Wells Gray Park is a wonderful wilderness featuring spectacular natural beauty, offering awesome adventures that many British Columbians and visitors are well familiar with, through anything from white-water kayaking down the Clearwater River to visiting the majestic Helmcken Falls, Mahood Falls and Dawson Falls.
However, what many people may not know about are the park’s abundance of historical treasures and its unique diversity in significant ecological and biological features that are hidden beneath the layers of ice or sheltered behind the globally rare inland rainforests where no roads exist, even today.
Set in western Canada’s Columbia Mountains, it maintains a wetter climate than it’s neighbouring parks in Canada’s Rocky Mountains and therefore hosts a more diverse heritage, with significantly different biological, geological and cultural aspects that hold some amazing examples of the history of the earth.
While this vast park covers an incredibly immense 540,000 hectares, much of which remains almost untouched by the hands and machines of modern humankind, the Wells Gray Wilderness Society Centre (WGWHC) has nominated it for consideration as a UNESCO World Heritage Site – and you may be able to help them further preserve and protect this natural wonderland for generations to come.
Dr. Catherine Hickson chairs the Wells Gray World Heritage Committee and is a director on the WGWHC, along with other park scientists and experts, who are responding to the federal government’s call for World Heritage Site nominations as part of celebrating Canada’s 150th year since confederation.
Hickson is a volcanologist who studies the unique heritage from glaciers to volcanoes and the geological features and pathways they create and leave behind as canyons and lava beds.
“We consider the entire area still to have the potential for future volcanic eruptions.”
While Mahood Lake gets visitors further into the heart of the park, there is no access because of the waterfalls and a bridge that washed out decades ago, but there is a cluster of young volcanic cinder cones there – small (inactive) volcanoes less than 10,00 years old – that are a good example of the important historic features of the park.
“Much of the volcanism occurred underneath glacial ice, so it allows us a snapshot of our past climate when the area was overlain by massive amounts of glacial ice. We’ve been able to document at least three periods of glacial activity in the last three million years using the evidence through these subglacial volcanoes that are present in the park.”
As those volcanoes erupted under glacial ice several kilometres thick, the intense heat from its lava created cavities protecting some very unique landforms that allow scientists, like Hickson, to read ancient geological information.
Another director on the society board seeking World Heritage Site status, naturalist Trevor Goward, says amongst all its abundant features, Wells Gray Park is home to more major waterfalls than any other area of its size in North America.
The botany and lichen expert notes the park’s 435 species of lichen flora is the most diverse range in the world, as well as growing some of the lushest and most extensive subalpine flower meadows on the continent.
Wells Gray offers one of the final strongholds to Canada’s endangered Mountain Caribou, while Murtle Lake is believed to be the largest lake in the world restricted to non-motorized boats.
The incredible leaf pattern of its watershed is almost entirely encapsulated by the bowl of mountain canyons within Wells Gray Park, practically unheard of in parks anywhere else in the world, he explains.
That’s because there is no place where pollution or contamination from any other waterways can affect Clearwater Lake, with the exception of Mahood Lake (and its watershed), located in a smaller, southwestern arm of the park.
“In terms of preservation in the long term, that’s hugely important.”
Another unique and extremely important aspect of the park is in its waterfalls’ mist that actually creates a stable habitat zone for plant species.
When major climate change inevitably happens, all unprotected plant species will die and most of these BC Interior valleys burn, these seemingly innocuous, misty zones will become very important places to the survival of the species in the long term.
“The one kind of place that is probably going to stay basically unchanged will be these waterfall spray zones. They are little time capsules where plants will probably survive, where otherwise, they will probably disappear.”
The society’s nomination letter states that Wells Gray Park was established ahead of colonial settlement here, and is, in essence, a living museum, preserving to a remarkable degree a vast landscape ecologically continuous with its past, and belongs to a class of wilderness reserves now globally rare in many regions.
It notes that Wells Gray Park is located on the traditional territory of three First Nations: Simpw First Nation, Tsq’escen’ (Canim Lake Band) and Xats’ull/Cmetem’ (Soda/Deep Creek), who have all been made aware of this application and their support is currently being sought through appropriate channels.
Hickson explains a World Heritage Site designation wouldn’t have any effect on treaty negotiations or change how the national park is currently managed, used or protected, she explains.
Whether you have a business related to tourism, or an ecological, economic or environmental knowledge and interest, Hickson encourages you to write a letter of support recommending Wells Gray Provincial Park as a World Heritage Site (particularly those with tourism interests, and local governments). More information is online at www.wellsgrayworldheritage.ca.
Noting the list of those being considered won’t be released until December, Hickson says becoming a World Heritage Site has such a huge economic development impact to any area that even making it onto the shortlist is a big deal.
To support Wells Gray as a World Heritage Site, e-mail your letter to pc.listeindicative-tentativelist.pc@pc.gc.ca, cc’d to Catherine Hickson at ttgeo@telus.net and/or mail your printed letter to: George Green, Vice-President, Indigenous Affairs and Cultural Heritage Directorate, Parks Canada, 30 Victoria Street, 3rd fl, Room 323 PC-03-J, Gatineau, Quebec, J8X 0B3.
