Harrison Hot Springs
"I came for the hot springs and left half-convinced a Sasquatch was watching me swim, which is exactly what this town wants."
A small mineral-springs resort town on Harrison Lake, half genuine wellness retreat and half Sasquatch folklore, an hour and a world away from Vancouver.
Harrison Hot Springs announces its whole personality within about ten minutes of arriving — a small, slightly old-fashioned resort town at the southern tip of a long glacial lake, mineral springs steaming quietly at one end of the public beach, and a two-metre wooden Sasquatch statue standing near the parking lot with the confident posture of a town mascot that everyone has agreed to take semi-seriously. I found this combination completely disarming. You don’t expect wellness-retreat mineral pools and cryptid folklore to share the same postal code, but Harrison manages it without any apparent contradiction.
Water That Was Here First
The springs themselves are the actual reason the town exists — hot mineral water, some of it exceeding 60°C at the source, discovered by non-Indigenous settlers in the 1880s but known and used by the Sts’ailes people for generations before that. The public hot pool sits right at the lake’s edge, cooler and more casual than the resort’s private pools, and I spent a long grey afternoon there watching steam drift out over Harrison Lake’s much colder water, the two temperatures visibly refusing to mix at the shoreline. Sts’ailes territory surrounds the lake, and the nation’s stories about Sasquatch — or Sasq’ets, the word the English term is actually derived from — long predate the tourist-board version that now sells t-shirts downtown. It’s worth knowing the difference before you buy one.
Sand Sculptures and a Very Serious Sasquatch
I happened to be in town during the World Championship Sand Sculpture competition, held on the public beach most summers, and it is a genuinely strange thing to watch — teams of sculptors spending days on enormous, technically absurd sand structures that will be gone within a week, tides and rain doing what tides and rain do. Lia stood in front of a sculpture of a diving whale for a solid ten minutes trying to work out how it was structurally possible. Nobody could tell us. That seemed appropriate for a town that has built a modest tourism economy on the overlap between hot mineral water and an unverified giant hominid.
The lake itself is worth the visit independent of the springs — Harrison Lake is long and fjord-like, carved by glaciers, with mountains rising steeply on both sides and a colour that shifts from slate to deep green depending on the light. A short paddle out from the public dock in the evening, when the resort crowd has retreated indoors for dinner, gives you the lake close to how it must have looked before any of this was built.
When to go: Summer for the sand sculpture festival and lake swimming, though the springs themselves are a year-round draw — a hot soak in the rain, with steam rising off both the pool and the lake, might be the better version of this town.