Crowsnest Highway

Province: British Columbia, Alberta

Crowsnest Highway (Highway 3: Dewdney Trail) is the scenic and, in parts, quite charming south-lying road in Western Canada which provides the east-west link via Crowsnest Pass (1396 m (4581 ft)). Near Hope, 154 km (96 mi.) east of Vancouver, this less busy highway branches off from the TransCanada Highway and passes close to the USA border through the south-east of British Columbia and over the Rocky Mountains into southern Alberta. After nearly 2000 km (1240 mi.) the Crowsnest Highway again meets up with TransCanada Highway 1 in Medicine Hat near the Saskatchewan border. It then continues in the shape of the "Red Coat Trail", a tourist route consisting mainly of by-roads through unspoilt rural countryside in the south of Saskatchewan and Manitoba as far as Winnipeg; to a large extent this is the route taken in 1874 by the men of the North West Mounted Police when they came West to restore law and order. After the Oregon treaty of 1846 had decreed that the lower reaches of the Columbia River south of the 49th Parallel should belong to the USA the Hudson's Bay Company was obliged to find new routes along which to transport their goods into the interior of British Columbia. In the middle of the 19th c. they built a trading post in Hope. In 1859 gold was discovered by the Kettle and Similkameen Rivers, whereupon the governor, James Douglas, appointed two young British engineers, E. Dewdney and W. Moberly, to construct the first "mule-track" along the 120 km (75 mi.) stretch between Hope and Vermilion Forks, now Princetown. Further discoveries of gold in the Kootenay region persuaded his successor Seymour to build a 480 km (300 mi.) extension of the road through the wilderness to Wild Horse Creek in the Rocky Mountains, so that gold being found would not be lost to the United States simply because of a lack of an adequate road link with Vancouver. At that time it took at least three weeks to travel from the Okanagan Valley to Wild Horse Creek in the Rockies. Today long stretches of the modern Crowsnest Highway 3 follow the route chosen by Dewdney. The Crowsnest Highway crosses five massive mountain chains, the Cascade, Monashee, Selkirk, Purcell and Rocky Mountains, winding through passes up to 1774 m (5822 ft) high and sampling almost all British Columbia's varied scenery, from the rain-forests of the Pacific Coast through the fruit plantations of the climatically-favored Okanagan valley, the green farmlands around Creston to the snow and ice-covered Rocky Mountains and the gently undulating prairies of southern Alberta.

Between Princetown and Keremeos there is good wild-water canoeing on the Similkameen River. In Princetown Highway 5A branches off to the north to Merritt and Kamloops.