Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park

Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park is a provincial park in British Columbia, Canada. Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park covers 23 ha of the Bulkley River Valley, on the east side of Driftwood Creek, a tributary of the Bulkley River, 10 km northeast of the town of Smithers. The park is accessible from Driftwood Road from Provincial Highway 16. It was created in 1967 by the donation of the land by the late Gordon Harvey (1913–1976) to protect fossil beds on the east side of Driftwood Creek. The beds were discovered around the beginning of the 20th century. The park lands are part of the asserted traditional territory of the Wet'suwet'en First Nation.

A car park just off the road access, leads to an interpretive sign and a bridge across Driftwood Creek. A short interpretive trail leads visitors to a cliff-face exposure of Eocene shales that were deposited in an inter-montane lake. Interbedded within the shales are volcanic ash beds, the result of area volcanoes that were erupting throughout the life of the Eocene lake that produced the shales. Preserved within the shale formations are plant, animal and insect species that inhabited the area over 50 million years ago. Similar fossil beds in Eocene lake sediments are found at the McAbee Fossil Beds Heritage Site west of Kamloops in southern British Columbia. The Princeton Chert fossil beds in southern British Columbia are also Eocene, but primarily preserve an aquatic plant community.

The BC Parks management plan for Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park lists these conservation attributes:

Limited personal fossil collecting was originally permitted in Driftwood Canyon Park, and the site is listed in several tourism and rock collection guides as a place to visit for this activity. However, in the past 5 or so years following recommendations to cease unrestricted public and commercial collection of fossils, BC Parks has ended fossil collecting by members of the public due to:

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