The railroad remains the best viewing platform to marvel at much of the Fraser River. One train company, Canadian operator Rocky Mountaineer, provides a luxurious means to explore much of this grand river’s vast watershed. In northern B.C. one of the train’s routes meets the river at Lillooet, B.C., shadowing for miles through Quesnel and Prince George before taking a southeastern turn to hug the Fraser’s banks into the Canadian Rockies to Jasper, Alberta.
Two more routes in the south follow the Fraser from Vancouver to Lytton, B.C. before coursing onward to Banff and Lake Louise in Alberta. These southern routes reveal the Fraser Canyon and Hell’s Gate, a ferocious narrowing of the Fraser River that Scottish explorer, the eponymous Simon Fraser, portaged around, famously writing, “surely we have encountered the gates of hell.” Over 200 million gallons of water surge through Hell’s Gate every minute, more than twice the volume that flows over Niagara Falls. It’s just one of scores of natural and cultural features that spread like evergreen forests across B.C. and the Canadian Rockies.
Once named “New Caledonia” by Fraser, Europeans considered this part of the B.C. mainland a remote fur trading territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company - that is, until word spread in the late-1850s that gold had been extracted from the banks of the Fraser River Canyon. By 1858 more than 30,000 prospectors had poured into the Fraser River Valley. This mass incursion would soon lead the British government to establish British Columbia as a crown colony of the Empire.
Farther north, the Cariboo Gold Rush began on the banks of the Fraser two years later leading to prosperous times for Quesnel and Barkerville, the latter a preserved heritage site named for successful prospector Billy Barker. As the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush faded, miners decamped from Yale, at the time the most populous city west of Chicago and north of San Francisco, for the arduous 380-miles long “Cariboo Trail” to Barkerville.
“The Fraser River is an incredible geography,” observes Daniel Marshall, PhD, adjunct assistant professor of history at the University of Victoria and leading Fraser River Canyon Gold Rush expert. “Not only does it pass so many different climatic environmental zones, Kamloops is the northern most extension of the high heat great American desert. Additionally, the main stem of the Fraser has never been dammed so when you travel the Fraser Canyon you witness what the pre-dammed Columbia River must have looked like. It’s just magnificent!”
The miners who rushed up the Fraser were likely too blinded by gold dust to appreciate the astounding natural setting through which they traveled. From the coastal rainforest populated with ancient cedar, Douglas firs and hemlocks to the northern reaches of desert and then into the Canadian Rockies, the Fraser traverses a diverse swath of breathtaking scenery unparalleled by all but a few watersheds on earth.
Though British Columbia wouldn’t come into being until 1871 when it joined the Canada Federation, the birth of this magnificent province, among the most environmentally and culturally diverse places on earth, began with the 1858 Fraser Canyon Gold Rush.
“You travel through an ancient world when you follow the Fraser River,” declares Professor Marshall. “From the Coastal Salish to the Interior Salish regions, these indigenous territories are occupied by people who have been here 8,000 to 10,000 years!”
And it isn’t just the natural splendor that will have you reaching for your camera as you travel along the river. Cisco Crossing contains two trestles over the Cisco (for Siska – unpredictable) waters. The Canadian Pacific Railway (CP) engineers arrived three decades before their Canadian National Railway (CN) counterparts, so they naturally built the CP trestle in the safest section of the canyon. The CN engineers had no choice but to construct their truss bridge on the more challenging opposite side. Perched 220-feet high and spanning 812-feet, the CN bridge is the largest single span bridge on the line.
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