Land of Fire, Ice and Torrent:
The Landscapes of Wells Gray

Most of Wells Gray Country lies inside the boundary of Wells Gray Provincial Park, a vast wilderness preserving pristine forests, high mountains, roaring rivers and big lakes, and the plants and wildlife which live among them.

In 1913, surveyor Robert Lee was the first European to set eyes on the astounding 145m cascade of the Murtle River over what was later to be named Helmcken Falls. This feature alone was enough to lead to the establishment of the Park in 1939, and its naming for Arthur Wellesley Gray, a prominent provincial politician of the time. The founders had the foresight to include the entire headwaters of the Clearwater River’s watershed, thereby preserving the great majority of a complete ecological unit: this was improved further in the mid-1990s, when the Park’s boundary was pushed further south along the Clearwater valley.

Big 'n' Wild
Wells Gray covers an area of some 5,400km², and is the fourth-largest of BC’s provincial parks. It is nearly the same size as Banff National Park, and larger than Yoho, Kootenay, Glacier, Mt Revelstoke and Pacific Rim National Parks all put together. With the adjoining Cariboo Mountain and Bowron Lakes Parks further to the north, it helps to preserve a wilderness of more than 8,000km² (3,000 sq miles) - larger than many entire countries!

The Park protects a great diversity of landscapes and their associated eco-systems, which have evolved through a fascinating series of natural events. The following sections will cover just a little of this detail...

Mountain High
High mountains occupy much of the Park, stretching up to nearly 3,000m (10,000ft). Many are capped by large icefields, which feed glacial streams and the lakes below. These highlands form the south-eastern limit of the Cariboo Mountains, a range raised by immense pressures in the earth’s crust as the Pacific oceanic tectonic plate was consumed beneath the western seaboard of North America.

This also resulted in intense volcanic activity: huge volumes of basaltic lava erupted throughout the area, continuing until only a few hundred years ago. This has left a legacy of cones, vents, and lava-beds, most of which are still easily recognisable throughout the area today: indeed, scientific opinion is still not convinced that the volcanic activity is entirely extinct, but we’re not expecting an eruption anytime soon…

Much of this took place during glacial periods: when the lava erupted, the ice above melted rapidly - sometimes explosively. The interaction between lava and the water released in this way gave rise to many rare geological features. In  warmer interglacial times, the erupting lava rapidly filled the deep glacial valleys with soft, unstable rock, which was rapidly eroded by river-action.

Valley Deep
Wells Gray’s glaciers and snowfields are a tiny remnant of the vast ice-sheets which pulsed into the area from the north during a series of glacial events lasting until about 10,000 years ago. The ice gouged major valleys from the rock as it advanced, exploiting deep structural weaknesses in the Earth's crust to form the basins for the big lakes we see today: Hobson and Azure, which feed Clearwater Lake, and Murtle in the east.

These lakes provide one of the major attractions for those who visit Wells Gray for outdoor adventures: they offer some of the best canoe-camping country to be found anywhere.

They also act as giant filtration tanks, allowing the glacial sediment carried out of the mountains by the rivers to settle out, making the Clearwater River (into which they all eventually drain) so, well - clear.

Rapid Progress
When layers of soft, unstable lava filled the glacial valleys, the energetic rivers quickly eroded it to give the deep, narrow gorges we see now throughout the Park. Where they have encountered harder rock, waterfalls and rapids have developed to give Wells Gray its nickname of the ‘Waterfall Park’.

In the more accessible southern part of the Park and immediately around its borders, there are over twenty major cascades, torrents, rapids and falls. Many of these are a short stroll from the parking-lot: others are an hour or two’s walk: some are a fairly major expedition which may take a day to complete, perhaps involving the use of a boat. If you'd like to see a representation of these in a new window, click here.

Of course, there are countless others deeper into the back-country for those who are able to get to them. It’s possible that some of these may not have been seen by another human for many years - if ever!