Wells Gray Provincial Park


Wells Gray Provincial Park is a large wilderness park located in east-central British Columbia, Canada. The park protects most of the southern, and highest, regions of the Cariboo Mountains and covers 5,250 square kilometres. It is British Columbia's fourth largest park, after Tatshenshini, Spatsizi and Tweedsmuir.

Topography

The boundaries of Wells Gray Park encompass 60 percent of the drainage basin of the Clearwater River and most water that originates in the park flows into this river. The northern two-thirds of the park is extremely rugged with relief ranging from Clearwater Lake at an elevation of to at an unnamed peak on the northern park boundary, west of Mount Pierrway. These summits are part of the Cariboo Mountains, and most of the east boundary of the park follows the mountain divide between drainage into the North Thompson River and into the Clearwater River. Individual mountain groups dominate the topography of the northern park region and are separated by deep glacially carved valleys, several of which contain large lakes such as Clearwater, Azure and Hobson. The ruggedness of its features has ensured that northern Wells Gray remains little known except to the hardiest of backpackers.
The southern third of Wells Gray Park is traversed by the Clearwater Valley Road, although large areas are accessible only by trail. The dominant topography features volcanic plateaus, lava flows and deep canyons which are crowned by several peaks over high. The waterfalls, for which Wells Gray is famous, usually result from the interaction of volcanic eruptions and glacial activity. The best known is Helmcken Falls, the fourth highest waterfall in Canada, which plunges over the edge of one of these volcanic plateaus.

Highest mountains

Here are the eight highest mountains in Wells Gray Park:
1) "Unnamed Peak, 2946 m, 4.9 km west of Mount Pierrway". Unnamed mountains are usually referenced in this style, by height and location relative to a named summit. It is curious that the Park's highest mountain is unnamed, but this also reflects its remoteness. The first climbers are unknown, but a cairn was left with no record of the ascent. It was discovered by Bill McKenzie and Roger Wallis who claimed the second ascent on August 18, 2005.
2) Mount Goodall, 2930 m. The mountain consists of 11 distinct summits and extends for nearly 8 km in a northwest to southeast direction. On the northeast side, an unbreached wall of rock and ice rises between 400 m and 1,300 m from the Goodall Glacier. The first ascent was achieved on August 21, 2006 by Roger Wallis, Don Chiasson, and Jim Lundy. They established its height, only 16 m lower than #1. As of 2015, only four of Goodall's 11 summits have been conquered. Mount Goodall is one of six peaks in this area named in 1966 in honor of Canadian soldiers from the Quesnel area who were killed in action during World War II; it is named for Trooper Walter Henry Goodall, age 24.
3) Garnet Peak, 2876 m. This is a prominent landmark from many viewpoints in southern Wells Gray Park. It is located north of Azure Lake. The first ascent was by Hugh Neave, Tor Schmid and Barbara Hargreaves on August 29, 1974. It was long believed to be the Park's highest mountain until expeditions to the north boundary found the above two peaks were higher.
4) "Unnamed Peak, 2861 m, 1.5 km SE of Mount Goodall". This is the second highest summit of the Goodall group and has been unofficially called "The Black Cone". Its first ascent was on July 30, 2012 by Paul Geddes, Norm Greene, and Bill McKenzie.
5) Mount Pierrway, 2854 m. It was first climbed in 1969 by Art Maki and Art Wilder. The second ascent was in 1987 and the third in 2005. This honors another World War II casualty, Private Alfred Pierrway, age 22.
6) "Unnamed Peak, 2847 m, 3.7 km WSW of Mount Pierrway". It is located on the north park boundary. As of 2015, there is no record of this peak being climbed, therefore it is Wells Gray Park's highest unclimbed mountain.
7) Mount Hugh Neave, 2829 m. Located east of Hobson Lake and north of Garnet Peak. Hugh Neave, first to summit Garnet Peak, and Peter Cowan attempted to climb it in 1972 via Hobson Glacier to the east, but were forced to turn back by difficult terrain. Two expeditions in the 1990s failed to reach the summit. It was named for Hugh Neave after his death in 1988.
8) "Unnamed Peak, 2797 m, 3.1 km SE of Mount Beaman".

