The diverse landscapes of Vancouver make the Canadian city a popular location for television and film production. Until production moved to Los Angeles for the sixth season, The X-Files’ cast and crew spent most of their time in Vancouver. One forest in particular served as home to most of the actual X-files Dana Scully and Fox Mulder investigated. Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve (previously called the Seymour Demonstration Forest), located in Northern Vancouver, was the site for most of the series’s abductions, murders, and mysterious happenings that can totally be explained by hard science and logic—shut up, Mulder!
Atlas Obscura has compiled a list of all of the various wooded places the Seymour Forest has pretended to be throughout the show’s first five seasons. The forest made its debut in the pilot, standing in for the Collum National Forest in Oregon and went on to double as locations all over the world. Though the forest most often imitated Washington state, the show also made us believe a Canadian forest could be Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Siberia.
Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny recently returned to Vancouver to begin shooting the X-Files revival limited series, but it’s so far unknown whether they’ll be returning to the versatile woods of Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve.