The Elk Valley is a valley in the southeastern Kootenay region of British Columbia, Canada. Located in the heart of the Canadian Rockies, the Elk Valley is approximately 60 kilometres from the Alberta and Montana borders.
The valley runs via the basin of the Elk River from the southeastern Alberta border near Kananaskis to the Rocky Mountain Trench. Communities in the valley, from uppermost to lowermost, are Elkford, Sparwood, Hosmer, Fernie, Morrissey, and Elko. The valley features a diverse topography, including low-lying wetlands, mixed grassland-forest areas, and steep, forested uplands. The Elk River meanders 220 kilometers through the valley, connecting with Lake Koocanusa and the Kootenay River near the Montana border. [1]
The Elk Valley is a critically important wildlife corridor for the movement of wide-ranging carnivores such as grizzly bears, wolves, wolverines, and lynxes. It supports a variety of large animals, including moose, elk, bighorn sheep, mule deer, black bears, grey wolves, cougars, and others. The area is vital for the conservation of these species in the North American Rocky Mountains. [2]
Historically, the Elk Valley was a significant centre of the coal mining industry in British Columbia for over a century, serving as a hub of labour activism and regularly electing socialist independents to the legislature. It is the largest producing coal field in the province, with millions of tons of coal being exported to steel mills globally. All operating coal mines in the Elk Valley are currently owned by Glencore. [3] In recent years, tourism has gained importance in the Elk Valley. The region attracts outdoor enthusiasts for activities like snowmobiling, skiing, hiking, angling, and hunting. Its natural beauty and adventure opportunities are contributing to a growing tourism sector. [1]
The Rocky Mountains, also known as the Rockies, are a major mountain range and the largest mountain system in North America. The Rocky Mountains stretch 3,000 miles in straight-line distance from the northernmost part of western Canada, to New Mexico in the southwestern United States. Depending on differing definitions between Canada and the U.S., its northern terminus is located either in northern British Columbia's Terminal Range south of the Liard River and east of the Trench, or in the northeastern foothills of the Brooks Range/British Mountains that face the Beaufort Sea coasts between the Canning River and the Firth River across the Alaska-Yukon border. Its southernmost point is near the Albuquerque area adjacent to the Rio Grande rift and north of the Sandia–Manzano Mountain Range. Being the easternmost portion of the North American Cordillera, the Rockies are distinct from the tectonically younger Cascade Range and Sierra Nevada, which both lie farther to its west.
Banff National Park is Canada's oldest national park, established in 1885 as Rocky Mountains Park. Located in Alberta's Rocky Mountains, 110–180 kilometres (68–112 mi) west of Calgary, Banff encompasses 6,641 square kilometres (2,564 sq mi) of mountainous terrain, with many glaciers and ice fields, dense coniferous forest, and alpine landscapes. Provincial forests and Yoho National Park are neighbours to the west, while Kootenay National Park is located to the south and Kananaskis Country to the southeast. The main commercial centre of the park is the town of Banff, in the Bow River valley.
Crowsnest Pass is a low mountain pass across the Continental Divide of the Canadian Rockies on the Alberta–British Columbia border.
Kootenay National Park is a national park of Canada in southeastern British Columbia. The park consists of 1,406 km2 (543 sq mi) of the Canadian Rockies, including parts of the Kootenay and Park mountain ranges, the Kootenay River and the entirety of the Vermilion River. While the Vermilion River is completely contained within the park, the Kootenay River has its headwaters just outside the park boundary, flowing through the park into the Rocky Mountain Trench and eventually joining the Columbia River. The park ranges in elevation from 918 m (3,012 ft) at the southwestern park entrance to 3,424 m (11,234 ft) at Deltaform Mountain.
The Kootenays or Kootenay is a region of southeastern British Columbia. It takes its name from the Kootenay River, which in turn was named for the Kutenai First Nations people.
The Elk River is a 220-kilometre (140 mi) long river, in the southeastern Kootenay district of the Canadian province of British Columbia. Its drainage basin is 4,450 square kilometres (1,720 sq mi) in area. Its mean discharge is approximately 60 cubic metres per second (2,100 cu ft/s), with a maximum recorded discharge of 818 cubic metres per second (28,900 cu ft/s). It is a tributary of the Kootenay River, and falls within the basin of the Columbia River.