History

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Wells Gray area was a valued hunting ground to the Secwepemc, Tsilhqot'in and Canim Lake aboriginal groups. This resulted in a conflict about 1875 over access to caribou herds. Geographic names like "Battle Mountain", "Fight Lake", "Battle Creek" and "Indian Valley" recall this period.
The Overlanders expedition to the Cariboo goldfields rafted down the North Thompson River in 1862. When they arrived at the mouth of the Clearwater River, they noted its distinct clarity compared to the muddy North Thompson and named it Clear Water. In 1863, the first tourists, Lord Milton and Dr. Cheadle, traveled through the North Thompson Valley and solidified the Clearwater River name by publishing it in their journal, The Northwest Passage by Land .
Between 1872 and 1881, about 20 survey parties fanned out across British Columbia trying to find the best route for the Canadian Pacific Railway between Yellowhead Pass in the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Coast. Three survey parties visited what is now Wells Gray Park. In 1873, Marcus Smith, searching for the ideal route to Bute Inlet, visited Hobson Lake and Mahood Lake. In 1874, the railway dispatched a survey party to explore the headwaters of the Clearwater River, under the leadership of E.W. Jarvis. The altitude of the pass was calculated at and the route skirted an immense glacier before descending to the Raush River, a tributary of the Fraser River — "clearly impracticable for a railway line". When the more southern Kicking Horse Pass was chosen instead in 1881, all the meticulously examined routes in what is now Wells Gray Park were abandoned. Only three place names in the park recognize those 10 wasted years of surveys: Murtle River & Lake, Mahood River & Lake, and Marcus Falls.
Helmcken Falls was discovered in 1913 by Robert Lee, a land surveyor working for the British Columbia government. He was so impressed with the waterfall that he wrote a letter from his remote camp to Sir Richard McBride, Premier of British Columbia, requesting that the falls be named "McBride Falls". Three weeks later, Lee received a reply from the Premier stating that the waterfall was instead to be called Helmcken Falls. This name honoured John Sebastian Helmcken, a physician with the Hudson's Bay Company who arrived in Victoria in 1850. He helped bring British Columbia into Canadian Confederation in 1871. Dr. Helmcken died in 1920 at the age of 95, but never actually saw the falls himself.
The first homesteaders in what is now Wells Gray Park were John Ray in 1911 at The Horseshoe, who was given land by the Canim Lake Band, and Michael Majerus in 1912 on the Murtle River near Dawson Falls. Both cleared land, built cabins and established isolated lifestyles far from other people. Other settlers who arrived between 1918 and 1925 were the Ludtke family, Lewis Rupell, Pete McDougal, Jack Zellers, Dave Anderson, Alex Fage and Herman Ordschig.
On July 16, 1926, the entire Clearwater Valley between First Canyon and the Murtle River was destroyed by a forest fire. It started from a lightning strike west of the Clearwater River, smouldered for several weeks, then was fanned by winds and moved rapidly north through the homesteads. The Ludtke family immersed themselves in Battle Creek for 8 hours, dampening some blankets to cover their heads, and their livestock and even wild animals joined them for protection. The Rupell cabin was the only one that did not burn. The fire crossed the Murtle River and burned part way up Kilpill Mountain. After its initial rampage, it burned slowly in the marshes of the Murtle Plateau until mid-August, when it was finally extinguished by a heavy rain. Over of the Clearwater Valley were burned and most settlers lost almost everything they owned. However, there was not a single human fatality.
Soon after the discovery of Helmcken Falls, a park was suggested to preserve the waterfall. Nothing happened, so in 1925 the B.C. Auto Club started a campaign to establish a park around the falls. The Minister of Lands, Duff Pattullo, was not interested and rebuffed the club by stating that the falls were there and could not get away, so why bother setting up a park. In the mid-1930s, there were more recommendations for a park at Helmcken Falls. Finally the government began to listen, mostly because a new Minister of Lands, Arthur Wellesley Gray, was interested in parks and recognized the growing need to preserve special places in British Columbia. In 1938, Gray and his Chief Forester, Ernest Manning, created Tweedsmuir Provincial Park in the Coast Mountains near Bella Coola and Hamber Provincial Park in the Rocky Mountains. In 1939, a forest ranger near Clearwater, Bill Noble, recommended a park and on November 28, 1939, Gray passed an Order-in-Council creating a huge park around most of the drainage basin of the Clearwater River. He named the park for himself. In 1941, he and Manning were working on establishing a new park in British Columbia's Cascade Mountains when Manning was killed in a plane crash and that park was named E.C. Manning Provincial Park. Tourists and hikers of the 21st century owe much to the vision of Gray and Manning. The original park, when created, did not include Trophy Mountain or the Flourmill Volcanoes, and originally included the Pendleton Lakes in the west. In 1986, the Pendleton Lakes were eliminated from the park while the former two areas were added to the park.
In 2018 Sarlacc's Pit cave was discovered in the park. Notable for its size, the entrance pit measures some 100m x 60m, and a 61m waterfall on the pit wall is fed by snowpack and glacier meltwater.

