Transportation

Situated as it is across the air route to the Orient, the
North Pacific Region, with its vast distances, sharply
varied topography, wide climatic range, and the distribution
and variety of its natural wealth, presents a problem in
the development of lanes of traffic perhaps more complex
than that of any comparable section in the British Dominions.

In the west, the Region is dominated physically by
the great Cordilleran backbone of the Americas, the western
most range of which dips sharply into the Pacific Ocean to
create a complex of islands and fiords that form a sheltered
inland waterway from the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Alaska.

This Cordilleran barrier between the Great Central
Plain of Canada and the Pacific Ocean is cut by a few natural
passages. Principal of these is the Yellowhead Pass, leading
from the plains through the Rockies into the comparatively
open upper valleys of the Fraser, Nechako, and Skeena
Rivers to provide the lowest and easiest route on the

continent to the Pacific Coast. Northward, the Peace and.

Liard Rivers, the main tributaries of the Mackenzie River
System, cut through the Rocky Mountains eastward to the
plains; in the west, the Nass and Stikine Rivers break
through the Coast Range to empty into the Pacific. Farther
north, a passage of relatively low relief from Skagway to
Whitehorse joins, at Whitehorse, the Lewes River and the

great inland water route of the Yukon River to Alaska and
the Bering Sea.

In the Far North, the shores of the North Pacific Region
are washed by the Arctic Ocean, a lonely sea, largely
uncharted and studded with icebound island masses virtually
unsurveyed and unknown. In this archipelago and its
extension eastward lies the real last American frontier.
Down to this northern ocean, out of the mountains to the
west and from the great central plain of western Canada
and the lakes of the Laurentian Plateau, extends one of the
world’s great river systems, the Mackenzie. This system,
numbering among its tributaries the Liard, Slave, Peace,
and Athabaska Rivers, drains an area of nearly "700,000
square miles, about a fifth of the mainland of Canada.

For more than a century and a half, the traffic of the
Northwest has flowed by way of mountain pass and river,
and it is along these natural channels that the present
pattern of water, rail, and highway transportation has
developed. The Canadian Northern Railway and the
Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, now part of the Canadian
National Railways, developed the route through the
Yellowhead Pass to follow the valleys of the Fraser, Thomp-
son, and Skeena Rivers to Vancouver and Prince Rupert.
Through the coastal mountains, the White Pass and Yukon
Railway found a path to the fastness of the Yukon, joining
there the water route to the interior and Alaska. Other
routes and gateways are subsidiary to the main channels,
or are local in their objectives.

There is one great natural feature that, from its peculiar
character and orientation, can hardly fail to play a part in
the future of land transportation in the North Pacific
Region. This is the Rocky Mountain Trench, which lies
west of and parallel to the Rocky Mountain chain, and
presents for some 600 miles, from the Fraser Valley to
beyond the Yukon border, an almost straight, open valley
of remarkably uniform gradient and physical character, with
a minimum of natural obstacles to highway or railway
construction.

Other natural channels or combinations of channels
follow the paths set by the north-bearing watercourses of
the interior plateau of the Cordillera. Alternate highway
routes, which have been found feasible, extend from railheads
on the Canadian National up Babine Lake and the head-
waters of the Skeena River, thence through the Stikine
Valley and connecting valleys to the Yukon border near

Atlin.

There are the following natural channels of transpor-
tation:

Ocean Route: The Inside Passage to Alaska.

Inland Water Route: The Mackenzie River and its
tributaries from Peace River Valley to the Arctic
Ocean.

Inland Water and Land Routes: The White Pass, Lewes
River, and Yukon River route to Alaska; Stikine
River and Dease River route to northwestern
British Columbia.

Land Routes: The Yellowhead Pass-Nechako-Skeena
railway route to Prince Rupert; the Rocky Mountain
Trench; the Interior Plateau routes from Babine
Lake and Skeena Valley to Yukon.

To the land routes might be added the old Alexander

Mackenzie Trail from the upper Fraser Valley across
central British Columbia to Bella Coola.

OcEAN TRANSPORTATION

Nature has furnished along the Pacific Coast a sheltered
waterway extending nearly a thousand miles from the
head of Puget Sound, in the State of Washington, through
the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the full length of the British
Columbia Coast and far up the panhandle of Alaska to
Haines and Skagway. Denying land passage through the
fiord-indented coastal mountains, nature offers instead
perhaps the world’s most sheltered and most beautiful
waterway, the Inside Passage. Providing a link through
Canadian waters, between Alaska and its motherland, the
Inside Passage stands as a symbol of the physical interde-
pendence of the two great American nations in the North
Pacific.

Some of the world’s great ports are on this waterway:
Seattle and Tacoma in Washington; Portland in Oregon;

See HES