Highway 99 is the Sea to Sky Highway, which winds through five distinct biogeoclimatic zones in the Vancouver, Coast and Mountains region of BC, from coastal rain forest at Horseshoe Bay, through Squamish, Garibaldi Provincial Park, and the Resort Municipality of Whistler.
Beginning at Horseshoe Bay, west of Vancouver, Sea to Sky Country stretches north through several mountain passes up to Pemberton British Columbia. These passes which are linked together by the Sea to Sky Highway are known as the Sea To Sky Corridor.
Intensely scenic, the Sea to Sky Highway (Highway 99) crosses paths with two historic routes, the Pemberton Trail and the Gold Rush Heritage Trail, which linked the coast with the interior in the days before the automobile. Along these ancient pathways, generations of Coast Salish people traded with their relations in the Fraser Canyon, while in the 1850s, prospectors stampeded north towards the Cariboo gold fields. In 1915, the Pacific Great Eastern railway began service between Squamish and the Cariboo. For those in search of outdoor recreation, the railway proved an ideal way to reach trailheads in Garibaldi Provincial Park and fishing camps such as Alta Lake's Rainbow Lodge, situated at the foot of London Mountain.
By the mid-1960s, the prospect of skiers heading from Vancouver to the fledgling trails on London Mountain - by this time renamed Whistler Mountain - prompted the provincial government to open a road north from Horseshoe Bay through Squamish to Whistler. Space being at a premium along steep-sided Howe Sound (North America's southernmost fjord), the road and railway parallel each other for much of the 28 miles (45 km) between Horseshoe Bay and Squamish at the head of the sound. By 1975, the highway was pushed through to Pemberton, and by 1995 the last stretch of gravel road was paved between Pemberton and Lillooet. (Highway 99 and the railway part company in Pemberton but link up again at Lillooet.) Today, vehicles breeze along the entire route in five hours, the time it took in the 1960s to make the journey just from Horseshoe Bay to Whistler. With the approaching 2010 Olympics, Highway 99 is being expanded once again.
With the opening up of these passes and valleys, industry and people began to take advantage of the natural resources that the region had to offer. These pressures have placed the environment of the area under threat. Toxic spills, the two most recent examples being the Cheakamus River train derailment of 2005, and the 2006 oil spill at Squamish, combinedwith the the toxic effluent from the Britannia mine pose a
combined threat to the marine environment. In addition, human activities such as: logging, pulp and paper production, highway expamsion, and recreation, in combination with the rapid increase in the human population in the Sea-to-Sky corridor, continue to ocompound the threat.
Sources:
Map:
Created by Robert Price, Base map sourced from Data Warehouse, DMTI Dataset, Can Map Street Files, CanMap_StreetFiles_v2005, BC, BCTop
Photos:
Oil Tanker Retrieved December 3, 2006 from: http://www.squamishstreams.com/Cheakamus.htm
Train Derailment Retrieved December 3, 2006 from: http://www.cbc.ca/bc/story/print/bc_spill-derail20050808
Britannia Mine Retrieved December 3, 2006 from: http://www.em.gov.bc.ca/mining/Geolsurv/Publications/OpenFiles/OF1992-19/Britannia.html