The Kootenay River or Kootenai River is a major river of the Northwest Plateau in southeastern British Columbia, Canada, and northern Montana and Idaho in the United States. It is one of the uppermost major tributaries of the Columbia River, the largest North American river that empties into the Pacific Ocean. The Kootenay River runs 781 kilometres (485 mi) from its headwaters in the Kootenay Ranges of the Canadian Rockies, flowing from British Columbia's East Kootenay region into northwestern Montana, then west into the northernmost Idaho Panhandle and returning to British Columbia in the West Kootenay region, where it joins the Columbia at Castlegar.
Bow Valley Provincial Park is a provincial park in Alberta, Canada. Established in 1959 in the arch of the Bow River at its confluence with the Kananaskis River, the park is one park of many within the Kananaskis Country park system.
Grasmere, British Columbia, Canada elevation 869m, is a tiny hamlet in the East Kootenay region of British Columbia within the Regional District of East Kootenay, British Columbia. It is located on the east side of Lake Koocanusa, below the mouth of the Elk River, and to the southeast of the city of Cranbrook, and 15 km north of the Canada–United States border and the state of Montana. The city of Fernie is located nearby farther up the Elk River.
Akamina-Kishinena Provincial Park is a provincial park located in the southeastern corner of British Columbia, Canada. The park was established by order-in-council on July 13, 1995 to protect the ecological integrity of a relatively narrow stretch of the Rocky Mountains in the southeastern corner of the province.
Height of the Rockies Provincial Park is a provincial park in the Canadian Rockies of south eastern British Columbia, Canada. It is located west of the Continental Divide, adjacent to Elk Lakes Provincial Park.
The Rocky Mountain Front is a somewhat unified geologic and ecosystem area in North America where the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains meet the plains. In 1983, the Bureau of Land Management called the Rocky Mountain Front "a nationally significant area because of its high wildlife, recreation, and scenic values". Conservationists Gregory Neudecker, Alison Duvall, and James Stutzman have described the Rocky Mountain Front as an area that warrants "the highest of conservation priorities" because it is largely unaltered by development and contains "unparalleled" numbers of wildlife.
The British Columbia Interior, popularly referred to as the BC Interior or simply the Interior, is a geographic region of the Canadian province of British Columbia. While the exact boundaries are variously defined, the British Columbia Interior is generally defined to include the 14 regional districts that do not have coastline along the Pacific Ocean or Salish Sea, and are not part of the Lower Mainland. Other boundaries may exclude parts of or even entire regional districts, or expand the definition to include the regional districts of Fraser Valley, Squamish–Lillooet, and Kitimat–Stikine.
Elko is located at the junction of Highway 93 and the Crowsnest Highway, to the north of the Roosville Canada–United States border crossing. A small sawmill town, Elko is situated near the southern end of the Rocky Mountain Trench at the edge of a plateau at the base of the Canadian Rockies, in the East Kootenay region of southeastern British Columbia.
The Alberta Mountain forests are a temperate coniferous forests ecoregion of Western Canada, as defined by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) categorization system.
The ecology of the Rocky Mountains is diverse due to the effects of a variety of environmental factors. The Rocky Mountains are the major mountain range in western North America, running from the far north of British Columbia in Canada to New Mexico in the southwestern United States, climbing from the Great Plains at or below 1,800 feet (550 m) to peaks of over 14,000 feet (4,300 m). Temperature and rainfall varies greatly also and thus the Rockies are home to a mixture of habitats including the alpine, subalpine and boreal habitats of the Northern Rocky Mountains in British Columbia and Alberta, the coniferous forests of Montana and Idaho, the wetlands and prairie where the Rockies meet the plains, a different mix of conifers on the Yellowstone Plateau in Wyoming, the montane forests of Utah, and in the high Rockies of Colorado and New Mexico, and finally the alpine tundra of the highest elevations.
The North Central Rockies forests is a temperate coniferous forest ecoregion of Canada and the United States. This region overlaps in large part with the North American inland temperate rainforest and gets more rain on average than the South Central Rockies forests and is notable for containing the only inland populations of many species from the Pacific coast.
The Elk Formation is a stratigraphic unit of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin that is present in southeastern British Columbia and southwestern Alberta. It is probably of Early Cretaceous age, but in some areas its strata could be as old as Late Jurassic. It includes minor thin coal beds and was named for outcrops near the now-abandoned Elk River coal mine east of Fernie, British Columbia.
The Kootenay Group, originally called the Kootenay Formation, is a geologic unit of latest Jurassic to earliest Cretaceous age in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin that is present in the southern and central Canadian Rockies and foothills. It includes economically important deposits of high-rank bituminous and semi-anthracite coal, as well as plant fossils and dinosaur trackways.