The map that did not exist

Somewhere on the internet there is a map of the Yukon’s major mountain ranges that I keep coming back to. It is almost nothing: a black outline of the territory on a white background, the ranges labelled in plain type, each name set along the curve of the rock it belongs to. No shaded relief, no colour-coded elevation, no clutter. Just the bones of the place and what we call them. You can read it in ten seconds and think about it for an hour.

I went looking for the same thing for Vancouver Island and could not find it. There are topographic maps, of course, and recreation maps, and the patchwork of OpenStreetMap labels you get if you zoom in far enough. But there was no single clean diagram of the island’s ranges, the kind of thing you could hand to someone and say, here, this is the shape of the island’s spine and these are its parts. So I went ahead and made one myself.

What you are looking at below is an SVG outline of Vancouver Island, the surrounding sea, and a deliberately simplified set of its major waterways, with every mountain range I could find labelled in place. I pulled names from OpenStreetMap to start, then checked them against more authoritative sources, and the labels follow the ranges roughly the way the Yukon map’s labels do. It is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, so you are free to use it, remix it, and build on it, as long as you credit the source (yours truly).

The mountain ranges of Vancouver Island. Map by Triston Line, CC BY 4.0.

What even counts as a range

Here is the first thing that becomes obvious once you start trying to make a complete list: nobody actually agrees on what the complete list is. Depending on who is counting and what they will accept as a range, Vancouver Island has somewhere between eighteen and thirty named mountain groups, and the spread comes from how the names are kept in the first place rather than from anyone being careless about it.

The province of British Columbia keeps an official register of place names, the provincial gazetteer (or as I came to read it somewhere around the third hour of cross-checking, the Provincial Gaze To Tears), and the federal government keeps a national one that mirrors it. Those are the closest things to a source of truth. Here is the catch, and it was a neat thing to stumble onto: the official systems store mountain ranges as single points, not as polygons. There is a center point and a short origin note, and that is it. There is no authoritative boundary file for most of these ranges. So when a map shows you the Beaufort Range as a shaded blob with a hard edge, or as a brown label in the case of OpenStreetMap, that edge is just some geographer’s, or some bureaucrat’s, interpretation. All they did was read the topography and the watershed lines, which means it is not quite a fact you can simply look up an authoritative answer to.

That means three different questions give you three different lists. If you ask what is officially named, you get the gazetteer’s answer, which is broader than what OpenStreetMap shows and includes quiet features most people have never heard of: the Karmutzen Range, the Catface Range, the Gowlland Range, the Thunderbird’s Nest Mountains. If you ask what mountain groups actually matter to the people who climb here, you have to add clusters that the gazetteer does not formally recognize as ranges at all, like the Elk River Mountains, which is where the island’s two highest peaks live. And if you ask what is simply visible on a public web map, you get OpenStreetMap, which is useful but incomplete, because a label being absent is not the same as a feature not existing.

There is also a quieter problem running the other direction. A single tall peak, however much it towers over its neighbours, is not a range, and if you handed a range name to every prominent lump on the island you would end up with another hundred of them and a map nobody could read. Poett Heights is the example that made me decide where the line was: pull it up on a topographic map, look closely, and it resolves into one standalone mountain of around eight hundred metres with genuinely impressive prominence and nothing around it that behaves like a chain. So it stays off my map, and so does Newcastle Ridge, for much the same reason, while meanwhile there are real clusters and chains out there, more deserving of a name than some of what is already gazetted, that simply have not been given one yet.

My map tries to sit in the honest middle of all that. It leans on the official names, corrects a few spellings along the way (the official form is Haihte Range, not Haite Range), and includes the working clusters that any island hiker would expect to see. As with all of science, bureaucracy, and software, it will probably need updates as the world gets around to noticing that something like half the island’s mountains still are not assigned to any range at all, or as some new feature comes along, like the big one. Who knows. ¯\(ツ)\/¯

Reading the island, north to south

The ranges run the length of the island, the better part of 450 kilometres laid down on a northwest to southeast grain, and seen all at once they make one long broken seam, dark basalt and pale granite, grey-green and storm-coloured along the wet northern third, scoured white and bright where the high centre still holds its ice, then softening southward into low, moss-darkened rock with the edges worn off it. The character of that seam shifts the whole way down.

The north is wet, remote, and shaped as much by industrial forestry as by anything geological. The Franklin, Bonanza, Hankin, and Karmutzen ranges sit between the great north-island rivers, the Nimpkish and the Tsitika and the Kokish, and most of them top out well below true alpine. They are rugged without being high. The Karmutzen Range is the type locality for the Karmutsen Formation, which is geologist-speak for the place the rock was first properly described and named after, the reference example everyone else points back to. The formation itself is a six-kilometre-thick stack of basaltic lava that is, more than anything else, what the island is built on. Stand on almost any island summit and you are standing on the cooled record of an enormous Triassic volcanic event.

