Qualla: Forbidden Plateau

Forbidden Plateau: Introduction

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Keefer4~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 2.5. The name is a lie, and a successful one. In 1927, a journalist named Ben Hughes published an article in The Province newspaper about a plateau in the Vancouver Island mountains where, legend had it, K'omoks women and children had vanished without a trace, consumed by evil spirits. The story was vivid, unsettling, and entirely fabricated. In a book published in 1967, Clinton Wood took credit for inventing the legend alongside Hughes, admitting he believed "a bit of mystery would help publicize the attraction of the plateau." It worked. The Forbidden Plateau has been trading on its invented name ever since.

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Keefer4~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 2.5

Forbidden Plateau: The Legend That Never Was

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Susan Daly, CC BY-SA 4.0. According to the fabricated story, the K'omoks people sent their women and children to the plateau for safekeeping during raids by the Cowichan. When a warrior went looking for them, he found only red lichen covering the snow and rocks, which he took for blood. The plateau was de...

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Image: Susan Daly | CC BY-SA 4.0

Forbidden Plateau: What the Plateau Actually Is

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bzargarian (talk) (Uploads), CC BY-SA 3.0. Strip away the invented mythology and you find a landscape that needs no embellishment. The Forbidden Plateau is a gently rolling subalpine terrain in the eastern Vancouver Island Ranges, northwest of Comox Lake, between Mount Albert Edward to the southwest and Mount Washington t...

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Image: Bzargarian (talk) (Uploads) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Forbidden Plateau: The Ground That Shook a Nation

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Clayoquot, CC BY-SA 3.0. On June 23, 1946, the Forbidden Plateau became the epicenter of the strongest earthquake ever recorded on land in Canada. The Vancouver Island earthquake registered 7.3 on the Richter scale, toppling chimneys in Courtenay and Cumberland, triggering landslides in the mountains, an...

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Image: Clayoquot | CC BY-SA 3.0

Forbidden Plateau: Skiing the 'Forbidden'

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Smably (talk) (Uploads), Public domain. The plateau's skiing history stretches back to the 1920s, when the first adventurers began exploring its slopes on wooden skis. The terrain is ideally suited to cross-country skiing -- open meadows, moderate grades, and reliable snowfall at subalpine elevation. Today, the nearby ...

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Image: Smably (talk) (Uploads) | Public domain