City on a Remote Island | Abandoned Since World War Two | Yorke Island | Destination Adventure

i've never seen anything quite like it it's not just remote if you don't have the proper equipment to get there it's not even accessible there has never been a public way to get there you need some sort of a landing craft there's just one small beach you can actually get onto getting onto the island itself that is actually a very small part of the equation a much bigger part is getting to the island because the tides going through this whole section they're among some of the most treacherous in the world for some reason the way the waters converge there at johnston strait and sunderland channel there's a lot of action there and a lot of turbulence so it's good to go with an experienced person who knows what they're doing york island is not a place you can just decide to go there is a lot of logistical challenges you have to overcome to get there and i'm very fortunate with the reach of the youtube channel because when i arrived on vancouver island a subscriber had reached out and offered me a ride to get out to york island so obviously immediately i said yes ever since i was a kid all i wanted to be was an explorer sail the seven seas find new worlds but uncle d everything's already been found what like everything well yeah oh man well so much for that but if i can't be an explorer i can still be an adventurer so i bought a motorhome and i'm hitting the open road my name is dustin porter and this is destination adventure [Music] just like all of the british columbia coastline the cruise to york island is unbelievably beautiful once we arrived at the island we anchored out in the bay and we got to paddle this little tender to shore and once you're on shore you'll immediately start seeing some ruins but before we start exploring let's dive into the history a little bit york island is actually a very small island it's difficult to get to but what makes it exceptional among the islands along the bc coast is that it was once the fort so it was a coastal defense site during world war ii it wasn't used in world war one they did start building on york island before war was declared with germany in 1939 they continued building right up until japan surrendered so that was august of 1945. [Music] it was sort of the northernmost island in that region they could put a fort they did a lot of research before they chose york island they actually had a coastal defense expert come from england who traveled the east and west side of canada and because the japanese in those years in the 1930s were being aggressive in asia he recommended that they build something on the west side first and they chose york island because they felt that if the japanese were to attack they would go for vancouver so they assumed that they would fly around the north end of vancouver island and come down the strait and they wanted a strategic spot from where they could shoot at these airplanes if they needed to one of the things they missed out on though was the fact that it had no fresh water and still doesn't so they ended up having to actually transport water from hardwick island over to york island the entire time that the fort was occupied and i fortunately met the fellow who had that job and he said oh well they really depended on me because he said every two days i had to take a scow over in a tugboat to hardwick island fill up with water and bring it back because they had usually about 200 army and navy personnel posted on the island and those guys went through a tremendous amount of water the ones who were in the army usually did about four months at a time and then they would go back to vancouver so they would go back and forth and then about halfway through the war they started to train people for overseas service so it became a training center as well [Music] in the beginning they were really cautious and they didn't want they didn't want the fellas having any sort of freedom so it was almost like a prison and a number of the people who came to the island had never even lived on the coast they were from the prairies so so it gets really dark and and rainy and dismal and there was a lot of mud and and they found it pretty tough going but about halfway through the war um they started to change things and they built them a beautiful gymnasium and had uh frequent entertainment and then they would allow the fellas to leave the island and go over to kelsey bay and they would socialize with local people and there would be dances and parties on the weekends and they even went to the outlying islands like the thurlow islands and they socialize with people in the small communities there [Music] it was december 7th when pearl harbor was attacked they decided to step up so that's when they installed the searchlight so there were three emplacements placed around the island and these were very powerful searchlights in fact people in kelsey bay would say they could read their newspapers by these lights and i was even told that someone in alert bay which is like about a six hour boat trip north said they could see these searchlights so they were they were going 24 hours a day so they were really quite something yeah highly visible [Music] as soon as the war was over it was completely abandoned except for one couple otto and his wife and they were given the rights by the canadian government to look after the island so they occupied a really beautiful house that was called the officer's quarters and they lived there and almost daily they towed some buildings from york island to the different places nearby there was a little island off hardwick island they took some buildings too a number went to hardwick island and became part of the ben dixon logging camp there were two i believe that ended up in campbell river so they these buildings ended up all over the place [Music] [Music] [Music] arriving onto york island is a very exciting experience because almost immediately you're greeted by ruins from wartime scattered all over the beach is broken pieces