Spruce Lake Protected Area
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The Spruce Lake Protected Area, formerly known variously as the Southern Chilcotin Mountains Provincial Park or Southern Chilcotins, and also as South Chilcotin Provincial Park and usually known as the South Chilcotin or South Chilcotins. It is a Protected Area in the British Columbia provincial parks system and has been the subject of an ongoing preservationist controversy since the 1930s. Former park plans were put forward as Charlie Cunningham Wilderness and the Spruce Lake-Eldorado Mountain Wilderness.
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[edit] Protected area status
The area was designated as a protected area by the BC provincial government in 2001, though not the full provincial park status hoped for by various advocacy groups, with park boundaries greatly reduced from the original proposed boundaries and resource extraction allowed on some areas on the protected area's periphery. The protected area designation resulted from the Lillooet Land and Resource Management Plan (LRMP), in which local communities, environmental, recreation and resource interests were attempted to be addressed. Even thought it is not in the Chilcotin District proper, the area has been called the "South Chilcotins" since about 1980 when a group of conservationists started to promote the area for protection as a park. The South Chilcotin name is derived from its geographic position in the Chilcotin Ranges, into the Bridge River Country where the park is located.
[edit] Location
The protected area is located 200 km north of Vancouver on the inland lea of the Pacific Ranges of the Coast Mountains, on the north flank of the Bridge River Country and the Chilcotin Country to the north. It adjoins Big Creek Provincial Park and Ts'il?os Provincial Park, which border it on the north and northwest, respectively. Part of the larger subcomplex of the Pacific Ranges known as the Chilcotin Ranges, the area was partially protected in the 1990s after 60 years of debate and controversy, although its status as a provincial park was downgraded to protected area in 2007.
This region 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.
The original proposals to protect it began in the 1930s during the heyday of the Bridge River goldfield towns just to the south. It has been proposed under a number of names, including the Charlie Cunningham Wilderness and the Spruce Lake-Eldorado Park Proposal, and also as the Spruce Lake Management Planning Unit.
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
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 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.
