halkomelem word, sásq’ets. The Sts’ailes people and many other...
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• Shanawdithit and the Beothuk Legend
  The Beothuk were the people of Newfoundland, and they are gone. Squeezed off the coast and away from their food by European settlement, hunted, and hollowed out by tuberculosis, their numbers collapsed through the 1700s....
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• Signal Hill and the first transatlantic signal Legend
  On 12 December 1901 Guglielmo Marconi, flying a kite antenna 150 metres up in a gale on this headland over St John’s, said he heard three faint clicks through the static: the letter S in Morse, sent 3,400 kilometres from...
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• Slumach’s lost creek gold Legend
  British Columbia’s great lost mine. Slumach, a Katzie man, was hanged in New Westminster in 1891 for murder, and in the decades after his death a story grew that he had been bringing coarse gold out of a hidden creek somewhere...
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• Sylvan Lake Legend
  Fifteen kilometres of freshwater lying across the line between Red Deer County and Lacombe County, and the closest thing central Alberta has to a seaside town. People were coming out here for the summer before the railways...
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• The 2024 Jasper wildfire Legend
  Lightning started it on 22 July 2024, wind and dry timber did the rest, and 25,000 residents, workers and visitors were put out of the valley. When the fire reached the townsite it took 358 of Jasper’s 1,113 structures, about a...
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• The Albertosaurus bonebed, Dry Island Fossil ground
  Late Cretaceous, Horseshoe Canyon Formation
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• The Athabasca Glacier Legend
  A tongue of the Columbia Icefield that comes down almost to the highway, six kilometres long, six square kilometres in area, and between 90 and 300 metres thick. It is the most visited glacier in North America and it is going: it...
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• The Athabasca oil sands Legend
  The largest deposit of its kind on the planet: bitumen soaked through sand and clay under 141,000 square kilometres of boreal forest and muskeg in northeastern Alberta, holding an estimated 133 billion barrels of oil in place....
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• The Baldoon Mystery Legend
  In the 1820s a Scottish settler family at Baldoon, in southwestern Ontario, was tormented for years by a poltergeist: stones flew, fires lit themselves, the house shook, and a lead ball fired at a black goose was said to break...
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• The Bar U Ranch Legend
  One of the great ranches of the Canadian west, founded in 1881 and running at its height over 160,000 acres with 30,000 cattle and a thousand Percheron horses. Harry Longabaugh broke horses here in 1891, a few years before the...
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• The Bellevue Underground Mine Legend
  The Crowsnest is full of places where coal killed people and none of them let you in. This one does. The Bellevue mine worked from about 1905 to 1961 and it is the reason the town exists, and on 10 December 1910 an explosion in...
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• The Bleriot Ferry Legend
  A cable ferry across the Red Deer River in the badlands, commissioned in 1913 with Andre Bleriot working it, and still crossing. It carries the North Dinosaur Trail, Highway 838, over the river and joins the two halves of the...
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• The Bonnechere Caves Cave
  Limestone caves in the Ottawa Valley near Eganville, cut by an ancient tropical sea and full of fossils, open for tours since 1955. You walk the passages the water bored through the old seabed, with the shells of...
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• The Brazeau Reservoir Legend
  Southwest of Drayton Valley the Brazeau River was dammed where the Elk River comes in, built between about 1960 and 1963, and the first unit put 355 megawatts onto the system in 1965. It is still the largest hydroelectric plant...
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• The Britannia mine, Howe Sound Legend
  A copper mine on the Sea-to-Sky Highway 55 kilometres north of Vancouver, whose townsite and workings grew together from about 1900 and whose history is a run of shared disasters, rockslide, fire and flood, because the housing...
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• The Bruderheim meteorite Legend
  At 1:06 in the morning on 4 March 1960 a fireball lit hundreds of kilometres of prairie and the shock of its explosion was heard over some 5,000 square kilometres. What came down on the frozen fields around Bruderheim was nearly...
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• The Burgess Shale Fossil ground
  Cambrian, ~508 mya
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• The Canmore Opera House Haunted place
  The odd thing about the Canmore Opera House is that it is in Calgary. Built in 1910 as a concert hall in the coal town it is named for, and said to have served as a morgue at some point in its working life, the whole building was...
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• The Cariboo & Fraser gold Gem & mineral ground
  British Columbia was built on two gold rushes. The Fraser Canyon rush of 1858 brought thirty thousand miners north; the Cariboo rush that followed reached the fabulously rich creeks around Barkerville, where the gravel of...
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• The Cave and Basin Legend
