Peace Sanctuary

The following email was sent to us way back in 2005:

From: “deryk houston” <xxx@xxxxxx.com>
Date: 18 Apr 2005 02:40:26 -0000
To: <xxx@xxxxxx.com>, <xxx@xxxxxx.com>
Subject: [Google Sightseeing] Contact Form

I constructed a peace sanctuary on the foothills of the Rocky mountains in British Columbia. I used a forty-two ton bulldozer to move hundreds of tons of gravel to form the lines of a mother and child. A primitive drawing. The image is a thousand feet across. It is located near the Bennet dam in northeastern BC. on Portage mountain.

Could you help me find a photo of it from space? The project was completed two years ago. (It is actually an ongoing project but the main image is completed. The National film board of Canada did a documentary on it called “From Baghdad to Peace Country“.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Deryk Houston

Well Deryk, it may have taken 4 years, but Google did eventually add high-resolution imagery of the area to Maps and Earth, meaning that we have finally been able to find your peace sanctuary.

During further correspondence with Deryk, he sent me this image he took of the site from a light aircraft, which clearly shows the two faces, a dove, and a hand.

Until someone launches live satellite imagery, there will always be some sort of waiting period for imagery to be updated. However, perhaps the brand-new Geoeye-1 satellite will at least reduce the waiting time to a matter of months? Or maybe even days?

Deryk’s official site has more info on the Peace Sanctuary project.