The 6th Day|Cleveland Dam — the concrete lip where the car goes over

The film's chase has to end somewhere with a drop, and it ends here: a wall of concrete ninety-one metres high, holding back a green reservoir on one side and falling away into the Capilano canyon on the other. Location guides list Cleveland Dam as the site of the sequence where the car leaves the road. Stand on the crest and the appeal to a stunt team is obvious. There is no gentle shoulder. There is the walkway, the parapet, and then a very long way down.

The dam was finished in 1954 and named for Ernest Cleveland, the water commissioner who spent decades arguing that Vancouver should own its watershed outright. It does. Everything above the dam is closed forest, patrolled and unpeopled, which is why the water in your glass downtown is unusually good and why the reservoir in the photographs looks so oddly untouched. On the north side the surface of Capilano Lake sits close under your feet. On the south side the spillway drops in a straight grey chute toward the river.

The crossing is a public path inside Capilano River Regional Park, open daily and free, at the end of Capilano Road in North Vancouver. Come on a clear morning and the Lions — the two peaks the bridge downtown is named for — sit directly up the valley behind the water. Come after heavy rain and the spillway is running, and you will not hear the person next to you.

The trail down the east bank from the parking lot reaches the base of the dam in about fifteen minutes of switchbacks. Do that, then look up. From below, the thing the camera treated as a cliff edge is a single unbroken curve of concrete with trees growing right to the foot of it, and the drop the stunt sold you turns out to be entirely real.

Location photo: Capilano River Regional Park (Wikimedia Commons).