  Three men working for the Canadian Pacific, Frank McCabe and the brothers Tom and William McCardell, climbed down through a hole in the rock on a felled tree in 1883 and found a hot spring in a cave. What they had actually found...
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• The Cobalt silver rush Legend
  In 1903 men working on the new railway through northern Ontario noticed metal in the rock cut. It turned out to be some of the richest silver ground ever found: veins of native silver you could cut with a knife, sheets of it, and...
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• The Columbia Icefield Legend
  The largest icefield in the Rocky Mountains, about 325 square kilometres of it, between 100 and 365 metres deep, taking up to seven metres of snow a year. It sits on a triple continental divide, and Snow Dome above it is the...
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• The Cremation of Sam McGee Legend
  The Yukon’s folklore was written in verse. Robert Service, the “Bard of the Yukon,” worked in Whitehorse and Dawson in the gold-rush years and turned the country into ballads that every Canadian schoolchild still learns: The...
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• The Cypress Hills Legend
  An island of mountain country sitting on open prairie: 1,466 metres at the top, about 600 above the plain around it, and the highest ground in Canada between the Rockies and Labrador. The reason it is strange is that the...
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• The Cypress Hills massacre Legend
  In June 1873 a party of American wolf hunters, having lost horses and having been drinking, attacked a camp of Nakoda people in the Cypress Hills and killed something over twenty of them, mostly as they fled. It was violence of a...
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• The Deane House Haunted place
  Richard Burton Deane was the last North-West Mounted Police superintendent at Fort Calgary, and in 1906 he had this house built because his wife would not live in barracks. He lived in it until 1914, when the Grand Trunk Pacific...
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• The Dungarvon Whooper Legend
  New Brunswick’s best-known ghost. The story from the Miramichi lumber camps is that a young cook on the Dungarvon River was murdered for the money in his belt, buried in the snow by the crew, and that ever since a scream comes...
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• The Empress Theatre Haunted place
  Built between 1910 and 1912 on the main street of a North-West Mounted Police town, opened as a house for vaudeville and moving pictures, and never stopped: it is the oldest continually operating theatre in western Canada and an...
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• The Fairmont Banff Springs Haunted place
  The Canadian Pacific built a Scottish baronial castle in the middle of the Rockies and then let it fill up with stories. Three of them are famous. A bride is said to have caught her dress on the staircase candles, fallen, and...
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• The Falcon Lake incident Legend
  Canada’s most physically documented UFO case. On 20 May 1967 Stefan Michalak, an industrial mechanic prospecting for quartz near Falcon Lake, said he approached a landed craft, was hit by a blast of hot gas from a grid of holes...
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• The Frank Slide Legend
  At 4:10 on the morning of 29 April 1903 the east face of Turtle Mountain came down on the sleeping town of Frank: around 44 million cubic metres of limestone, about 110 million tonnes of it. It buried the eastern edge of the...
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• The Gibraltar Point Lighthouse Haunted place
  The oldest lighthouse on the Great Lakes still standing, lit in 1808 on the Toronto Islands, and the source of Toronto’s oldest ghost story: its first keeper, John Paul Radelmuller, vanished in 1815, murdered, the tale says, by...
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• The Grotto, Bruce Peninsula Cave
  On the tip of the Bruce Peninsula, where the Niagara Escarpment meets the impossible blue of Georgian Bay, a sea cave called the Grotto opens at the waterline with a submerged tunnel to the lake, over water clear as glass. Above...
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• The Halifax Citadel Haunted place
  The star-shaped stone fortress on the hill over Halifax has guarded the great harbour since the 1700s, and its long dark casemates and powder magazines are among the most reputedly haunted military ground in Canada, a soldier who...
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• The Hillcrest mine disaster Legend
  At half past nine on the morning of 19 June 1914, methane ignited in the Hillcrest mine and set off a coal dust explosion that killed 189 of the 237 men underground. It is the worst coal mining disaster in Canadian history. The...
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• The Hopewell Rocks and the Fundy tides Legend
  The Bay of Fundy moves more water twice a day than every river on Earth combined, and the tide here runs up to sixteen metres. At Hopewell the sea has cut the cliff into free-standing flowerpot stacks with trees on top: at low...
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• The Keg Mansion Haunted place
  A grand 1868 mansion on Jarvis Street in Toronto, once home to the Massey family, now a steakhouse whose staff and diners have reported a maid hanging in the stairwell, a child upstairs, and doors that open themselves for over a...
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• The Lodgepole blowout Legend
  At half past two in the afternoon on 17 October 1982, a well about 20 kilometres west of the hamlet of Lodgepole blew out of control. What came up was sour gas carrying 25 per cent hydrogen sulphide, 250,000 parts per million,...
