The K'ak'awin petroglyphs are the park's most significant cultural feature -- a panel of carved images on rocks along the lakeshore. The figures are mythological, their precise origins and meanings not fully understood by outsiders. What is known is that the Hupacasath First Nation has traditionally occupied this area, and the carvings connect to a spiritual and cultural tradition far older than European contact. The petroglyphs are not behind glass or roped off in a gallery. They sit at water's edge, weathered by the same lake that has risen and fallen against them for centuries. Visitors who stumble upon them often don't realize what they're looking at until they kneel down and trace the shapes with their eyes -- figures emerging from stone like memories surfacing.

For decades, Sproat Lake was home to one of aviation's most improbable sights: the Martin Mars water bombers, the largest firefighting flying boats ever built. Originally designed as naval transport aircraft during World War II, the Mars planes were converted for aerial firefighting and based on Sproat Lake by Coulson Flying Tankers. Each aircraft could scoop up over 27,000 liters of water and dump it on forest fires in a single pass. Watching a Martin Mars lumber across the lake's surface, engines roaring, spray erupting behind its hull, was an experience that visitors traveled considerable distances to witness. Both aircraft have now departed Sproat Lake: the Hawaii Mars made its final flight to the British Columbia Aviation Museum in August 2024, and the Philippine Mars left for the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona in February 2025. After more than six decades of firefighting service, the era of the Mars bombers on Sproat Lake has come to a close.

The park itself occupies the north shore of Sproat Lake along Highway 4, offering 58 vehicle-accessible campsites, a boat launch, and a small beach. In summer, the lake draws swimmers, paddlers, and boaters from across Vancouver Island. The water is warmer than you might expect -- the Alberni Valley's mild maritime climate, warmed by Pacific Ocean currents, creates dry summers that heat the shallow reaches of the lake to swimmable temperatures. The surrounding forest of cedar, fir, and hemlock presses close to the shoreline, and the mountains of the Beaufort Range rise behind. It is a place where families have been coming for generations, setting up camp in the same sites their parents used.

Gilbert Malcolm Sproat arrived on Vancouver Island in the 1860s as an agent for Anderson, Anderson and Company, helping establish the first sawmill at the mouth of the Somass River. He became a colonial official, serving as a magistrate and eventually as the first Indian Reserve Commissioner in British Columbia -- a role that placed him directly in the colonial apparatus that dispossessed the very Indigenous peoples whose petroglyphs adorn the lake's rocks. The irony of his name being attached to a place whose deepest history belongs to the Hupacasath is not lost on those who know the full story. Sproat Lake Provincial Park holds both legacies -- the ancient carvings and the colonial name -- without resolving the tension between them.