Clearwater River dams

The disastrous flood of the Fraser River in 1948 nearly changed the Clearwater River and Wells Gray Park forever. In November 1947, the Federal Minister of Public Works proposed the creation of a joint federal-provincial committee to study the Fraser's water resources. The flood made this project all the more urgent and, in late 1948, the Dominion-Provincial Board, Fraser River Basin was established to report on power generation, fisheries, flood control, water supply and recreation. Between 1949 and 1954, the committee of ten collected basic data and filled in the gaps in other government studies. No report was produced, but, in 1953, 12 detailed maps of the Clearwater River between Hemp Creek and the North Thompson River were published. These had a scale of 1 inch = 500 feet and a contour interval of 20 feet. Over 50 years later, these sheets are still the most detailed and accurate topographic maps available of the lower Clearwater, although they are out-of-date regarding human developments.
The Fraser River committee proposed two dams, one just upstream from Clearwater and one at Sabre Tooth Rapids, but nothing happened. In 1955, the federal and provincial governments replaced this committee with a smaller one, the Fraser River Board, which had only four members. It was directed to determine what development of the Fraser's water resources would be feasible, particularly regarding flood control and hydro-electric power. The Board published two preliminary reports, one about flood control in 1956 and one about hydro-electric developments in 1958.
The idea of developing hydro power from the Clearwater River and its tributaries was not new to the Fraser River Board. In 1918, Helmcken Falls was studied as a source of power for Kamloops, although the length of the transmission lines ended that notion. In the late 1940s, the Aluminum Company of Canada examined the power potential of Helmcken Falls, but chose Kitimat instead, thereby flooding northern Tweedsmuir Park instead of Wells Gray. In 1959, a comprehensive development of the Murtle River was proposed by the British Columbia Power Commission.
All these proposals pale in comparison to the final report of the Fraser River Board, issued in 1963. Although dams were proposed elsewhere such as on the Cariboo and McGregor Rivers and at the Grand Canyon of the Fraser, the Clearwater River attracted most of the attention with seven dams and five reservoirs recommended. The dams would be located upstream from the North Thompson confluence, at the lower end of Granite Canyon, at Sabre Tooth Rapids, near Myanth Falls, at the outlet of Hobson Lake and on the low pass between Hobson and Quesnel Lakes. Together, these dams would turn the Clearwater River into a 160 km long series of reservoirs extending nearly to its glacial source above Hobson Lake. Each dam would back water almost to the foot of the next one, similar to the Columbia River today which has little free-flowing water. The dam at Sabre Tooth Rapids would be the highest at, flooding most of Helmcken Canyon, inundating Sylvia and Goodwin Falls, and submerging the bottom of Helmcken Falls. The plan for Bailey's Chute envisaged two dams; the lower dam at Myanth Falls would divert the river into a power canal ending at Bailey's Chute. Collectively, the proposal was called System E and the cost of construction was estimated at $398,503,500.
There was little reaction, positive or negative, to the Fraser River Board's report. In the 1960s, there was less leisure time than today, and the public was not too concerned about losing remote preserves such as Wells Gray Park, when British Columbia had so much wilderness land. The park may have been saved because the British Columbia government was preoccupied in the 1960s with planning and building the W.A.C. Bennett Dam on the Peace River and Mica Dam, Keenleyside Dam and Duncan Dam, all part of the Columbia River Treaty projects.
In 1971, BC Hydro, the provincial power utility, revived the Fraser River Board's report and took a new look at the feasibility and costs of building the seven dams on the Clearwater River. Fortunately, in just a decade, the environmental movement had gained power and credibility in the province, and BC Hydro's interest in the Clearwater quickly caught the attention of the Shuswap-Thompson River Research and Development Association and the newly formed Yellowhead Ecological Association based in Clearwater, BC. One of the undertakings was to offer bus tours of Wells Gray Park during the summer of 1972. The tours stopped at viewpoints where the volunteer guides urged passengers to imagine how the valley would look when flooded by the dams. The strategy was very effective and succeeded in creating an uproar of protest about the dams. Within a year, the plan to dam the Clearwater River was quietly shelved, but BC Hydro retained its water rights until 1987 when the flooding reserve on the Clearwater was cancelled.

