Callaghan Valley

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The Callaghan Valley is located in the Sea to Sky Country of southwestern, British Columbia, in the Pacific Ranges of the Coast Mountains 90 km north of Vancouver. It was the home of the 2010 Winter Olympics's Whistler Olympic Park, the venue for the Nordic events of the Olympics, and adventure tourism operations including Canadian Wilderness Adventures.

British Columbia Province of Canada

British Columbia is the westernmost province of Canada, located between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. With an estimated population of 5.016 million as of 2018, it is Canada's third-most populous province.

Pacific Ranges mountain range

The Pacific Ranges are the southernmost subdivision of the Coast Mountains portion of the Pacific Cordillera. Located entirely within British Columbia, Canada, they run northwest from the lower stretches of the Fraser River to Bella Coola and Burke Channel, north of which are the Kitimat Ranges. The Coast Mountains lie between the Interior Plateau and the Coast of British Columbia.

Coast Mountains

The Coast Mountains are a major mountain range in the Pacific Coast Ranges of western North America, extending from southwestern Yukon through the Alaska Panhandle and virtually all of the Coast of British Columbia south to the Fraser River. The mountain range's name derives from its proximity to the sea coast, and it is often referred to as the Coast Range. The range includes volcanic and non-volcanic mountains and the extensive ice fields of the Pacific and Boundary Ranges, and the northern end of the volcanic system known as the Cascade Volcanoes. The Coast Mountains are part of a larger mountain system called the Pacific Coast Ranges or the Pacific Mountain System, which includes the Cascade Range, the Insular Mountains, the Olympic Mountains, the Oregon Coast Range, the California Coast Ranges, the Saint Elias Mountains and the Chugach Mountains. The Coast Mountains are also part of the American Cordillera—a Spanish term for an extensive chain of mountain ranges—that consists of an almost continuous sequence of mountain ranges that form the western backbone of North America, Central America, South America and Antarctica.

Contents

Geography

The valley is the basin of Callaghan Creek, at the head of which is Callaghan Lake and associated provincial park. Midway down Callaghan Creek is the confluence of Madeley Creek, just above which on that creek is Alexander Falls, which lies just at a bridge on the road to Callaghan Lake.

Callaghan Lake Provincial Park is a provincial park in British Columbia, Canada, located in the upper Callaghan Valley to the west of the resort town of Whistler. The dormant volcano Mount Callaghan overlooks the lake on its north side, while just to the south of the park is the sliding events facility for the 2010 Olympics. Callaghan Lake was to be the site of the base village for a proposed ski resort, Powder Mountain Resort, but the project never went through due to alleged interference by William Vander Zalm and others in the then-Social Credit government.

Alexander Falls waterfall

Alexander Falls is a waterfall on Madeley Creek, a tributary of Callaghan Creek in the Callaghan Valley area of the Sea to Sky Country of southwestern British Columbia, Canada. The falls are located just below a bridge on the access road to Callaghan Lake Provincial Park, at the head of the valley, which lies to the west of the resort town of Whistler.

On its western perimeter is the Powder Mountain Icefield, and the potentially active [1] [2] volcano Mount Cayley, which lies at the valley's southwestern extremity. Mount Callaghan, at the head of the valley, is a dormant volcano because its last eruption was not as recent as Mount Cayley's, nor does it display hot spring or seismic activity. The valley's eastern wall is the small range formed by Mount Sproatt and Rainbow Mountain, which lies in the angle of the Cheakamus River and Callaghan Creek (which in the past has also been known as the West Fork of the Cheakamus) and east of which is the Resort Municipality of Whistler. The valley's mouth and road access is at McGuire's on BC Highway 99, 14 kilometres south of downtown Whistler, in British Columbia. The location is also known as Northair, and the road as the Northair Mine Road, after a mine located a few miles north of the junction, which is marked by a quarry pit columnar basalt lava rock on the opposite side of the highway, and which are the northern end of a small lava plateau between the highway and river south to and including Brandywine Falls. Volcanoes in the Callaghan Valley were erupted between 25,000 and 11,000 years ago whose age is extremely young in the geologic record. [3]

Powder Mountain Icefield glacier in Canada

The Powder Mountain Icefield, also called the Powder Mountain Icecap and the Cayley Icefield, is a glacial field in the Pacific Ranges of southwestern British Columbia, Canada, about 20 kilometres (12 mi) west of Whistler and about 90 kilometres (56 mi) north of Vancouver. On the west side of the icefield is the valley of the Squamish River, while on its east is the Callaghan Valley, which is the setting for the Nordic facilities for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Mount Cayley

Mount Cayley is a mountain and highest point of the Mount Cayley massif between the Cheakamus and Squamish rivers in British Columbia, Canada. It has an elevation of 2,385 m (7,825 ft).

Mount Callaghan mountain in Canada

Mount Callaghan is a volcanic peak located east of the headwaters of the Squamish River, just northeast of the Powder Mountain Icefield and just south of the Pemberton Icefield in the Sea to Sky Country of southwestern British Columbia, Canada, about 20 km directly west of the Resort Municipality of Whistler. A crack was observed across Callaghan's summit in the spring of 1999. In 2000, a section of the summit collapsed. Callaghan Lake lies below the south face of the mountain.

Development history

The Callaghan Valley is a unique microclimate surrounded by a circular rampart of five mountains. Recent commercial snow sports developments have completely altered this ecosystem and these changes are increasingly having an impact on it.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Etkin, David; Haque, C.E.; Brooks, Gregory R. (2003). An Assessment of Natural Hazards and Disasters in Canada. Springer. p. 569. ISBN   978-1-4020-1179-5.
  2. ↑ Rolf Ludvigsen (1996). Life in Stone: A Natural History of British Columbia's Fossils. UBC Press. p. 33. ISBN   978-0-7748-0578-0.
  3. ↑ Callaghan Lake Provincial Park: Background Report

Coordinates: 50°08′13″N123°09′07″W / 50.13694°N 123.15194°W / 50.13694; -123.15194

Geographic coordinate system Coordinate system

A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are often chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position and two or three of the numbers represent a horizontal position; alternatively, a geographic position may be expressed in a combined three-dimensional Cartesian vector. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation. To specify a location on a plane requires a map projection.

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