The new face of fentanyl, and other B.C. videos that resonated in 2016

As 2016 comes to an end, we take a look back at the videos that resonated the most with our followers on CBC Vancouver's Facebook page.

The new face of fentanyl

You can read all the statistics, but sometimes it's a single person's story that moves you the most. 

When CBC's Eric Rankin met 22-year-old Kati Mathers in September, she was addicted to fentanyl and living on the streets in Surrey, B.C.

Kati tells her own story of how she got there.

This video, the most watched on CBC Vancouver's Facebook page, takes a shocking look at the devastating effects of one of the most powerful opioids available on the street today — a drug that has caused hundreds of overdose deaths in the past year.

Since then, Mather has turned her life around. After overdosing 17 times, she got clean and has become an advocate for long-term addiction treatment. 

Baby mammoth makes it debut in Victoria

Dire wolves, mastodons and short-faced bears: Those were just some of the creatures featured in a new exhibit at Victoria's Royal B.C. Museum called Mammoths: Giants of the Ice Age.

But the star of the show was a 40,000-year-old baby woolly mammoth, which the museum calls the best-preserved specimen in existence.

Love birds?

For 15 years, the World Parrot Refuge in Coombs, B.C., accepted unwanted or abandoned exotic birds. But when its founder died, the refuge was left scrambling to find homes for up to 600 parrots and cockatoos.

The video CBC made of the birds in need became an instant internet hit. 

Our Facebook page was flooded with messages expressing interest in adopting the birds, including one Coquitlam family that adopted one African grey parrot and is fostering 34 others.

World's deadliest mushroom

To the untrained eye, it's a plain-looking white mushroom, popping up in yards and boulevards of Vancouver, Victoria and the Fraser Valley.

But among B.C.'s thousands of mushrooms, the Death Cap mushroom is one that should be on your radar.

It claimed the life of a three-year old boy from B.C. after he ate one.

We made a video to explain how to identify it, and it became one of the most watched of the year.

Ski surfing

And finally: the year was 1985, and a new menace to society had made its way to ski slopes across B.C.: snowboards.

CBC dug up this gem of a video from our archives, and everything from the 80s fashion to the reporter's language (calling snowboarding "ski surfing") made it one of the most watched by our viewers.