The Transformer's Rocks at Wreck Beach

Larry Grant, a Musqueam elder, points out that a century ago, this UBC campus was forest, but it was clearcut in 1912 to make way for the university. He says that all of Metro Vancouver was forest, and today it’s the largest clearcut in the southwest corner of the province, with even Stanley Park being second and third growth.

There was a Musqueam village on the Deadman Island side of Stanley Park, and others on Prospect Point and Point Atkinson, near what is now Lighthouse Park. There were no permanent Musqueam settlements on this present UBC campus, but there were villages all around the perimeter, including the reserve to the south where Grant grew up, and at Jericho–Locarno Beach, to the northwest.

He describes the Jericho–Locarno Beach site as a huge village site. Many of the homes built on the side hill and along the shoreline there have disrupted a lot of burial sites and middens of that community. There would have been grasses all along there, and a lot of it has been filled in where the swampy areas were. He notes that it didn't have the clean sand before, and a lot of that has been shipped in.

Ecologically, the area was much richer back then, teeming with ducks and water life. Grant recalls there were a lot of muskrats along the foreshore and up the river, and that in his childhood, people were still trapping them for their fur.