Siwash Rock
Siwash Rock is a tall rock pillar in Stanley Park, Vancouver, British Columbia. It stands about 15–18 metres high and has long been part of Squamish Indigenous stories. It was once called Nine Pin Rock because its shape looks like a bowling pin.
About 32 million years ago, magma squeezed up through surrounding sandstone and mudstone to form a basalt stack that rises from the sea. This rock is the only sea stack in the Vancouver area.
The Squamish call the rock Slhx̱i7lsh (sometimes Lhilhx̱í7elsh). The name is linked to a tale of a man transformed by X̱ays. There is a hole in the rock where Slhx̱i7lsh kept his fishing tackle. Poet Pauline Johnson wrote about a Squamish legend in which a man becomes Siwash Rock as a symbol of steadfast fatherhood. A nearby plaque says it represents Skalsh, the unselfish, transformed by Q'uas the transformer as a reward for unselfishness.
There is debate about the name Siwash. It comes from a Chinook Jargon word for First Nations people, and its roots trace to the French sauvage, meaning wild. Some consider it derogatory, though it remains in use in certain place names and other contexts.
On the cliffs above the rock is a lookout along the Siwash hiking trail. It used to be called Fort Siwash, and during the World Wars an artillery battery and searchlights were there.
Local stories also tell of a runaway mountain goat in the 1960s and a man living in a nearby cave after World War II.
The small Douglas fir atop Siwash Rock died during a very dry summer in 1965, described by some as an obituary for the tree. Park crews later planted new saplings, and by a few years later the area started to recover.
In 2017, a Vancouver park official proposed renaming the rock to Slhx̱í7lsh to avoid a name that could be seen as insulting.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 12:10 (CET).