Fraser Canyon

View of Hells Gate looking downstream, c.1955

Cisco Bridges – CPR bridge (black) in foreground, CNR bridge (orange arch) in background (with CPR train on it). Photo facing upriver.

At Hells Gate, near Boston Bar, the canyon walls rise about 1,000 metres (3,300 ft) above the rapids. Fish ladders along the river's side permit migrating salmon to bypass a rockslide that diverted the river during the blasting of the Canadian Northern Railway line in 1913. The area around Hell's Gate carries the name Black Canyon, which may either be a reference to the colour of the rocks when it rains, or the name of a community built on the cliffsides here during the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush. At the site that once housed railway workers, a tourist attraction built in 1971 takes visitors across Hell's Gate via an aerial tramway.

View of Hells Gate looking across to east bank, with a CPR steam locomotive in background passing old railway housing, c.1945

At Siska, a few minutes south of Lytton, there are the Cisco bridges—a pair of railway bridges at the throat of a rocky gorge. From south to north, the Canadian Pacific has been on the west side of the canyon, while the Canadian National has been on the east side. At Siska, the two railways switch sides: the CP—160-metre-long (520 ft) truss bridge—crosses to the east, the CN—on an 250-metre (810 ft) steel-arched bridge over the CP—is now on the west. The two railways now have an agreement to allow directional running through the canyon as far as Basque. All eastbound trains—CN, CP, and Via Rail's eastbound Canadian—run on the CP line. All westbound trains—CN, CP, Via Rail's westbound Canadian—use the CN tracks.

Just north of Lillooet, narrow rock ledges choke the river just at the confluence of the lower canyon of the Bridge River, forming an obstacle to migrating fish that has made this spot the busiest aboriginal fishing site on the river, from ancient times to the present. Concentrations of First Nations people here, from all tribes of the Interior, were believed to have been in excess of 10,000.

Many stretches of the Fraser are named in their own right, starting with the Little Canyon between Yale and Spuzzum, which is officially the lowest reach of the Fraser Canyon (although in regional terms Hope, 32 kilometres (20 mi) farther south, is considered a canyon town and to be the southern outlet of the canyon because the highway became more difficult from that point; the river is navigable to Yale). Between the Spuzzum and Boston Bar was known in the gold rush as the Big Canyon or Black Canyon;[1] there are several named subcanyons of the Big Canyon, most famously Hells Gate Canyon (in some descriptions the Black Canyon is below Hell's Gate). Above the Big Canyon there are the Lillooet Canyon, Fountain Canyon, Glen Fraser Canyon, Moran Canyon, High Bar Canyon, French Bar Canyon and more all the way up to Soda Creek Canyon near Quesnel. Upstream from there the river flows in wider country, but in the Robson Valley between Prince George and Tête Jaune Cache, the river enters the Grand Canyon of the Fraser. The Black Canyon was the site of a shantytown of the same name, much of which was on catwalks on the ramparts of its dark-rock cliffs.

Nearly all tributaries of the Fraser have canyons of varying scale; the few exceptions include the Pitt and the Chilliwack in the Lower Fraser Valley. The Thompson Canyon, from Lytton to Ashcroft, is a sequence of large canyons of its own, some of them also named, although most British Columbians and travellers think of it as part of the Fraser Canyon. Other important canyons on tributaries include Coquihalla Canyon, the Bridge River Canyon, Seton Canyon and adjacent Cayoosh Canyon, Pavilion Canyon, Vermilion Canyon (Slok Creek) and Churn Creek Canyon. The Chilcotin River also has several subcanyons, as does the Chilko River, notably Lava Canyon and another Black Canyon.

There are other canyons on the Fraser that are not considered part of the canyon, notably at Soda Creek, between Williams Lake and Prince George. The official but comparatively diminutive Grand Canyon of the Fraser is in the river's upper stretch through the Rocky Mountain Trench, about 115 km (71 mi) upstream from Prince George and about 20 km (12 mi) upstream from the Fraser's confluence with the Bowron River. Despite its name, the Grand Canyon of the Fraser is only one treacherous switchback rapid in a shallow rock gorge, and it has neither the roughness of water nor the depth and severity of canyon as is found in the area south from Big Bar to Lillooet or between Boston Bar and Yale.

Almost all of the rivers and creeks feeding the Fraser from Williams Lake south have their own canyons which open onto the Fraser, or are just up side-valleys a few miles. These include Marble Canyon, Churn Creek, the Chilcotin River, the Bridge River, Seton Lake and Cayoosh Creek, the Stein River, the Nahatlatch River, the Coquihalla River and the innumerable smaller creeks flanking the river between Kanaka Bar and Yale.

The Canadian Pacific Railway has at least 30 tunnels in its Yale to Lytton section with one up to half a mile in length. The Fraser Canyon Highway Tunnels were constructed from the spring of 1957 to 1964 as part of the Trans-Canada Highway project. There are seven tunnels in total, the shortest being approximately 57 metres (187 ft); the longest, however, is approximately 610 metres (2,000 ft) and is one of North America's longest. They are situated between Yale and Boston Bar.

In order from south to north, they are: Yale (completed 1963), Saddle Rock (1958), Sailor Bar (1959), Alexandra (1964), Hell's Gate (1960), Ferrabee (1964) and China Bar (1961). The Hell's Gate tunnel is the only tunnel that does not have lights, while the China Bar tunnel is the only tunnel that requires ventilation.

The China Bar and Alexandra tunnels have warning lights that are activated by cyclists before they enter the tunnels. This was required because the tunnels are curved. It is expected that the Ferrabee tunnel will get the same warning lights as it too is curved.