The Adam Project | Alouette Lake, Golden Ears Provincial Park — the water the director kept for last

Laura's cabin sits on a lake ringed by mountains, and when the fight finally comes to it the water is flat enough to hold the reflection of everything falling out of the sky. Shawn Levy has called this his favourite place he has ever shot. It is Alouette Lake, in Golden Ears Provincial Park, about an hour east of Vancouver in Maple Ridge.

The lake is not entirely natural. A dam at its southern end raised the water in the 1920s to feed hydroelectric generation, drowning the valley floor and the logging railway grades that ran through it — on a low-water autumn you can still see stumps standing out in the shallows, cut flat by crosscut saws a century ago. The park around it was carved out in 1967 from what had been one of the largest logging operations on the coast. The two peaks that give it its name are visible from most of the shoreline, a pair of granite summits that catch the last light long after the beach has gone into shade.

North Beach is the spot. It is a long grey-sand crescent, log-strewn, with the mountains closing the far end of the lake. Canoes launch from there. In July the water is cold enough to make you honest about it.

Golden Ears Provincial Park, Maple Ridge. Day-use parking fills early on summer weekends; the drive in from Maple Ridge village takes twenty minutes.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.