Malahat SkyWalk and Victoria’s Indigenous Ties

The soaring Malahat SkyWalk helps connect the present to Vancouver’s Indigenous past

written by James Sinks

Unfolding below, a lush blanket of Vancouver Island rainforest disappears at a rugged shoreline, and then rises again through mist-shrouded hillsides across a narrow bay. Eagles tack in the wind. There is no bustle, except maybe the happy screams of children descending a slide nearby.

The bird’s-eye vantage comes courtesy of one of the more ambitious and architecturally stunning ecotourism projects in North America, the circular Malahat SkyWalk, just northwest of Victoria, B.C.

Opened in 2021, the centerpiece of the $17 million SkyWalk project is a towering wood-and-steel scaffold that invites you to corkscrew from a Douglas fir-and-cedar forest upward some ten floors—roughly 800 feet from the ground below—to a 360-degree viewing platform where on clear days you can see as far away as Washington’s Mount Baker.

It’s a place that can make you feel simultaneously on top of the world, and humbled by it.

Long before the Western expansion, Vancouver Island and the abundant waters of the Pacific were the territory of several Indigenous First Nations. The location of the SkyWalk along the Saanich Inlet once was a tribal trading and gathering place; now, the visitors come from across the world.

The attraction is operated in partnership with the Malahat Nation, a Saanich tribe whose ancestral home encompasses the shoreline over which the SkyWalk soars. The SkyWalk was proposed and financed by the developers of the Sea to Sky aerial gondola, a separate project on the British Columbia mainland between Vancouver and Whistler.

In addition to the curving ramp to the top of the SkyWalk, the attraction also includes an elevated wood-planked TreeWalk through the forest, along which a local artist has fashioned driftwood likenesses of woodland wildlife including a wolf, heron and cougar. The walk from the welcome center to the top of the tower and back is 1.4 miles.

Winter operating hours are shorter, but crowds are thinner. For warmth and ambience, the staff also maintains an outdoor fire pit. Thankfully, the flames are not directly below the wooden tower, but rather in an adjacent plaza with a playground and food options. In warmer months, yoga classes are offered on the observation deck on top.

It takes about twenty minutes to walk up, and—if you take the spiral slide in the center of the tower—about ten seconds to get back down, said spokesman Ian Wish. The record for number of trips down the slide in one day is forty-seven, by an 8-year-old girl.

Also at the top, if your tummy can handle heights, you can bounce onto a 900-square-foot “Adventure Net” anchored in the center of the structure and peer through to the forest floor below.

Wish said the SkyWalk is helping to achieve its mission in two ways. First, it gives almost anybody, regardless of age and mobility, the ability to see and experience a view that might otherwise be reserved for hikers. The entire stretch is wheelchair accessible; there are no steps, and electric scooters are available to rent.

It also harkens to history. “It allows the average person to connect with the land and the area the way First Nations have experienced for millenia,” he said.

The SkyWalk is just one way Vancouver Island echoes with Indigenous culture and ways to celebrate it, and to reflect on how tumult sometimes shaped that history, which dates back thousands of years.

The capital of British Columbia and named after the then British queen, Victoria originated in 1843 as a fort and settlement that displaced a forcibly relocated village. When gold prospectors poured into the area in the 1850s, the city became home to the West Coast’s second Chinatown, behind San Francisco. It also was the epicenter of a smallpox outbreak in the 1860s that wiped out two-thirds of the island’s Indigenous population.

A port facing the picturesque Salish Sea, which separates Canada from Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, Victoria today is a bustling, international cityscape that was voted the world’s top city to visit by Condé Nast Traveler readers in 2023. It also remains interwoven with First Nation history and culture, from towering totem poles at Thunderbird Park to the Unity Wall mural on the Victoria seawall to the Seven Signs of the lǝk’^wǝŋǝn, large bronze casts at significant tribal historical sites across the city.

At the Royal BC Museum, curators offer glimpses of some of more than 200,000 artifacts. At the same time, the museum also is engaging with First Nations leaders about how to more appropriately honor their cultures, taking into account the colonial past.

Inside the Royal BC Museum.
(photo: Destination BC/Jordan Dyck)

Downtown at the Mark Loria Gallery, find the handiwork of leading Indigenous artists across Canada.

You also can experience Indigenous-influenced flavors at Songhees Food Truck, which celebrates the Songhees Nation’s history with a menu that includes bannock (fried bread), seafood chowder and bison sausage.

A lover’s paradise, people stroll along Victoria Harbor, with its Parliament building in the distance.
(photo: Destination BC/Jordan Dyck)

No visit to Victoria would be complete without a peek at the circa-1888, tarnished-domed Parliament building, awash in holiday twinkly lights and overlooking the harbor and ferry terminal, and a leisurely walk through world-acclaimed Butchart Gardens, where 55 acres of display gardens, restaurants and even gelato now occupy a former limestone quarry.

Butchart Gardens, with 55 acres of beauty.
(photo: Destination BC/Local Wanderer)

A national historic site, the gardens sit in the traditional territory of the WSÁNEĆ people. To celebrate that connection and heritage, two bird-topped totem poles—designed and carved in the classic Coast Salish style—gaze down on the oft-photographed place, symbolically bringing together the beauty of Victoria’s present with its past.