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Bridge River Fishing Grounds


The Bridge River Rapids, also known as the Six Mile Rapids, the Lower Fountain, the Bridge River Fishing Grounds, and in the St'at'imcets language as Sat' or Setl, is a set of rapids on the Fraser River, located in the central Fraser Canyon at the mouth of the Bridge River six miles north of the confluence of Cayoosh Creek with the Fraser and on the northern outskirts of the District of Lillooet, British Columbia, Canada.

The rapids are among the fiercest on the Fraser and are generally considered impassable to canoes and river-rafting expeditions and are formed by the narrowing of the Fraser's banks by rock ledges at this point. However the diversion of the Bridge River in 1958 with the Bridge River Power Project severely curtailed the flow of the Bridge River, and the combined flows of the river no longer produce the "fountain" of combined waters during spring freshet which led to the location's frontier-era name of the Lower Fountain.

(The Upper Fountain was a longer but equally difficult but not as narrow gauntlet of whitewater a few more miles upstream, below the community of Fountain, which was formerly known as the Upper Fountain; those rapids today are the Upper Fountain Rapids).

The narrows in aboriginal legend were formed by Coyote leaping back and forth from bank to bank so as to make a barrier for salmon and places for people to fish.

The location is the most important aboriginal fishing site in the British Columbia Interior and historically it and neighbouring sites along the stretch of river between Fountain and Lillooet attracted over 15,000 people at a time to fish at the site during key salmon runs from the many different peoples of the Interior. It was here early in the 19th Century, that an insult by the chief of the Lakes Lillooet to the chief of the Okanagan people, Pelkamulox, led to the death of the latter and an eventual war of revenge against the St'at'imc by his son, the famous Nicola in the late 1830s.


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