The central core is where the island finally reaches for real height. This is Strathcona country: the Sutton Range with Victoria Peak at 2,163 metres, the Haihte Range holding some of the largest glaciers left on the island, and the informal Elk River Mountains, where the Golden Hinde tops out at 2,195 metres and Elkhorn Mountain stands barely a metre behind it. Forbidden Plateau sits on the eastern edge of all this, a sub-alpine highland with a name invented by 1920s tourism promoters who fabricated a legend of vanishing settlers to give the place an air of mystery. It is also, less whimsically, the epicentre of the 1946 earthquake, a 7.3 that remains the strongest ever recorded on land in Canada.

The south drops in elevation but not in importance. The Seymour, Warwick, and Gowlland ranges and the Sooke Hills are low by island standards, but they sit in a far more tectonically complicated setting, where the simple Wrangellia story of the north gives way to a tangle of fault-bounded belts. And they carry an outsized share of the island’s protected areas, its regional parks, and its drinking water. The Gowlland Range, barely rising to 450 metres at Mount Work, is half the recreational lifeline of Greater Victoria.

Then there are the western outliers, the ranges that sit off the main body of the island entirely. The Refugium Range on the Brooks Peninsula earns its name from one of my favourite pieces of Canadian geography. During the last glaciation, when ice buried most of the island, the range’s higher peaks stood up above the sheet like islands in a frozen sea. The word for a peak or ridge that pokes above an ice sheet that way is nunatak, an Inuit word, and a genuinely wonderful one; I came close to naming my home-built camper truck The Nunatak while I was polling friends and family for names, and I still half-wish I had, partly because this year that same truck is carrying me north for some long hikes in the Ogilvie Mountains, into country that very few people have ever walked. On the Brooks Peninsula those nunataks did something remarkable. They kept rare plant communities alive in isolation for tens of thousands of years while the ice did its work everywhere around them.

And then there are the Sophia and Genevieve ranges, which sit on Nootka Island, a different island entirely, and which, thanks to the people who love rocks a little too much, we file under the Vancouver Island Ranges anyway, because physiographically they belong to the same system. The geographers are not wrong about this. They are just being geographers about it.

The roads I don’t love but need anyway

I have driven through a good many of these ranges. Not all of them, some have no road into them at all, and others sit inside protected areas where the only honest way through is on foot, but those that I have driven were almost exclusively industry roads.

I am an environmentalist before I am almost anything else politically. I think the way extractive resource industry has been managed on this island, over decades, has been a failure on its own terms as well as ecologically: poor planning, damage to biodiversity, monoculture stands replacing functioning ecosystems, and, in the end, not even the durable profitability that was supposed to justify all of it. But I want to be careful about where I point that frustration. I do not have warm feelings for a second-growth plantation, and I will not pretend otherwise, but a plantation that went in decades ago is not the same wound as an old-growth slope cut last year, and I will not mourn the two with the same voice. What I will not accept is the logging of the old growth that is still standing. All of it should be preserved, more of it should have been, and that line matters more to me than almost anything else in this conversation. The existing plantations are a problem of management, not of morality. We need wood, it has to come from somewhere, and Canada’s forestry, for all its real faults, runs on labour law, human-rights law, and environmental law that put it well ahead of the places where the same global demand gets met by murdering Indigenous people and planting palm oil where the forest used to be.

And yet. The reason I have stood in so many of these ranges, seen so many of these vistas, reached so many of these shores and summits, is the network of industry roads that thread through them. Without those roads I would not have had the time, the stamina, or the helicopter budget (in this economy?!) to reach a fraction of what I have reached.

But that gratitude does not cancel the criticism. It is also worth saying that the roads alone do not make a mountain reachable in any meaningful sense. The trail systems that turn a logging spur into an actual route up an actual peak were forged and are maintained by people: the island’s hiking community, the Vancouver Island section of the Alpine Club of Canada, BC Parks, the regional districts, and sometimes industry itself, usually in the form of a trailhead and a parking spot at the bottom of someone else’s hard work. The map shows the ranges. It does not show that quieter human infrastructure, but it is there in every line.

The navy’s handwriting

A surprising amount of the island’s range nomenclature is just the Royal Navy writing on the landscape. The Franklin Range was named in 1861 by Captain George Henry Richards for Sir John Franklin, the lost Arctic explorer, and his wife Lady Jane. Then one day, as someone recounted to a geographer the time Sir Franklin was a-hankerin’ for a Hankin, the Hankin Range was born. The Beaufort Range honours the hydrographer who gave us the Beaufort wind scale. The Sophia Range is named for a colonial official’s daughter. A second wave of names was formalized in 1933, lifted more or less wholesale off geological and topographic survey maps, so that layer by layer the island’s spine ended up relabelled in the vocabulary of empire and survey.

The working list behind the map

For anyone who wants the underlying inventory rather than just the picture, here is the working list behind the map, grouped roughly by sector. Where I could not confirm a representative summit with reasonable confidence, I have said so rather than guess.

If you are a geographer, a hiker, an OSM contributor, or just someone who pores over maps the way I do, this is as much yours as mine now. I know this map isn’t perfect, and I welcome suggestions and contributions backed by authoritative sources. The Yukon map I admired so much works because it is simple and clean, and I would like the Vancouver Island version to get there too: simple, clean, and as close to right as the island will let it be.