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• The Lost Lemon Mine Legend
  The best-known lost mine in Alberta. The tale runs that two prospectors, Lemon and Blackjack, struck rich gold in the Crowsnest country in 1870, that Lemon killed his partner at the camp that night, and that everyone who later...
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• The McAbee Fossil Beds Fossil ground
  Early Eocene, about 52 mya
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• The Nahanni and Headless Valley Legend
  The South Nahanni cuts canyons more than a kilometre deep through the Mackenzie Mountains, and drops over Virginia Falls at twice the height of Niagara. The name that stuck to one stretch is Headless Valley, after the McLeod...
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• The Nova Scotia gold belt Gem & mineral ground
  Nova Scotia had real gold rushes. From 1861 the Meguma slate-and-quartz belt along the Eastern Shore gave up over a million ounces at camps like Goldenville, Sherbrooke and Waverley, worked from quartz veins and the streams below...
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• The Okotoks Erratic, Big Rock Legend
  A block of quartzite sitting alone on open prairie, 41 metres by 18 and 9 metres high, weighing about 16,500 tonnes. It did not come from here. Between 12,000 and 17,000 years ago a landslide in the Athabasca valley dropped this...
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• The Ottawa Jail Hostel Haunted place
  The Carleton County Gaol ran in Ottawa from 1862 to 1972 in grim conditions and hanged its prisoners in the yard, among them Patrick Whelan for the assassination of a Father of Confederation. It is a backpackers’ hostel now, and...
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• The Pembina oil field Legend
  In February 1953 Mobil completed a wildcat called Pembina No. 1 and found the field that Drayton Valley sits in the middle of. The oil is in the Cardium Formation, with more coming from the Viking and the Rock Creek sandstones,...
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• The Pipestone Creek bonebed Fossil ground
  Late Cretaceous, Wapiti Formation, about 73 mya
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• The Princess Theatre Haunted place
  A 1914 picture palace on Whyte Avenue that opened with the largest stage in western Canada and 660 seats, and is still showing films. The building has had other lives, and the ghost belongs to one of them: for a stretch it was a...
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• The Royal Tyrrell Museum and Midland badlands Fossil ground
  Late Cretaceous, Horseshoe Canyon Formation
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• The Saamis Tepee Legend
  Sixty-five and a half metres of painted steel standing over the Trans-Canada at Medicine Hat, which makes it the tallest tepee in the world and about the height of a twenty-storey building. It was not built for here. It was...
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• The Screaming Tunnel Legend
  A limestone drainage tunnel under an old rail line near Niagara Falls, Ontario, with a stubborn legend: a girl fleeing a fire, or a murder, died inside it, and if you stand in the middle at midnight and strike a match, her scream...
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• The St Louis ghost train Legend
  For decades people drove out to an abandoned rail grade near St Louis, Saskatchewan, to watch a white light come up the line and swing, with a smaller red light behind it, exactly as a brakeman’s lantern would. It is one of the...
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• The Star Mine Suspension Bridge Legend
  A footbridge 117 metres across the Red Deer River at Rosedale, put up in 1931 so the men working the Star Mine could get to the other side. Before it they crossed on a cable car, which is the kind of detail that tells you what...
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• The Sudbury Basin Legend
  One of the oldest and largest impact structures on Earth, and the reason Ontario has a mining industry. An asteroid 10 to 15 kilometres across hit here 1.849 billion years ago, and the melt sheet that formed in the crater floor...
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• The Teaching Rocks Legend
  Northeast of Peterborough, in Petroglyphs Provincial Park, gently sloping soft rock carries the largest collection of ancient First Nations carvings in Ontario: about 1,200 figures of shamans, animals, reptiles, possibly the...
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• The Thunder Bay amethyst Gem & mineral ground
  The north shore of Lake Superior is amethyst country, and amethyst is Ontario’s mineral emblem: the Thunder Bay Amethyst Mine Panorama, the largest amethyst deposit in Canada, is a public fee-dig where you pick deep-purple...
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• The Torrington Gopher Hole Museum Legend
  A village of about two hundred people put 77 taxidermied Richardson’s ground squirrels into 44 dioramas, dressed as the villagers themselves: the priest, the hairdresser, the fire brigade, the Mountie. It opened in 1996 and it...
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• The Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village Legend
  East of Elk Island in Lamont County, a whole settlement rebuilt out of buildings moved in from the country around it: farmsteads, a hall, churches, a store, a grain elevator, the works, set to the years between 1899 and 1930 when...
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• The Vikings of Vinland Legend
