Sooke Potholes Regional Park covers 63.5 hectares — about 157 acres — strung along the Sooke River north of the town of Sooke, on the southwest coast of Vancouver Island. It is not a large park, and its shape follows the river rather than any tidy boundary, which is the point: what is being protected here is a corridor, not a block. At the southern end, the smaller Sooke Potholes Provincial Park runs up against the regional park's boundary, so that two levels of government protect one continuous run of riverbank. From the park you can reach the westernmost end of the Galloping Goose Regional Trail, the rail-to-trail route that runs all the way back into Victoria. The canyon walls throw shade over the water for much of the day, which keeps the pools cold even in August.

Cut into the hills east of the river is one of the more unusual pieces of engineering on Vancouver Island. The Sooke Flowline, built in 1915, was a gravity-fed water conduit that followed the contours of these hillsides for kilometre after kilometre before reaching the Humpback Reservoir near what is now Mount Wells Regional Park. Nothing about it is dramatic. That is what makes it impressive: a line of flowing water that crosses a mountainous landscape purely by following the shape of the ground, laid out by surveyors with instruments and patience more than a century ago. It can still be found in the hills east of the Sooke River, threading through the second-growth timber.

Up in the trees above the potholes stands a concrete ruin, and the story behind it is one of the most-told in the park. Much of this land was once part of the Deertrail Resort — a development proposed in the 1980s that was to become a substantial destination in the Sooke hills. It never opened. Construction got as far as raising at least one structure, and then the money, the permits, or the ambition ran out, and the forest began taking the site back. The remains of that building are still there, roofless and grown over, and they have acquired the particular gravity that unfinished buildings always do. A ruin is usually evidence of something that ended. This one is evidence of something that never quite started.

This valley lies within the traditional lands of the T'Sou-ke Nation, who were here for a very long time before the river became a swimming destination. Following European colonization in the nineteenth century, the land around the potholes was worked hard — farmed, fished, mined, and logged — and only later turned over to recreation. The park exists because of two purchases: The Land Conservancy of British Columbia and the Capital Regional District bought the property from private owners in 2005 and 2007, and the two organizations now plan and manage it together. At the northern end of the park sits the 67-site Spring Salmon Place Campground, known by its T'Sou-ke name, KWL-UCHUN, and operated seasonally by the T'Sou-ke Nation. It is a small but meaningful arrangement: the Nation running the visitor facilities on a river that has been theirs far longer than anyone has been camping beside it.