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