| Camelsfoot Range |
Website Links For Range |
Information AboutCamelsfoot Range |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT CAMELSFOOT RANGE | |
| mountain ranges of british columbia | |
| history of british columbia | |
| camelids | |
| chilcotin country | |
| bridge river | |
| lillooet country | |
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TERRAIN AND LOCATION The far southeast end of the Yalakom is extremely rugged, and dropping to one last point at 7000'-plus before plunging into the gorge of the Fraser Canyon at Fountain , near Lillooet . For 45km NW from there the range is rocky and lightly forested with lodgepole pine, breaking into high benchlands and large creek basins draining through benchland country via small canyons. Beyond that the range's terrain is much more gentle, with high, meadowed ridges running east towards the Fraser Canyon between treed plateaus and small canyons and a few large, barren domes running further north along the Fraser . The range is bounded on the north and west by a large and impressive benchland-and-hoodoo sand canyon similar to those along the range's east flank - that of Churn Creek , which is a provincial protected area. The historic Empire Valley Ranch is near the mouth of Churn Creek and is provincially protected for heritage and environmental reasons. It is on a high side-valley above the Fraser Canyon , and north of it beyond Churn Creek is the even more historic Gang Ranch . CAMELS IN THE CARIBOO Camelsfoot Peak and the range itself get their name from an odd episode in the story of the Fraser and Cariboo Gold Rushes . A man named Frank Laumeister bought a 23 camels from the US military corps and set out to use them on the Douglas Road and the Old Cariboo Road from Lillooet to Fort Alexandria , and later on the new Cariboo Wagon Road from Yale , when they were finally decomissioned and put out to pasture. Horses could not stand their smell, the camels' soft hoofs were not used to the rocky soils of the BC Interior and the canyon trails, and there really wasn't as much desert as made them all that relevant anyway. Many escaped retirement into the wilds. The last confirmed sighting was in the Ashcroft area in 1905, possibly 1910 by some claims, although there are barroom stories of silhouetted sightings elsewhere in the southern Interior into the 1930s but these are taken with the same amount of stock as the Sasquatch or the Cariboo Alligator . The original Log Cabin Theatre in Lillooet , now long burned down, was originally Laumeister's camel barn. No one knows if they ever roamed the Camelsfoot, or might still do. The new highway bridge in Lillooet is named the Bridge of the Twenty-Three Camels to commemorate their role in local history. | ||
| There Are Projected Open-pit Mine And Smelter Plans For The Poison Mountain-Red Mountain Orebody, Using Power From The Also Projected | "http://wwwinformationdelightinfo/encyclopedia/entry/Hat_Creek" class="copylinks">Hat Creek lignite deposits nearby on the other side of the Fraser Canyon Fraser]] These have never been brought forward in the public planning process, nor are they likely to be given the scope (and overlapping) of First Nations land claims in the immediate region |
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