Glacier (British Columbia)

Glacier National Park covers 1,349 km² in the Selkirk and Purcell ranges, within the Columbia Mountains of interior British Columbia, and is organised around Rogers Pass. It was created in 1886, one of the first in Canada, in parallel with the completion of the Canadian Pacific railway through the pass, one of the great engineering works of the nineteenth century. It is managed jointly with neighbouring Mount Revelstoke National Park.

Rogers Pass is the heart of the park and a national historic site. Its history is marked by snow: it receives some ten metres of snowfall a year and avalanches were a constant problem for the railway, which came to be protected by 31 snowsheds of some 6.5 kilometres in total length before the Canadian Pacific chose to drive the Connaught Tunnel in 1916. Today the Trans-Canada Highway crosses the pass, protected in turn by large snowsheds built in 1962, and the park maintains one of the most important active avalanche control programmes in the world. The Rogers Pass Discovery Centre tells the story of the railway, the fight against avalanches and the pioneers of mountaineering; following an abandoned rail line one reaches the ruins of a Victorian hotel where the legendary Swiss guides opened climbing routes and trails still in use.

The Columbia Mountains intercept the moisture-laden air off the Pacific, which generates at lower altitudes an interior rainforest improbable at this latitude and distance from the sea, with western red cedar, western hemlock and devil's club. Above the tree line, the alpine meadows flower briefly in August before the first snows. The park is home to grizzly bear, mountain goat, wolverine and pika, and together with Mount Revelstoke some 250 animal species have been recorded. The park's meltwater, rain and glaciers feed countless streams that end up flowing into the Columbia River.