Montague Harbour is a provincial marine park on Trincomali Channel on the southern coast of Galiano Island, one of the Gulf Islands in the Strait of Georgia, about 32 miles (52 km) north of Victoria and 30 miles (48 km) south-southwest of Vancouver, British Columbia. The harbor is an embayment well protected on the west by Gray Peninsula, which is connected to Galiano Island by a low isthmus, and to the south by Parker Island, which forms two narrow channels leading into the harbor. Captain George H. Richards from HMS Plumper named Galiano Island in 1859 after Dionisio Alcalá Galiano, a Spanish explorer who surveyed the area in 1792. The island is long, narrow and broken into a series of ridges and valleys that control local drainage patterns. These topographic features were formed by sedimentary rocks of the Nanaimo Group that developed during the Late Cretaceous (about 100 million to 66 million years ago) and consist of alternating sequences of sandstone and siltstone, and mudstone and shale. Quaternary glacial deposits of glacial till or fluvial sands and gravels deposited by glacial meltwater cover these rocks. Small wetlands, bogs and creeks are common across the island.

Montague Harbour has a white shell beach on the north shore containing several prehistoric middens representing 3,500 years of human occupation. Local collectors have recovered artifacts from these beaches for decades, probably because winter storm surges and cumulative sea-level rise have eroded and redeposited the middens. In the 1960s major archaeological excavations on the beach found arrowheads, spearheads and stone carvings. Gray Peninsula on the western shore consists of a substantial bedrock island and a coastal spit creating an isthmus with an intertidal lagoon and a freshwater bog. Seventeen archaeological sites have been found, including a possible fish trap, extensive shell middens and habitation sites representing the Marpole culture. These people were complex hunter-gatherers with traditions of hereditary matrilineal inequality, multi-family housing, resource ownership and wealth accumulation. Coast Salish nations have inhabited Galiano Island since before the arrival of Spanish explorers; in historical times the Penelakut First Nation inhabited Gray Peninsula and other locations on the island. The island remained mostly isolated from European settlers until 1858, when gold was discovered in the Fraser Canyon. Poor soil limited development, and early settlers resorted to fishing and logging. In 1871 the confederation of British Columbia into Canada, and the subsequent completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885, caused a rapid influx of pioneers to Galiano Island, and a small community became established.

Montague Harbour Park was established in 1959 and expanded in 1978 to 25 acres (10 ha). In 1982 the name was changed to Montague Harbour Marine Park. Today it extends from a depth of 16 feet (5 m) below sea level to an elevation of 590 feet (180 m) on a steep rocky precipice and includes approximately 252 acres (102 ha), with 173 acres (70 ha) of uplands and 79 acres (32 ha) of foreshore. The marine park is designated category II by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The enlisting of protected areas is part of a strategy for conserving the world’s natural environment and biodiversity. The main objective of a Category-II wilderness area is the protection of a functioning ecosystem, but the classification implies more leniency with human visitation and its supporting infrastructure. These parks are managed in a way that may contribute to local economies by promoting educational and recreational tourism on a scale that will not reduce the effectiveness of conservation efforts. The surrounding areas of a park may be for consumptive or non-consumptive use but should nevertheless act as a barrier to defend the protected area’s native species and communities, enabling them to sustain themselves in the long term. Read more here and here. Explore more of Montague Harbor and Galiano Island here: