Wells Gray Provincial Park

Wells Gray doesn’t come up often when people talk about BC’s parks — Banff and Jasper get the crowds, Garibaldi gets the Vancouver day-trippers, and this enormous wilderness area north of Kamloops, roughly the size of Prince Edward Island, gets a fraction of the visitors of any of them despite arguably rivaling their scenery. I drove up from Kamloops on a recommendation from a guide I’d met rafting near Golden, expecting a modest provincial park, and instead found myself standing at a viewpoint over Helmcken Falls, watching the Murtle River drop 141 metres — taller than Niagara Falls — into a canyon carved from ancient volcanic basalt, with not another person in sight.

The whole park sits on a foundation of volcanic activity that’s shaped everything about how it looks — lava flows, cinder cones, and mineral-rich springs left over from eruptions that occurred as recently as a few hundred years ago in geological terms. Driving the Clearwater Valley Road, which runs the length of the park’s accessible section, takes you past half a dozen major waterfalls, mineral-stained cliffs, and Ray Farm, an abandoned homestead from an early-twentieth-century settler that’s now slowly being reclaimed by the surrounding forest — an eerie, quiet stop with fruit trees still bearing apples from trees planted over a century ago.

I spent an afternoon canoeing on Clearwater Lake, one of the park’s larger bodies of water, glacially fed and an improbable turquoise-blue on the day I was there, with almost no motorized traffic allowed on much of it — a rule that keeps the lake genuinely quiet in a way that felt increasingly rare the more of BC I’d seen by that point in my trip. The park is also home to a substantial moose population and one of the province’s healthier grizzly bear ranges, and while I didn’t see either up close, a ranger at the visitor centre in Clearwater showed me trail-camera photos from earlier that week that made clear how present they are, just mostly unseen.

When to go: June through September for full road access and hiking; some of the more remote sections and the highway connecting to the park close or become difficult in winter. Come specifically expecting solitude — it’s one of the few large parks in BC where you can genuinely have major viewpoints to yourself.