Spruce Lake Protected Area

The Spruce Lake Protected Area, was a 71,347-hectare Protected Area in the British Columbia provincial parks system 200 km north of Vancouver. The area had been the subject of an ongoing preservationist controversy since the 1930s. Formerly known variously as the Southern Chilcotin Mountains Provincial Park, Southern Chilcotins, and also as South Chilcotin Provincial Park. In 2007, its status as a provincial park was downgraded to protected area.

Recreational activities included camping, hiking, cycling, swimming, fishing and hunting. There were walk-in wilderness camping sites. Wildlife in the protected area include grizzly bear, California bighorn sheep and wolverine.

In June 2010, Bill 15 - created the South Chilcotin Mountains Park, a "Class A" park of 56,796 hectares from Spruce Lake Protected Area. The remaining approximately 14,550 hectares were set aside for tourism and mining, but commercial logging is still prohibited. The bill also confirmed the implementation of the 2004 decision for mining/tourism zones in the Lillooet Land and Resource Management Plan area.

The area was designated as a protected area by the British Columbia provincial government in 2001, and then established as a Provincial Park by then Minister of Water, Land and Air Protection Minister Joyce Murray in 2004, with park boundaries including 70% of the protected area and limited resource extraction allowed in the remaining area on the protected area's periphery.

The protected area designation resulted from the Lillooet Land and Resource Management Plan (LRMP), in which local communities, environmental, recreation and resource interests were attempted to be addressed. Even though it is not in the Chilcotin District proper, the area has been called the "South Chilcotins" since about 1980 when a group of conservationists started to promote the area for protection as a park. The South Chilcotin name is derived from its geographic position in the Chilcotin Ranges, into the Bridge River Country where the park is located. Bert Brink, one of British Columbia's most renowned naturalist, advocated for the conservation of this area for over sixty years and lived to see it become a park, before he died in 2007.

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