[camsell] great canon OF FRASER RIVER 47 



between the Columbia river and the Skeena, a distance of nearly 

 800 miles, and not only has it become an outlet to the drainage of the 

 interior, but it forms the only route by which railways can find an 

 easy grade from the interior to the coast. 



On its western side the Interior Plateau rises gradually and passes 

 without any abrupt change of slope into the Cascade and Coast ranges 

 where elevations increase to a maximum of about 8,000 feet, and the 

 mature plateau features are entirely replaced by a steep or rugged 

 mountainous topography of a more youthful character. 



The Coast range has an average width of about 100 miles and is 

 bounded on the westward by the Pacific Ocean. On their western 

 slopes the mountains dip abruptly down to the sea and are penetrated 

 by a number of deep narrow fiords which run far back into the heart 

 of the range, while at the ends of these fiords the rivers entering them 

 are building up deltas proportionate in size to the volumes of the 

 streams. 



The Fraser river, which has a length "of about 700 miles and a 

 drainage area of over 91,000 square miles, rises on the western slope 

 of the Rocky mountains and after flowing north-westerly for over 

 200 miles, to latitude 50°N, bends sharply to the west and south and 

 runs for nearly 400 miles in an almost direct line southward cutting 

 diagonally across the Interior Plateau region and passing down the 

 gap between the overlapping ends of the Coast and Cascade mountain 

 ranges. Having passed beyond and to the westward of the Cascade 

 range the river turns westward around the southern end of the Coast 

 range and emerges on to a level delta plain of its own construction 

 which it traverses for about 70 miles to the sea. 



The valley of the Fraser river, from where it bends to the south- 

 ward near Fort George, down to the sea coast, may be divided broadly 

 into three parts each having characteristics distinctive from the other 

 two, namely (o) a plateau portion, (b) a mountain portion and (c) a 

 delta portion. The part from Fort George to Lytton at the junction 

 of the Thompson river might be referred to as the plateau portion of 

 its course, because it lies entirely inside the limits of the Interior 

 Plateau. This part of the valley is entirely outside the limits of this 

 paper and because of lack of a full knowledge of its characteristics 

 cannot be here described. 



Lytton is the point at which the Canadian Pacific Railway first 

 enters the Fraser valley. From this point almost to Agassiz, a dis- 

 tance of 85 miles, the stream flows in a deep valley bordered on the 

 east by the northern prolongation of the Cascade mountain range and 



