A boater on Williston Lake in northern British Columbia photographed something that shouldn’t have been there. A slab of forest, trees and all, was floating loose in the middle of one of the largest reservoirs on Earth.
BC Hydro, which runs the reservoir, didn’t believe it. “When we first received photos and video of a floating island covered in trees, we weren’t entirely convinced,” said Bob Gammer, the utility’s community relations manager. “In the age of AI, it’s important to verify unusual reports before drawing conclusions.”
But when they pulled the satellite imagery, it was still there. At roughly 460 feet long and 230 feet wide, it was about the size of two football fields.
Local resident Rocky Avery, who got the photos from the boater and posted them, had been on that water for a long time. “It was a pretty amazing sight to see, never seen anything like that in my 40 years in this country,” he told CBC. He put them up partly as a warning for an upcoming fishing derby.
By the time anyone went looking, however, the island was gone.
Finding it again was not simple. Williston Reservoir runs 250 kilometers north to south and 125 kilometers east to west. Gammer compared the search to looking for a needle in a haystack, but then some help came from an unexpected direction. Finlay Farquhar, a radio engineering assistant in the United Kingdom, read about it online and tracked the island down using free satellite imagery. “Quite curious, and it was really quite surprising that there’d been a floating island,” he said, according to CBC News.
It had come to rest on the shoreline of the Ospika Arm, about 30 kilometers northwest of where it started. “Turns out it wasn’t missing. Just drifting,” BC Hydro shared online. “All told, it travelled about 30 km in 15 days.”
As for where it came from, Gammer’s best theory is that logs and woody debris collected in a sheltered part of the reservoir and stayed put long enough to rot down into something plants could live on. “And over time, as it was decomposing, it became a host for plants and moss, and ultimately trees started to grow on this collection of logs that were all just kind of pressed up together,” he told Vancouver Is Awesome.
The water probably set it loose as the reservoir filled to capacity for the first time in 14 years. “When we have full reservoirs, these higher water levels can lift material that may have been lodged along the shoreline, in a sheltered bay, and then allowing it to float free,” Gammer told CBC.
BC Hydro says people are welcome to view the island by boat or drone, but nobody should set foot on it, since it’s made of logs and decaying debris and wouldn’t support a person.
The internet, predictably, took this as a dare. “If it can hold a tree, it can hold me. We ride at dawn,” one YouTube commenter wrote.
