Yellowhead Lake. Surveyed in 1917. Boundary between Alberta and British Columbia. Detail.
Internet Archive

Yellow Head Lake and Pass. George Monro Grant, plate 35
Ocean to Ocean: Sandford Fleming’s Expedition through Canada in 1872

Yellow Head Lake (looking Easterly). George Monro Grant, plate 36
Ocean to Ocean: Sandford Fleming’s Expedition through Canada in 1872

Yellowhead Lake looking east.
Photo: Mary Schäffer, 1908
Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies

This lake near the Yellowhead Pass has been known by several names. In 1824, Hudson’s Bay Company governor George Simpson [1792–1860], heading for the Athabasca Pass, noted, “the track for Cranberry Lake takes a Northerly direction by Cow Dung River.” The Cow Dung River was the Miette River and Simpson’s Cranberry Lake may have been our Yellowhead Lake. In 1862, when the Overlander gold seekers crossed Yellowhead Pass (which they called Leather Pass) they camped on Cow Dung Lake. A year later, the lake was known to Milton and Cheadle as Buffalo Dung Lake. In 1872 George Monro Grant [1835–1902] suggested its present name, recalling the namesake of the pass.

“It is a very charming litle sheet of water,” wrote Arthur Oliver Wheeler [1860–1945], “four miles long, with a greatest width of half a mile. There are several narrows, and the irregularities of its form are by no means the least part of its charm. For the most part it is surrounded by green forest and is distinctly one of the most beautiful lakes in the district. In colour the waters are a creamy sap green.”

On Arrowsmith’s 1859 map the two sections of Yellowhead Lake are called “Moose L.” and “Cow dung L.” On the map present-day Moose Lake is called “L. d’Original,” a misspelling of the French Canadian “Lac Orignal.”

BC Parks has a bathymetric map of Yellowhead Lake.

Association with Yellowhead Lake.

John Yates (b. Blackburn, England,1880) was called by mountaineer John Norman Collie [1859–1942] “the best guide in unknown country I have ever met.”

In 1884, Yates’s family moved to California, and Yates attended high school in San Diego. Around 1906 he homesteaded on Hobo Ranch, west of Lac Ste. Anne (about 45 miles west of Edmonton). With his brother Bill, he packed supplies for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railwaysurveyors, and in 1907 he contracted to carry the mail to railroad construction camps between Edmonton and Tête Jaune Cache.

While carrying the mail past the base of Mount Robson in September 1907, Yates ran into Arthur Philemon Coleman [1852–1939] and his mountaineering party. Returning from their unsuccessful attempt to climb Robson, Coleman’s party met Yates again at Big Eddy, and Arthur Coleman accompanied the mail-carrier to Edmonton. “Before bidding goodbye to Yates, the hustler, born in England and brought up in California, I sounded him as to another expedition the following summer,” Coleman wrote, “and found him willing to arrange for horses if I wanted to go.”

In 1908 Coleman’s party regrouped at the Hobo Ranch and, guided by Yates with the assistance of Adolphus Moberly, approached Mount Robson by way of the Moose River. On September 5 the climbers, including Yates, who carried an alpenstock he had made out of a pole and a heavy wire nail, reached the 10,000 foot level, but had to turn back because of the lateness of the day and Yates’s frozen feet. The group made two more attempts, and group member George R. B. Kinney [1872–1961] made a solo climb, but they left Robson a virgin peak, arranging with Yates to try again in August of 1909.

In May of 1909, Kinney heard that “a party of foreigners” were planing to assault Mount Robson that summer. He sent a frantic wire to Yates and hurried from his home in Victoria to Edmonton. Awaiting him was a letter from Yates, explaining that it would be madness to start for the mountain so early in the year, especially since spring had been very late and the snowfall exceptionally heavy. Kinney hit the trail alone, teamed up with Donald “Curly” Phillips [1884–1938] near Jasper, and went on to climb Mount Robson, a feat which was later disputed. Returning to Edmonton, Kinney and Phillips met the dreaded “party of foreigners:” Arnold Louis Mumm [1859–1927], Leopold Charles Maurice Stennett Amery [1873–1955], Geoffrey Hastings, and mountain guide Moritz Inderbinen [1856–1926], under the care of John Yates. The party was not successful at Mount Robson.

In 1910, Yates guided Mumm and Collie to the Mount Robson area, where they “discovered a splendid snow mountain that Yates named Mt. Bess,” after Elizabeth Gunn of Lac Ste. Anne, on whom Yates had a crush. In 1911, Arthur Oliver Wheeler [1860–1945] in the vicinity of Calumet Creek, noticed an “old blazed track known as the Yates trail, because it was made by a packer of that name…. The Yates trail comes out in an open at the highest point. It well might be called ‘Exclamation Point.’ Looking south in the V of the valley, Mt. Resplendent stands a great white cone, clad from head to foot in eternal snows. Below, the the left, Yates Torrent issues from the forefoot of Coleman Glacier, a splendid icefall, the main northern outflow of Reef Névé.”

“Yates Torrent” did not become an official name; the stream issuing from the Coleman Glacier is an unnamed tributary of the upper Smoky River.

Yates retired from outfitting and moved back to California, ca.1920.

Earl Francis Woodley [1892–?] was postmaster at Red Pass Junction from 1923 to 1946. Earl and his wife Edna (1899-1971) ran the Red Pass general store and hotel from 1923 until 1944. Earl’s father, about 70 years old in 1944, was bartender in the pub. One of the Woodley boys married a Hinkelman girl and lived in McBride.

Called “Flat Heart River” by David Thompson [1770–1857] in 1811, who descended it after crossing the Athabasca Pass.

Our residence was near the junction of two Rivers from the Mountains with the Columbia: the upper Stream which forms the defile by which we came to the Columbia, I named the Flat Heart, from the Men being dispirited ; it had nothing particular. The other was the Canoe River ; which ran through a bold rude valley, of a steady descent, which gave to this River a very rapid descent without any falls….

In his edition of the journal of Edward Ermatinger [1797–1876], who crossed the Athabasca Pass with a fur brigade in 1827, James White notes that “the Wood river was apparently so named after the dense forest traversed by the portage road up its valley.”

Origin of the name unknown.

This west arête is visible from the Robson viewpoint on Highway 16, the two branches of the wishbone joining some 450 metres below the summit.

“Up, up we toiled, winding round crags, in and out piles of windfall, over hummocks of rocks, through furiously boiling creeks and innocent-looking muskegs…. All topics of conversation had long been exhausted; dead timber and a windfall-strewn trail, with their pitfalls and dangers, are not conducive to comment, except of a querulous character. ” Frederick Arthur Ambrose Talbot [1880–1924] wasn’t referring to this creek, but almost every early traveller to the region had to fight windfall.

Origin of the name unknown.