First Narrows is the official name for the entrance to

Burrard Inlet Burrard Inlet () is a shallow-sided fjord in the northwestern Lower Mainland, British Columbia, Canada. Formed during the last Ice Age, it separates the City of Vancouver and the rest of the lowland Burrard Peninsula to the south from the coa ...

, the mouth of

Vancouver, British Columbia Vancouver is a major city in Western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the cit ...

's inner harbour.

Name origin

Captain

George Henry Richards Sir George Henry Richards (13 January 182014 November 1896) was Hydrographer of the Royal Navy from 1863 to 1874. Biography Richards was born in Antony, Cornwall, the son of Captain G. S. Richards, and joined the Royal Navy in 1832. His eld ...

named the First Narrows and Second Narrows during his 1859–60 survey for the British Admiralty. Judge

Gray Grey (more frequent in British English) or gray (more frequent in American English) is an intermediate color between black and white. It is a neutral or achromatic color, meaning that it has no chroma. It is the color of a cloud-covered s ...

suggested the alternative name of "Lion's Gate" in 1889 with respect to the Lions to the north, a name generally adopted for the later bridge.

Dredging

In 1909, the DGS ''Mastodon'' was ordered from a shipyard in

Scotland Scotland is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It contains nearly one-third of the United Kingdom's land area, consisting of the northern part of the island of Great Britain and more than 790 adjac ...

. She was commissioned in 1911. Her crew worked 24 hours a day, six days a week, from 1912 to 1917, to dredge the channel. The 5 million tons of excavated material was a mixture of blue clay with embedded rocks and boulders. Some of the boulders were too large to be scooped up by the dredge's buckets, and had to be smashed first. The project widened the waterway from to .

Ferry

In 1909, John Lawson, John Sinclair, William Thompson, and Robert McPherson founded the

Ambleside Ambleside is a town in the civil parish of Lakes and the Westmorland and Furness district of Cumbria, England. Within the boundaries of the historic county of Westmorland and located in the Lake District National Park, the town sits at the ...

Gastown Gastown is the original settlement that became the core of the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and a national historic site and a neighbourhood in the northwest section of the Downtown Eastside, adjacent to Downtown Vancouver. Its ...

ferry service with a 35-passenger converted fishing boat. An experimental English Bay run proved unsuccessful. In 1912, the municipality of

West Vancouver West Vancouver is a district municipality in the province of British Columbia, Canada. A member municipality of the Metro Vancouver Regional District, West Vancouver is situated on the north shore of Burrard Inlet to the northwest of the city ...

acquired the unprofitable enterprise. The terminal relocated from the foot of 17th St to 14th St, where the former ferry building still stands. Over time, larger vessels, which could carry up to 120 passengers, replaced the original ones. The bridge opening and the inauguration of bus transit led to the demise of the ferry service, which ceased operations in 1947.

Bridge

The

Lions Gate Bridge The Lions Gate Bridge, opened in 1938 and officially known as the First Narrows Bridge, is a suspension bridge that crosses the First Narrows (Vancouver), first narrows of Burrard Inlet and connects the City of Vancouver, British Columbia, to ...

opened in 1938 and was designed to have enough clearance to permit ocean going vessels to transit beneath.

References

{{coord, 49, 19, 00, N, 123, 08, 26, W, region:CA-BC, display=title Landforms of Vancouver