South Chilcotin Provincial Park
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South Chilcotin Provincial Park, officially the Southern Chilcotin Mountains Provincial Park and Spruce Lake Protected Area is a British Columbia Provincial Park located on the inland lea of the Pacific Ranges of the Coast Mountains, between the Bridge River Country to the south and the Chilcotin Plateau to the north. Part of the larger subcomplex of the Pacific Ranges known as the Chilcotin Ranges, the park was finally protected in the 1990s after 60 years of debate and controversy.
This region actually contains only a portion of the southern Chilcotin Ranges and partly is in the Bridge River Country, historically connected to the Lillooet Country which lies to its south and east and not part of the Chilcotin District. It remains the object of a protracted quarrel between preservationist and resource development which first began in the 1930s when prospectors and guide-outfitters dedicated to its natural beauty proposed it be preserved. One manifestation of these proposals bore the name of one of the driving forces of the original movement to preserve the area, Charlie Cunningham, whose career as a wildlife film-maker began in this area. The Charlie Cunningham Wilderness proposal was revised in the 1970s as the Spruce Lake-Eldorado park proposal, but as land-use plans impinged on the proposed park area this name was abandoned.
A provincial park has finally been established after many years of campaigning, but its political status is uncertain and the area preserved is greatly reduced from the original proposals to protect it, which began in the 1930s during the heyday of the Bridge River goldfield towns just to the south.
The area's unique and distinct landscape and ecology, so different even from the rest of the Chilcotin Ranges or the rest of the Bridge River Country, is what made it stand out for protection amid a region already wild and extremely beautiful (especially back in the 1930s, long before logging, hydroelectric development transformed the valley to the south.. The neighbouring Dickson, Shulaps and Bendor Ranges are all unprotected and have been or are being heavily logged, except for special preserves in alpine areas of the Shulaps and in its neighbour to the east, the Camelsfoot Range.
Many on the environmentalist side hope that the creation of Ts'ilos and Big Creek Provincial Parks will help shore up the protection of the South Chilcotin Provincial Park which remains vulnerable to government review. Hunting guide Ted (Chilco) Choate of Gaspard Lake, on the Chilcotin Plateau just northeast of the South Chilcotins Park has joined in the call to combine all these three parks, plus the Churn Creek Protected Area to their northeast, plus some of the surrounding country and the deep, much higher heart of the Pacific Ranges into a National Park. Industry and government remain publicly committed to shared use and sustainable planning.
[edit] First Nations History of the Southern Chilcotin Mountains
Historically this region was the hunting territory of Chief Hunter Jack of the Lakes Lillooet, whose big-game hunting business shared the region with hunters of the Tsilhqot'in people. The shared use of the area north of the Bridge River and Gun Creek was part of the settlement of an early 19th Century peace which had ended a long and bloody war between Hunter Jack's people and the Tsilhqot'in.
Trails from the Bridge River Country led over the many ranges of the region to Taseko Lake and Chilko Lake in the Chilcotin Country, and also east across the Camelsfoot Range to the Fraser River near Big Bar.
