Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
In the spring of 2018, a team of researchers soared above the rugged, northeastern portion of British Columbia’s Wells Gray Provincial Park in a helicopter. Below them, the ground was a patchwork of green, brown, and white—clusters of trees, expanses of rock, and swaths of snow.
They were looking for caribou, but they found something else.At first, they weren’t exactly sure what. It was definitely a divot in the earth, but from a distance, it was hard to tell whether it was a hole stuffed with ice and snow, or a crater—some dent from a long-ago volcanic eruption.
Whatever it was, the team dubbed it “Sarlacc Pit,” in homage to the Star Wars creature who hunkered down in the ground of Tatooine. To learn more about this earthly feature, they needed eyes on the ground—and beneath it.
The researchers recruited Catherine Hickson, a volcanologist well-versed in the park’s geology. After studying photographs and satellite images of the feature, a group consisting of Hickson, a caver, a parks official, and the helicopter pilot who spotted the cave from the air got up close in September, the Canadian Press reported this week. When Hickson and her team arrived, their attempts to take precise measurements were stymied by a thick mist rising up from swift-moving waters.
“We just stood there in awe of this immense, gaping hole,” Hickson says. “All we could see was a black void.” It was essentially a vertical drop.
But, farther from the edge, they also found a spring on the…
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