Harrison Lake
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Harrison Lake is the largest lake in the southern Coast Mountains of Canada, being about 250 square kilometres in area. It is about 60 km in length and at its widest almost 9 km across. Its southern end, at the resort community of Harrison Hot Springs, is c. 95 km east of downtown Vancouver. East of the lake are the Lillooet Ranges while to the west are the Douglas Ranges. The lake is the last (and of course largest) of a series of large north-south glacial valleys tributary to the Fraser along its north bank east of Vancouver. The others to the west are the Chehalis, Stave, Alouette, Pitt, and Coquitlam Rivers.
At the north end of the lake is a small First Nations community of the In-SHUCK-ch Nation, Port Douglas, British Columbia, known in the St'at'imcets language as Xa'xtsa (ha-htsa). There are several hot springs along the shores of the lake or near it, including at Port Douglas, Twenty Mile Bay and Harrison Hot Springs.
The main waterflow coming into the lake is the Lillooet River, where there is a small bay named Little Harrison Lake. At the head of this bay was one of British Columbia's main ghost towns, Port Douglas; today on its eastern shore is the rancherie (village) or the Port Douglas Band of the In-SHUCK-ch Nation. Halfway down Harrison Lake on its eastern shore is the valley of the Silver River, also known as the Big Silver River, one of its tributaries being the Little Silver.
Opposite Silver River on the west shore of Harrison Lake is Twenty-Mile Bay, site of one of the lake's many hotsprings; mid-lake between the Silver River and Twenty-Mile Bay is the northern end of the lake's longest and largest island, aptly-named Long Island, 9.5 km long, 2.6 km wide. The other main island of any size in the lake is Echo Island, 4 km long and 2.2 km wide. ; it is offshore from Harrison Hot Springs, and is immediately east of the forested canyon of the Harrison River at the lake's outflow. The Harrison enters the Fraser near the community of Chehalis.
Harrison Lake was important in the early history of British Columbia as one of the water links on the Douglas Road, which accessed the goldfields of the upper Fraser during the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush of 1858-60.
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