“Yellowhead Pass” appears as “Yellow Head Pass.”

Charles Francis Hanington [1848–1930] accompanied Edward Worrell Jarvis [1846–1894] on a Canadian Pacific Railway survey of potential passes north of the Yellowhead. A hard trip they had of it, with dogsleds from Quesnel through the McGregor and Smoky Rivers, finding no better passes than the Yellowhead.

This map accompanies Donald “Curly” Phillips’s article in the 1914-15 Canadian Alpine Journal.

Includes many unofficial names: Muddy River, Sulphur River, Ptarmigan Lake, Rockslide Creek, Sulphur Pass, No Luck Creek, Snow River, Mirror Canyon, Calumet Snowfield, Twin Tree Lake, Mt. Pamm, Rockslide Creek, Short River…

Samuel Prescott Fay [1884–1971]

“Pete” Fay as he was known to his friends had been a member of the [American Alpine] Club for 59 years at the time of his death last August [1971]. His qualifications for election in 1912 were four seasons in the Canadian Rockies beginning in 1906. In 1914 he joined a Smithsonian expedition which left Jasper, Alberta in June for the purposes of exploration, mapping and the collection of birds and mammals in the northern Rockies. Reports were filed with the Biological Survey in Washington. In mid-October the party met a trapper who showed them an old newspaper with reports of the first weeks of World War I of which they had no inkling. For the next three or four days they traveled non-stop to reach Hudson Hope on the Peace River.

Pete graduated from Harvard in 1907. During World War I he joined the American Field Service to drive an ambulance in France and later served with the Air Force in France and Belgium. Afterwards he was associated with an investment counseling firm in Boston for many years. Aside from two years on the Council (1930-1932), he did not take an active part in Club affairs, though he attended frequent meetings. Frail health confined him to his home for the last ten or more years.

— Hall, American Alpine Journal, (1972)

“Blue Glacier is a wonderful stream of slipping, sheering, blue, green, and white ice. Why it does not slip and slide as a whole down into Berg Lake is one of the unsolved secrets of this great mountain,” wrote Charles Doolittle Walcott in his report on the 1912 Smithsonian expedition to Mount Robson.

“From the elevated ice-field, fed by avalanching snows from the sides of Robson, a gigantic ice cascade tumbles down rock precipices and buries its nose in the waters of Berg Lake,” wrote Arthur Oliver Wheeler after his 1911 visit. “At frequent intervals great chunks of ice break off with a report like cannon, and, bounding and rattling down the steep incline, plunge into the clear water of the lake. Dr. Coleman has named the overhanging ice-fall ‘The Blue Glacier,’ The term is not strong enough: ‘Tumbling Glacier,’ though not so euphonious, is a better name to express the activity of such a unique feature.”

Alexander Mackenzie travelled from his winter quarters near Finlay Forks to the Pacific coast in 1793. On his return to the east, travelling through the same unnamed pass through the Rocky Mountains that he traversed on the trip west, he wrote in his journal:

Friday, 16 August, 1793. The weather continued to be the same as yesterday, and at two in the afternoon we came to the carrying-place which leads to the first small lake; but it was so filled with drift wood, that a considerable portion of time was employed in making our way through it. We now reached the high land which separates the source of the Tacoutche Tesse, or Columbia River, and Unjigah, or Peace River: the latter of which, after receiving many tributary streams, passes through the great Slave Lake, and disembogues itself in the Frozen Ocean, in latitude 69-1/2 North, longitude 135. West from Greenwich; while the former, confined by the immense mountains that run nearly parallel with the Pacific Ocean, and keep it in a Southern course, empties itself in 46. 20. North latitude and longitude 124. West from Greenwich.

Mackenzie believed it to be the Columbia, or a major tributary thereof, and Lewis, and Clark, in 1805 the next non-Indigenous party to cross the northern part of the continent of North America, shared the assumption. Mackenzie’s coordinates are accurate for the mount of the Mackenzie River, to which the Unjigah or Peace is a tributary. His coordinates for the mouth of the Columbia River are also accurate, but he was mistaken in thinking that Tacoutche Tess was the Columbia; it is the Fraser River, neither the Columbia nor a tributary, but this was not discovered until 1807 by Simon Fraser.

In 1793 the expedition of Alexander Mackenzie [1764–1820] crossed the Continental Divide through the unnamed pass that contains this lake, crossing from Parsnip River, in the Arctic drainage, to Bad River (James Creek), in the Pacific drainage. They crossed from east to west on June 12:

We embarked on this lake [Pacific Lake], which is in the same course, and about the same size as that which we had just left [Portage Lake], and from whence we passed into a small river [James Creek or Bad River], that was so full of fallen wood, as to employ some time, and require some exertion, to force a passage. At the entrance, it afforded no more water than was just sufficient to bear the canoe.

Wednesday, 12. The weather was the same as yesterday, and we proceeded between three and four in the morning. We took up the net which we had set the preceding evening, when it contained a trout, one white fish, one carp, and three jub. The lake is about two miles in length, East by South, and from three to five hundred yards wide. This I consider as the highest and Southern-most source of the Unjigah, or Peace River, latitude, 54. 24. North, longitude 121. West of Greenwich, which, after a winding course through a vast extent of country, receiving many large rivers in its progress, and passing through the Slave Lake, empties itself into the Frozen Ocean, in 70. North latitude, and about 135 West longitude.

So wrote Alexander Mackenzie [1764–1820] in June 1793 , crossing the continental divide on his way to the Pacific Ocean. His latitude was precise; longitude is more difficult, especially if you’ve lost your watch.

The lake was named in 1910 by British Columbia land surveyor T. H. Taylor, who was employed that year by the BC Government to explore and survey the Parsnip River and the McGregor River. “This lake is at the Pacific-Arctic Divide; the water is clear as crystal.” (Extract from Reports of British Columbia Land Surveyors, Cariboo District, 1891-1927.)