Gorges of the Golden Cayoosh - Canyons of the Lillooet Country

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Bridge River Canyon	Fountain & Glen Fraser	Pavilion-Moran	Fountain Ridge
Marble Canyon	Nkoomptch (Seton Creek Gorge)	Cayoosh Canyon	Seton Bluffs & McNeils
Moha to Applespring	Xwisten (Lower Bridge River)	The Upper Fraser Big Bar to Soda Creek	The Big Slide
Hurley Canyon		Lytton & the Thompson Canyon	Maps

The canyons of the Lillooet Country focus on Lillooet, but as a group span a region more than a hundred miles square. The great gorge of the Fraser extends far beyond the Lillooet area, however, running north a few hundred miles from Lillooet through Fountain and High Bar to Gang Ranch and Dog Creek, a region that is rarely travelled although stretches of it are often featured in photographic travelogues of BC, and of cousre south through the better-known parts of the Fraser Canyon to Yale and Hope. The lesser-known Fraser Canyon above Lillooet is framed by wide rangeland benches encayoned by rolling pine alpine plateaux, cut by a deeper low canyon. Tthe vista is a classic one of the Old West. Indeed, it was in the Gold Rush of '58 era that the image of the western wilderness frontier became forged in the popular imagination; thousands of American miners returned back from the Cariboo and Fraser gold rushes to California Dixie and New England; at the time most of the American Rockies and Plains (north of the Platte, anyway) were still unmarred by the Indian Wars. In a very real way, the Lillooet and its sister regions in BC (the Cariboo, the Kootenay) embody an actual part of "the American West" that most Canadians and Americans alike are unaware. Any American visitor looking at pictures of the Golden Mile in Lillooet would immediately mistake the town for something out of their own history, ratherh than Canada's

In the wider canyon vale that runs south from Lillooet to Boston Bar where, the valleys of the Cayoosh, Seton, Blue Pavilion and other creekswatersheds within a range of the canyonland's focus at Lillooet and Fountain. The great complex of gorges and alpine that is the basin of the Bridge River, once near-legendary even in modern times for its unique remoteness and stunning beauty, runs some 120 miles from the great Lillooet Icecap in the central Coast Mountains through a spectacular series of basins and canyons to its confluence with the Fraser; its middle canyon, downstream from Terzaghi Dam to the Yalakom's merger with the Bridge at Moha, is a staggering gorge of towering 5000' cliffs closed in on a narrow, rocky rivercourse strewn with giant boulders of jade and variegated granite. The Bridge's lower canyon below Moha and Horseshoe Wash to the Fraser is now dry of most of its natural waterflow, but still has stunning stretches of deep pools and jade-coloured rapids running beneath steep canyon walls, flanked on all sides by soaring mountain flanks and glimpses of high alpine. The Yalakom River's canyon upstream from Moha is relatively short but incredibly narrow The largest of the upper Bridge River canyons is that of the Hurley River, also called 'the South Fork' [of the Bridge], views of which visitors are treated to on the main road between Gold Bridge and Bralorne, the canyon's east wall where the road runs being about 2500' above the river, although it's only about eight miles long from Hurley Falls below Bralorne to its confluence with the main course of the Bridge at Haylmore (a 'suburb' of Gold Bridge). The lower canyon of Gun Creek runs some thirty miles, and though it is not of great depth is fiercely rocky, filled with the creek's powerful waters.

[MAP}bridge-marble.gif

Photo: Mike Cleven This is among the most historically famous of the great scenic views of the Lillooet Country: the view north up the Fraser Canyon from the 12 Mile Roadhouse at Fountain. Travellers from farther south along the Fraser were forced by geography to detour through Fountain Valley in order to get to Lillooet or (before the construction of the Lytton-Clinton stretch) in order to reach the Cariboo Wagon Road for the journey north; this was the view that greeted them as they descended to the Fraser. For a few months in 1858-9, Fountain was nearly as famous and busy a staging ground for the Gold Rush as Lillooet. The ruins of the 12 Mile Roadhouse adjoin the site of this roadside view, which lies along the original route of the Wagon Road through the Fraser Canyon's grandest stretch. What is not easily evident from this roadside view is the depth of the Fraser's gorge at Fountain. The canyon walls seen here only constitute the deepest level of a multi-layered canyon that cascades down from alpine heights on either side, some 4-7000 feet of vertical above the river (elev. c.1000'), depending on which of the many summits about Fountain the measurement is takenl. The eastern flank (up to the right; see below) is actually a plateau edge of high, flat summits known as the Clear Range. From the highway it appears to be a line of peaks, and may be fairly easily accessed by a mix of road and hiking from the Hat Creek basin and the south wall of Marble Canyon. The left wall at this point is a spearhead-shaped ridge that is the last abutment of the 80-mile Camelsfoot Range, named for camels brought in during the gold rush, some of whom reputedly ran wild in the montane deserts of central BC (of which the Camelfsoot Range is typical). Camelsfoot Point is the name of the 7000' summit immediately above the southward point of the Fraser's bend at Fountain, and is itself only the foreshoulder of 9000+ Camelsfoot Peak in behind. In the view shown, this is the bank at left; the summit in the background is actually only a low forehill of the Camelsfoot and Black Dome Ranges and the plateaux in behind; the Fraser comes from to the right of it.

Six Mile Rapids, Fountain BC Photo: Mike Cleven The scale of the Fountain Gorge of the Grand Canyon of the Fraser is hard to describe, and only a bit less difficult to depict photographically. The image at left is a close-up of the same scene as at right, which lies at the southward turn of the Great Bend in the Fraser between Glen Fraser and the Bridge River Bridge. At this point, the Fraser carves its course through the rocks shown, turning back northwards for one short mile, then bending west again to turn directly south. Mountains on either side of the river (elev. 1000') soar up to 7000' and beyond on both sides, with the canyon's depths among the driest and most sheltered places north of the Columbia. The grand beauty of the place, and its favourable situation for human habitation, inspired the legend that this was one of the three principal homes in North America of the great spirit-being, Coyote the Trickster. Archaeological finds in the Fountain area are among the oldest in the Northwest, and it is believed that humans have always lived here - after the retreat of the icecap, that is. The 'Xaxlip (Fountain) First Nation of the St'at'imc People reside in a large village on the benchlands adjacent to the gorge containing the Six Mile Rapids, which were among the richest fisheries anywhere within British Columbia for centuries and central to the economy and society of the Interior First Nations peoples of BC, and key to the cultural and political importance of the St'at'imc in the old days, as today.	Photo: Mike Cleven
BC Archives # A-06133

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