In 2008, a kayaking tourist spotted a “face” etched into a cliff on a remote island in Canada’s Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. She snapped photographs of the rocky countenance, but when she returned to land, she wasn’t able to pinpoint its exact location. No one has been able to find it since.
Until now, that is.
Hank Gus of the Tseshaht First Nation, an aboriginal group in the area, recently rediscovered the face after patiently searching for it for two years, ABC News reports. The face is said to be located on a cliff on Reeks Island, which is part of the Broken Group Islands in British Columbia.
"It's quite noticeable from the water; it's pretty large," Gus told CTV News of the giant face, estimated to be about seven feet tall. “It's high up and there's bunch of rock cliffs on the side.”
He added that due to the treacherous terrain, it's “so hard to access.”
As Buzzfeed notes, the Broken Group Islands are part of the traditional territory of the Tseshaht First Nation.
Gus, who works as a Tseshaht Beachkeeper -- a job that involves providing orientation to kayakers and visitors to the area, and learning about the region’s geography -- said he’d become interested in finding the “face in the rocks” after hearing the story of the kayaking tourist a couple of years ago. He said he’s kept an eye out for the face ever since.
Tseshaht First Nation and government agency Parks Canada are now working together to figure out the origins of the face.
“Mother Nature is capable of creating all sorts of amazing things, though the face is very striking," Parks Canada First Nation’s program manager Matthew Payne told ABC News. "But we still can’t definitively say if the face is man-made or not."
“The Tseshaht has lived in area for thousands of years, so [we're] working with the First Nations to find out if there are any oral histories the face could link back to,” he added.