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Comment by Fnoord | Hacker News Reader

There's a river going there, how could this have been missed? Anyone got a map of this?

BC is 950K km^2 with less than 5M people (drop Metro Vancouver and it's 2.5M). So 1.5 the size of France, the majority of which basically looks like Wells Gray (though Wells Gray has some extra beautiful spots). There are dozens of "Wells Gray like" parks, and most visitors don't hike up the mountains (and surely not off trails). So it's missable in theory.

[EDIT]: also mentioned in another cover - explorers believe cave was snow covered year-round up until 20-50 ago.

From the 2.5m remaining after you have subtracted Vancouver and the Fraser valley, now subtract the populations of nanaimo, Victoria, Kamloops, Kelowna, Nelson, osoyoos, Whistler, Campbell River, Prince George, fort St John, nelson and just about every other town that is big enough to have a few bank branches... The remaining rural area outside of any city limits is REALLY sparsely populated.

All this is true, but this is right outside Valemount and near Jasper National Park and in an area where there is a whole bunch of hiking, backcountry nordic and alpine heli-skiing and snowmobile tourism. It's not really the most remote part of B.C. Highway 16 isn't even that far away.

Are there any satellite imaging surveys or aerial surveys 50+ years ago that can confirm the assertion that the cave entrance has been covered with snow 100% of the time before 50 years ago?

We have photos of Robson and the glacier in jasper banph corridor, both are really close. And it was not “an assertion” but rather a conjecture.

>Are there any satellite imaging surveys or aerial surveys 50+ years ago that can confirm the assertion that the cave entrance has been covered with snow 100% of the time before 50 years ago?

You think people comb through satellite photos to look for cave entrances?

I was only asking what the basis was for the assertion that the cave entrance has been persistently covered with snow year-round prior to 50 years ago.

Here's a map with more recent, higher quality imagery than Google.

https://zoom.earth/#52.516747,-120.04313,19z,sat

So much for trying to keep its location secret :)

From the article: "Pollack wouldn’t reveal the exact location of the cave, saying only that it was in the northern section of the park. Asked whether he was concerned about protecting the site, he said, “We are, but also the thing is that this cave is truly in the middle of nowhere."

They put up a video showing arial shots of the hole and the surrounding area. Of course the internet is going to figure it out. The Wells Grey area isn't so big that you can't scour satellite maps of the whole area in a few hours.

An awful lot of BC is the middle of nowhere. Hell, once you get 100km past the US border things thin out pretty quickly.

BC is huge. For this particular spot, it's a very long distance from the nearest road, even one passable by high clearance 4x4. Unless you had the valley it's in as a specific destination, would be easy to miss. It is also not accessible by float plane, so either a multi day hike or helicopter.

If you look at where the population is concentrated in BC, the 10 largest cities, take a look at the total population of the province, and then look at how many square km it is...

No, this is actually quite close to a quite heavily traffic'd area -- Mt Robson and Jasper National Park are quite close. The town of Valemount not far. Hwy 16, the northern branch of the Transcanada Highway, the route between Edmonton (major city population ~1million and about 5 hours away) and most of B.C. is like 50km away. There is a major 4-season ski resort being built in Valemount over the next few years. Hiking, heli-sking, mountain biking, and snowmobiling are big sports in the area.

This is not some remote arctic outpost.

In addition to the other comments and explanations, I saw another article wherein one of the geologists mentioned that climate change could be a factor that previously inhibited its discovery - until a few decades ago, it was probably snow-covered year-round, which would make it much harder to see.

It's hard to tell on the satellite timelapse imagery, but overall you can visually tell that snow amounts have declined in the area. However, the very point where this cave is located still looks like a hole to me as of 1984.

Open a new browser window and open these two links into separate tabs and cycle through them fast until you get oriented. Not sure what conclusions you might draw from it. It's only 34 years' worth, but hmm.

1: https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/#v=52.52697,-120.06...

2: https://www.google.com/maps/place/52%C2%B031'00.8%22N+120%C2...

https://goo.gl/maps/xAq3L86hkQ82

LOL someone on Google Maps already named it "Saarlac Pit Cave"

Not on my view in Google Maps.

Adjusting for 3D view and zooming out slightly, you really can see how remote it is!

From looking at the map, it looks like the valley for the river goes into the cave, and that there isn't much water down hill of it going into the main river. In hindsight that could be a big signal that there water is going underground.

Perhaps there are several other caves of similar size to be found?

It boggles the mind that something that massive didn't get picked up sometime, especially in this age of broadly accessibly high quality satellite imagery.

Canada is mind bogglingly big.

Imagine the things that are waiting in the Universe to be discovered.

Yes it is. My favorite anecdote about it is that the province of Ontario is big enough to have vineyards in the south and polar bears in the north.

Half of Canada's population lives south of the red line in this map, which is also further south than Seattle.

https://imgur.com/CenW9oi

Yup. That line is just north of Montreal, so the area south of it includes Canada's two largest metropolitan areas.

Did you know there's a tiny bit of Canada that is further south than the California-Oregon border?

Detroit is actually north of that tiny bit of Canada too. Blew my mind a little when we moved here.

No kidding. Just the Wawa-Sault Ste. Marie-Timmins-Sudbury quad is large enough to be lost in for several lifetimes. One tell that you are about to enter uncharted territory is a sign that reads 'last gas station for 400km'.

And that is one of the more accessible areas, there are still plenty of lakes where a water plane can land and there are logging trails every 30 km or so.

Maybe the indigenous people knew about it

Quite likely. I have no idea why this was downvoted. It's usually the case native populations had far greater knowledge than they are ever credited for. Perhaps they will find some evidence of humans inside.

It's quite possible that the indigenous population knew of the cave, but it's very unlikely they ever purposefully descended into it. There's not much reason to, and it would be a very difficult descent.

There could be other entrances, collapses, etc.

And yet when my acquaintance summited Mt Everest, there was a Tibetan native there in a fur suit and hat.

I am almost certain that there will be evidence of native incursion into the cave. Its been there a long time; the natives have been there a long time. Young bloods with nothing to lose are always doing damn-fool things like that.

There's no evidence that Sherpas summited Everest prior to Norgay doing it with Hillary's expedition. Into The Silence covers this in more detail, if you care to read the whole book, but there were technological and cultural hurdles to it ever happening.

Everest is a pretty clear example of native people not bothering to do stupid things until white people show up and get them tangled up in the mess.

Technical detail (who was first to the tippy top). Sherpa's were climbing the mountain for centuries. Somebody has been in that cave, because its there.

From what I have read they were pretty far up but there is a pretty hard limit to what you can achieve without technology. There is a huge difference between climbing to 8000m vs 8800m.

"Not much reason to, and very difficult" describes most of the history of human population expansion over the globe.

"To see what is there" has been reason enough most of the time.

the article said it had probably been covered with snow year round until 20 years ago.

> Maybe the indigenous people knew about it

Or the military.

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