The Stave was a productive salmon river, and the territory belonged to the Sxa'yaks - the Skayuks - a Halqemeylem-speaking Coast Salish people related to today's Stó:lo. They are not here any longer. Smallpox arrived with Europeans, the population collapsed, and the Kwantlen First Nation expanded into the ground the survivors could no longer hold. It is a short paragraph in a reference work and an entire world ending, and it happened before most of the written record of this valley begins. Whatever names the Skayuks had for the reaches of this river, the falls, the fishing places, are not in the record either. The names the map uses now are all from afterwards.

What drew industry here was the timber. The lower Stave grew red cedar at a size that brought lumber companies up from the coast, chief among them Stave Lake Cedar, whose mill stood a mile above the damsite. Then a second industry arrived with a different use for the same valley. Stave Falls Dam was completed in 1912, and work through the 1920-22 period under the Stave Falls Power Company - later a subsidiary of the British Columbia Electric Railway - built the system out substantially, raising the Upper Stave and flooding its forests. What came with the dam was a whole settlement: bunkhouses, a community hall, a sizeable workers' town, and a railway line known as the Stave Falls Branch. Below, the same thing happened again in 1930, when Ruskin Dam filled a canyon comparable to Capilano or Lynn and made Hayward Lake.

Stave Lake today covers about 55 square kilometres. Its main arm runs roughly 20 kilometres north to south, with a southwest arm about 9.5 kilometres long ending at Stave Falls Dam. Before the dam, the lake was around a third the size of that main arm alone - which is to say the reservoir is mostly not a lake at all but a flooded valley wearing one. The climate here is oceanic, and emphatically so: average annual precipitation runs to 2,359.4 millimetres, well over two metres of rain and snow a year pouring off the Pacific Ranges into this catchment, which is exactly why the engineers wanted it. The extremes are startling for a coastal valley. The thermometer reached 40.0 °C on 25 June 1925, and fell to -26.7 °C on 31 January 1929.

Film crews found the Stave Dam complex and built something remarkable there for the movie We're No Angels: an entire fake town, and with it a timber cathedral - a real one, actually constructed, driven into Stave Lake on pilings. Everything came down when shooting finished, with a single exception. A gazebo-style bandstand from the set was moved downstream to the Hayward Lake Recreation Site just below Stave Dam, where it now stands among the picnic tables on the ground that once held the dam workers' housing, beside a lakeside trail that follows an old railway right-of-way. It is the only surviving building of a town that never existed.

BC Hydro controls most of the shoreline, which has kept Stave Lake from acquiring the ring of cottages that would otherwise surround a body of water an hour from Vancouver. A handful of private cabins sit along the east shore, reached by Sylvester Road. Zajac Ranch, a summer camp for children with special needs, occupies ground on the southwest side. And at the southwest end, where the drawdown exposes an enormous expanse of sand and silt each year, the lake has become one of the best-known off-road destinations in British Columbia - trucks and dirt bikes churning across flats that are lakebed for half the year. It is a peculiar sort of wilderness: engineered, industrial in origin, and genuinely wild the moment you look north toward Mount Robie Reid and the peaks beyond it.