Natural history

Wells Gray Park is bordered on every side by different types of terrain and these merge within the boundaries to give the park its great diversity. According to B.C. Parks, Wells Gray contains over 700 species of vascular plants, over 200 species of mushrooms, 56 species of mammals and 219 species of birds. There are many factors that so enrich the park and these include the 1926 forest fire, the proximity of the Fraser Plateau westward, the Cariboo Mountains northeastward, the interior wet belt eastward, and the semi-desert zone to the south. Within the Park, micro-climates, altitude, soil type, and the availability of water all have their effects and contribute to the existence of this large variety of plant and animal life. The park is densely forested with conifers and areas above have extensive alpine meadows. Nature Wells Gray is recommended to visitors seeking detailed information about the park's natural history.

Wildlife

This park is home to various birds as well as the mammalian species of grizzly bear, white-tailed deer, beaver, moose, mule deer, black bear and timber wolf.

Climate

Winters in the Clearwater Valley are severe, with an average of of accumulated snow at lower elevations and much more higher up. Snow may linger along the low elevation roads until mid-April and never completely disappears from the north sides of the mountains. Early May and most of June are often rainy and, during the summer, storms occur about once a week. Average annual precipitation at Clearwater is and this increases as one travels north into the Park and closer to the mountains. Clearwater Lake receives over and Azure Lake about. Summer temperatures in the Clearwater Valley are often in the mid-20s Celsius, but may reach 30 degrees, and vary considerably according to altitude. September through mid-October usually features clear warm days, cool nights and colourful fall foliage.

Access

There are five roads that provide access to Wells Gray Park.
The park is popular from mid-May through mid-October. Campgrounds are open and serviced from late May to mid-September. The park is open year-round, but in winter the Clearwater Valley Road is plowed only as far as Helmcken Falls. Following are the park's major attractions:
Wells Gray Park bears the nickname "Canada's Waterfalls Park" because 39 waterfalls are found within its boundaries. There are actually many more, if you count the numerous creeks that cascade down the mountainsides, but the following table lists the named waterfalls.
Waterfall NameHeight in metresLocation
Allison15Philip Creek below Philip Lake
Are15Philip Creek above confluence with Trout Creek
Bailey's Chute10Clearwater River above The Horseshoe
Candle Creek10Candle Creek near Clearwater River
Canim25Canim River between Canim and Mahood Lakes
Coal Creek40Coal Creek in the Hemp Canyonlands
Cougar20Cougar Creek falling into Helmcken Canyon
Crystal30Unnamed creek flowing into north side of Azure Lake
Dawson20Murtle River
Deception50Deception Creek above Mahood Lake
Fage30Fage Creek near Clearwater River
Falls Creek4Confluence of Falls Creek and Clearwater River
Garnet30Garnet Creek above Azure Lake
Goodwin10Mahood River below Sylvia Falls
Helmcken141Murtle River
Hemp8Hemp Creek west of The Flatiron
Horseshoe6 and 10Murtle River
Ida20Third Canyon Creek near Buck Hill
Lifely10Unnamed creek flowing into east side of Clearwater Lake
Mahood20Unnamed creek, part of Canim River outflow from Canim Lake
Majerus12Murtle River
Marcus5Clearwater River above Bailey's Chute
McDiarmid10Grouse Creek near confluence with Clearwater River
McDougall14Murtle River below Murtle Lake
Meadow8Murtle River below McDougall Falls
Moul35Grouse Creek above confluence with Clearwater River
Mushbowl5Murtle River at Clearwater Valley Road bridge
Myanth3Clearwater River above Marcus Falls
Osprey3Clearwater River at mouth of Clearwater Lake
Rainbow20Angus Horne Creek above Azure Lake
Roostertail10Unnamed creek flowing into south side of Azure Lake
Second Canyon15Second Canyon Creek below Clearwater Valley Road
Silvertip200Silvertip Creek above Spahats Creek Road
Spahats75Spahats Creek near confluence with Clearwater River
Sticta10Falls Creek 1 km upstream from Clearwater River
Sundt25Lickskillet Creek near Hobson Lake
Sylvia20Mahood River 3.5 km above Clearwater River
Third Canyon8 and 10Third Canyon Creek above Clearwater Valley Road
Triple Decker60Candle Creek below Clearwater Valley Road

Campgrounds

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