Cariboo Road

The Cariboo Road (also called the Cariboo Wagon Road, the Great North Road or the Queen's Highway) was a project initiated in 1860 by the Governor of the Colony of British Columbia, James Douglas. It was a feat of engineering stretching from Fort Yale to Barkerville in the Canadian province of British Columbia through extremely hazardous canyon territory in the Interior of B.C.

Between the 1860s and the 1880s the Cariboo Road existed in three versions as a surveyed and constructed wagon road route. The first Cariboo Wagon Road surveyed in 1861 and built in 1862 followed the original Hudson's Bay Company's Harrison Trail (Port Douglas) route from Lillooet to Clinton, 70 Mile House, 100 Mile House, Lac La Hache, 150 Mile House to the contract end around Soda Creek and Alexandria at the doorstep of the Cariboo Gold Fields. The second Cariboo Wagon Road (or Yale Cariboo Road) operated during the period of the fast stage coaches and freight wagon companies headquartered in Yale: 1865 to 1885. From the water landing at Yale, the road followed north via the spectacular Fraser Canyon route over Hell's Gate and Jackass Mountain and connecting to the earlier Cariboo Road at Clinton. The third Cariboo Road was the revised route following the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885. The railway station at Ashcroft became the southern end of the wagon road. Much of the Fraser Canyon wagon road was destroyed by the railway construction as well as by washouts and the Great Flood of 1894 (interest in rebuilding this portion of the road would not occur until the construction plans for the Fraser Canyon Highway for automobiles in the 1920s).

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