  Five hundred years before Columbus, Norse sailors from Greenland landed in North America and built a settlement of turf houses at what is now L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. It was long only a saga story, until a Norwegian...
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• The Walterdale Playhouse Haunted place
  It was a fire hall first, built in 1910, and a theatre company took it over in 1974, which is the fact that makes the haunting worth telling. The ghost is a friendly one the company calls Walt and takes to be a firefighter who...
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• The Warsaw Caves Cave
  A cave-and-kettle country on the Indian River near Peterborough, where the meltwater of the last ice age drilled deep round kettles into the limestone and opened seven caves you can scramble through. A conservation area with...
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• The Wendigo Legend
  The Algonquin and Ojibwe peoples of the northern forests have always warned of the Wendigo, a gaunt, ravenous spirit of winter and starvation that possesses those who turn to eating human flesh to survive the long cold, and grows...
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• The Willow Creek hoodoos Legend
  The badlands are full of hoodoos and these are the ones everybody photographs: about ten stone columns standing between roughly one and three metres, sixteen kilometres east of Drumheller on Highway 10. The structure is simple...
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• The petroforms of the Whiteshell Legend
  On the flat granite ridges of the Whiteshell, Anishinaabe people laid out boulders into the shapes of snakes, turtles, fish and human figures, some of them tens of metres long. Estimates of their age run to a few thousand years....
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• The phantom ship of Northumberland Strait Legend
  For two centuries people on both shores of the strait, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, have reported a three-masted sailing ship burning on the water, sometimes with figures moving in the rigging, that vanishes when boats...
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• Tom Thomson and Canoe Lake Legend
  The painter Tom Thomson, whose work helped found the Group of Seven and Canadian art itself, drowned in Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park in July 1917 in circumstances no one has ever settled: a strong swimmer, found with fishing line...
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• Turner Valley and Hell’s Half Acre Legend
  On 14 May 1914 Archie Dingman’s well struck wet gas in Turner Valley, the first major strike in western Canada, and Calgary went into a share frenzy overnight. The plant that grew here is the earliest gas processing facility...
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• Vulcan Legend
  A Canadian Pacific surveyor named this place after the Roman god of fire, decades before anybody wrote a television show about a planet with the same name, and the town has been enjoying the coincidence since 1993. There is a...
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• Wabamun Lake Legend
  A big shallow lake west of Edmonton, 19.2 kilometres long and 6.6 wide, about 11 metres at its deepest, and it has had two lives. It was reputedly the best whitefish lake near Edmonton and held big northern pike, both fished...
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• Waterton Lakes Legend
  The mountains here do not build up to anything, they simply start: prairie, then wall. That is the Lewis thrust, which slid a sheet of Proterozoic rock bodily over much younger rock, so the old sits on the new and the front range...
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• West Edmonton Mall Legend
  Put aside what you think about shopping centres for a minute, because the superlatives here are real. It opened on 15 September 1981 and was built out in four goes, finishing in 1999, and it covers 490,000 square metres, 5.3...
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• Wood Buffalo National Park Legend
  The largest national park in Canada at 44,741 square kilometres, the second largest on Earth, and bigger than Switzerland. It was set aside in 1922 to protect the last free-roaming herd of wood bison, which stands at around 3,000...
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Every one of these is sourced

Each entry links to the record it came from. Access rules, permits and land status vary by country and are noted where the source states them, check locally before you go.

What this map cannot tell you in Canada

Some of what the map draws comes from United States federal records: the Bureau of Land Management, the USGS, NOAA. Those surveys stop at the border, so 38 of the map's layers have nothing to draw here. They are greyed out on the map rather than quietly empty, and they are listed here so you know before you plan around them.

• active mine operations
• burns
• charted shipwrecks
• claims
• crossroads
• deer hunt zones
• exposed bedrock
• flash-flood outlook
• flood zones
• ghost towns
• gravity
• historic mines
• historic trails
• live river flow
• and 24 more

What does work here: the places on this page, the legends and their sources, published fossil localities, named mines, caves, ghost towns and shipwrecks worldwide, satellite imagery and the world place-name gazetteer. Scored honey holes and live land status are United States only, and are not shown here rather than being guessed at.

The rules, province by province

What you may pan for, what you may pick up and what you actually own differ by province, and they differ in ways that catch visitors out.

• Alberta
• British Columbia
• Ontario
• Yukon

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Every country on the map