of pottery because pretty much everything left over from the mess was dumped into the ocean and then there's all these wooden pillars sticking up out of the sand from the original dock and then you turn around and just peeking out of the moss there is this cement staircase starting at the beach and disappearing up into the forest on shore there you can find the steps that actually lead you up to the officer's quarters i do have some pictures of when it was first built and it was a lovely building it was um someone who had visited there as a child he said it was pretty swank he said they had a beautiful brick fireplace and it was it was like his grandparents were the ones who occupied it after the war and he said yeah it was a pleasure for them to live there the officer's quarters unfortunately is one of the few buildings on york island that had a wooden roof so it's deteriorated a lot faster than the rest of the ruins that you'll find on the island but nevertheless it's still a pretty exciting welcome to the island wow that's cool very cool so this path would have gone down to the old dock where you can still see the pilings running along the beach there when i had arrived on york island i really had no idea what to expect because there is so little documentation on this site but lucky for me all of the original roads are still very visible so the island is actually quite easy to navigate after leaving the officers quarters the first building we found was the powerhouse which is just a large cement building with these great big steel doors on it still in very good condition [Music] i do like this you can still see the original paint colors on the wall there i suppose this whole building probably was painted like that yeah you can see there the green would have all been like this hmm look at these doors oh lay pretty seized up after leaving the powerhouse i started climbing up towards the top of the island and that's when things started getting very exciting for me because i knew that the gun emplacements were still there from photos that i had found earlier on but i had no idea how much more i was gonna see [Music] at the top were the gun emplacements and there were two of them and they they started out with no covers on them so they just use a piece of camouflage they started out with these four inch guns and then about halfway through like same time as they stepped up their security they traded them out for six inch guns and they had them mounted in these gun emplacements and then they built a solid roof over top so these were huge guns i love looking through the gun and placement largely because of the condition exploring old and abandoned places like this you never find something in this kind of condition unless it's been restored then you walk into this one and the hinges on the doors still work and a lot of them even had very visible writing still on the front of them [Music] i felt the same thing going into the gun emplacement i said oh it says right there shell recess okay that's where they stored the shells and was built to last it was really built to last and and i think it it seemed a big surprise to me that they did abandon it but it seems that as soon as the war was over all the enthusiasm for keeping up any sort of sites was just lost [Music] this is unfortunately a very common theme here in canada not just with our military sites but pretty much all of our historic sites and it's really sad because our history as a country it's so much younger than the rest of the world but all of our sites and stories that have gone into making our history book they're just disappearing that's why this site was so special to me not just to explore but to document oh yeah we found it oh god there's more here wow that's a very small little fireplace for that chimney maybe from this side nope look at how cool this is [Music] hmm these are the least uniform bricks i have ever seen that's weird this is this is where i just was below here but there's no access to this i don't know um wow look at this unbelievable maybe this is how we access that other one oh my gosh this is huge shoes in touch oh yeah this is it that's that one we're looking down [Music] cool [Applause] so what up frank what up nelson [Music] this timber is in perfect condition man i love this spot how cool built right into the bedrock wow that's amazing more relics total dead person a little bit of writing left on those doors but not really enough to read there's an apple tree this one's wood actually oh she's gonna be seized up yeah no way it's moving this one maybe look at that oh cool [Music] no this one not either seized up very cool hmm empty wow i was looking at this stuff it almost looks like lead but it's not it's a rock of some kind this place is really blowing my mind hmm that's cool i love that these coverings are still here the deck below me still had all of them all the way across [Music] [Music] so [Music] i was taken there in 2010 and i was really astonished at what i saw i was simply astonished i just could not believe how well preserved it was and it was not well known at all even today with some some of the publicities that it's had there are so many people who've never heard of it [Music] i feel very thankful for my opportunity to go and explore york island and i hope you guys enjoyed learning about it if you did like the video give it that thumbs up and let me know down in the comment section most of all thank you for watching now let's finally put 20 20 in the rear view and focus on a healthy and hopefully easier 20-21 [Music] baby [Music]

Channel: Destination Adventure

Views: 420,075

Rating: 4.9324942 out of 5

Keywords: abandoned, Urbex, urban exploring, history, historic, lost, forgotten, found, discovered, discovery, NatGeo, Nat Geo, National Geographic, History, Yorke Island, adventure, explore, explore bc, BC, British Columbia, Canada, Explore Canada, Travel, War, World War 2, WWII, Military, Fort, Navy

Id: YIb85SxQFTI

Length: 25min 51sec (1551 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 01 2021