The Morice River is the outflow of Morice Lake south west of Houston, British Columbia, Canada. Morice Lake and Morice River are named after Father Adrien-Gabriel Morice Geographic Name details The Morice River is a small river when it leaves Morice Lake but it converges with the Thautil and Gosnell Rivers approximately 15 KM downstream at which point it gains a lot of volume and would best be described as a medium size river. The Morice river continues on to the town of Houston at which point the river is joined by a small tributary river called "The Little Bulkley" and the two rivers joined become the Bulkley River. They become the Bulkley, not the Morice despite the fact the Morice is larger. This was done by Poudrier, a government cartographer whom, it is rumoured, never saw the region.
The Morice River was listed as the 6th most endangered river in British Columbia due to the proposed Enbridge Pipeline. The report was issued by the Outdoor Recreation Council of British Columbia.[1]
Report Excerpt:
The Morice River, which joins the Bulkley River near Houston, helps form one of BC’s most productive river systems. However, the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline will run along the Morice and its tributaries for close to 60 kilometres with a crossing of the Morice 50 km south west of Houston. The Morice produces 30% of the Chinook Salmon in the entire Skeena system and also plays a major role in providing extensive Sockeye Salmon and Coho Salmon spawning habitat. Along the Morice itself, the proposed pipeline route runs parallel to 32 kilometres of the most important spawning and rearing habitat in the entire watershed (given the braided, complex nature of the Morice river channel, this is equivalent to 150 kilometres of habitat on river systems with typical more defined channels). An oil spill lasting the duration of the one that occurred from the Enbridge pipeline near Kalamazoo, Michigan last year would release approximately 12,000,000 litres of oil into the Morice. Since much of the pipeline along the Morice will run through rugged, remote and hazardous mountain terrain, a major spill is likely to last far longer than the one on the Kalamazoo River and prove far more difficult to respond to. The heavy tar sands bitumen oil will mix with the shoreline log jams and other debris, as well as the river bottom substrate that characterizes the Morice and the Bulkley - and which provides such good fish habitat. There is little hope that a major spill in this river system could be effectively cleaned up – and the impacts of such an event would be devastating to the fish, the grizzlies and other wildlife that depend on them. The effects would also be catastrophic to the First Nations' cultures along the rivers that are centered on the salmon, as well as other groups who depend upon and enjoy these amazingly productive rivers.