The Fraser River
The Fraser River /'fre?z?r/ is the longest river within British Columbia, Canada, rising at Fraser Pass near Blackrock Mountain in the Rocky Mountains and flowing for 1,375 kilometres (854 mi), into the Strait of Georgia at the city of Vancouver.[5][9] It is the 11th longest river in Canada.[citation needed] The river's annual discharge at its mouth is 112 cubic kilometres (27 cu mi) or 3,550 cubic metres per second (125,000 cu ft/s), and it discharges 20 million tons of sediment into the ocean.
The river is named after Simon Fraser, who led an expedition in 1808 on behalf of the
North West Company from the site of present-day Prince George almost to the mouth of the river. The river's name in the Halqemeylem (Upriver Halkomelem) language is Sto:lo, often seen archaically as Staulo, and has been adopted by the Halkomelem-speaking peoples of the Lower Mainland as their collective name, Sto:lo. The river's name in the Dakelh language is Lhtakoh.[11] The Tsilhqot'in name for the river, not dissimilar to the Dakelh name, is ?Elhdaqox, meaning Sturgeon (?Elhda-chugh) River (Yeqox).
Course
The Fraser drains a 220,000-square-kilometre (85,000 sq mi) area. Its source is a dripping spring at Fraser Pass. The river then flows north to the Yellowhead Highway and west past Mount Robson to the Rocky Mountain Trench and the Robson Valley near Valemount. After running northwest past 54° north, it makes a sharp turn to the south at Giscome Portage, meeting the Nechako River at the city of Prince George, then continuing south, progressively cutting deeper into the Fraser Plateau to form the Fraser Canyon from roughly the confluence of the Chilcotin River, near the city of Williams Lake, southwards. It is joined by the Bridge and Seton Rivers at the town of Lillooet, then by the Thompson River at Lytton, where it proceeds south until it is approximately 64 kilometres (40 mi) north of the 49th parallel, which is Canada's border with the United States.
From Lytton southwards it runs through a progressively deeper canyon between the Lillooet Ranges of the Coast Mountains on its west and the Cascade Range on its east. Hell's Gate, located immediately downstream of the town of Boston Bar, is a famous portion of the canyon where the walls narrow dramatically, forcing the entire volume of the river through a gap only 35 metres (115 feet) wide. An aerial tramway takes visitors out over the river. Hells Gate is visible from the Trans-Canada Highway 1 about 2 km (1.2 mi) south of the tramway. Simon Fraser was forced to portage the gorge on his trip through the canyon in June 1808. At Yale, at the head of navigation on the river, the canyon opens up and the river is wider, though without much adjoining lowland until Hope, where the river then turns west and southwest into a lush lowland valley, known as the Fraser Valley, past Chilliwack and the confluence of the Harrison and Sumas Rivers, bending northwest at Abbotsford and Mission, turning southwest again just east of New Westminster, where it splits into a North Arm,[12] which is the southern boundary of the City of Vancouver, and the South Arm, which divides the City of Richmond from the City of Delta.
From Wiki