Culture

Deer Lake is surrounded by Deer Lake Park. The park (enter off Canada Way at Sperling Avenue, or off Deer Lake Avenue) has become the cultural centre of Burnaby, with the Burnaby Art Gallery at the Ceperley Mansion, said to be a haunted house, the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, Burnaby Village Museum with a vintage carousel known as the C. W. Parker Carousel and the posh Hart House Restaurant located in a beautiful heritage building. Annual summer concerts are held in the Park.

Natural History

The vegetation natural to the area is temperate rainforest dominated by conifers such as Tsuga heterophylla, Pseudotsuga menziesii, and Thuja plicata. Most of this forest, whose trees were considered particularly tall for the Lower Mainland, was logged in the first few years of the 20th century.

Deer Lake and the surrounding park is a highly altered habitat. Most of the aquatic animals are introduced species, having arrived by invasion, as released pets, or for angling. These include bullfrogs, painted turtle, rainbow trout, stocked cutthroat trout, ictalurid catfish and carp. Rainbow trout were probably present as a native species, along with sculpin and crayfish.

The Legend of Deer Lake, as told by E. Pauline Johnson, is a Coast Salish tale about a hidden waterway between False Creek and Deer Lake. It was discovered by a young Indian, the first chief Capilano, who speared a "king" harbour seal in False Creek with his elk antler spear with western red cedar line. The seal escaped through a hidden underground creek, and he spent months looking for it by the shore. One day he was "beckoned" inland by what turned out to be the flames of a forest fire. On the shore of Deer Lake he found the remains of the seal and recovered his spear, and with it, his prowess as a hunter.

Today there is a complex of condominiums overlooking the lake, where Oakalla Prison, a maximum security prison farm once existed.

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