Canoe Trek With Kids
Nanika-Kidprice Provincial Park

It’d been a few months since we got out on the bikes in the Okanagan and we felt like we should get one more good trip in before fall set in, school started, and routine took hold. We had some orders from our retailers west of Vanderhoof, so we decided to combine a delivery run with a full scale outdoor adventure. Leroy had recently purchased a drone to aid in his video making and we were looking for places that would make some stunning footage. I suggested the Nanika-Kidprice canoe route – we’d done bikes, why not a canoe? We had all our trekking gear from our KVR bike trip, the longest portage is only 2 km – a distance our kids handle regularly around town – and it has a fantastic waterfall out of the last lake that would make a beautiful drone video. We got our permit from BC parks to fly our drone on the trip, checked over and packed our gear into backpacks, and loaded the canoe on the truck.

I’d been on the route once before, nearly ten years ago, with some friends who invited me along with the condition that I help pack the second canoe. We’d gone on the May long weekend – too early for bugs, still early enough for snow on the ground. Still, we managed to get out to the falls and back in our three days and, while I was sore and tired after it all, I got a taste for backwoods adventures.

This time around, we planned for up to five days in the park, depending on how the weather worked out. The area is known for being windy and two of the lakes are quite large and are prone to being rough. If we had to, we could tackle these in the mornings when it is typically calm, but that would stretch out our trip. After making our deliveries as far as Smithers on Monday, we backtracked to Houston and turned south on the forest service roads towards the park. As we turned onto the Morice Forest Service Road we ran into a lot of down traffic and we hopped in and out of pull-outs while trying to decipher their thick radio chatter. Then it dawned on us – this was right on the route of the Coastal GasLink pipeline project, it was late afternoon, and all the workers were coming out in their pickups. Finally, we made it to the turn-off towards the park. The quality of the road declined, but the the traffic dropped to nil so we made better time the rest of the way to Lamprey Lake. We unloaded the canoe, had some dinner, and set up our rooftop tent for our first night. We would be ready to get a good start in the morning.

The Park

The canoe route covers a total of four lakes – Lamprey, Anzac, Stepp, and Kidprice. Nanika lake is an extra 8 km west of Kidprice,and the only access is by an “arduous journey” of lining your canoe upstream in a braided channel with potential for logjams. There is no portage trail. As getting to the end of Kidprice lake is work enough, I would be surprised to hear of anyone actually completing that part. Other than Lamprey, all the lakes drain into Kidprice lake, which flows out over the Nanika falls into Morice lake and on into the Morice river – the largest tributary to the Bulkley river and so is also important to one of BC’s major river systems, the Skeena.

Incidentally, Nanika-Kidprice Provincial Park is a relatively new addition to BC’s park system with an interesting (and rather political) history. In 1950, the BC government signed away the rights to all the water in the Nanika watershed, along with all the water in the Nechako watershed to Alcan. The company went on to build the Kenney Dam to create the Nechako Reservoir out of the lakes set aside for Tweedsmuir park in 1938, drill a 16 km tunnel through Mount DuBose on the coast, and divert most of the water from the Nechako watershed to power the aluminum smelter in Kitimat. This was completed within five years, with little consultation with inhabitants of the area and displacing many First Nations people with little to no notice. Prior to this construction, the Nechako river was the largest tributary to the the Fraser river. Seventy percent of its water is now diverted west for power production.

In 1978, Kitimat was connected to the provincial electrical grid, and Alcan was allowed to start selling power they weren’t using for making aluminum to BC Hydro. In 1979, Alcan announced they wanted to divert more water from the Nechako and make use of their rights to the Nanika watershed as well – with another dam (this time on Kidprice lake at Nanika Falls), another tunnel to connect Nanika lake with the Tahtsa reach of the Nechako reservoir, and a second tunnel though Mount DuBose to the powerhouse in Kemano. The effects on the Bulkley river flows would have been equally devastating as they had been on the Nechako.

Many hardworking people in both Vanderhoof and Smithers put a lot of work into fighting for their rivers over the next decade and a half. There were several court cases, settlements, and eventual agreements. The project, as it was announced in 1979, was cancelled piecemeal by the BC government with several concessions to Alcan along the way. In an agreement in 1987, Alcan gave up its rights to the Nanika Watershed and in 1995, the half-finished second tunnel to Kemano was also cancelled. A legacy project that arose from all this history and politics was the Nanika-Kidprice canoe route that makes possible the access to Nanika falls – which had been slated to become another large earth-fill dam. It was only after all this that it was formally established as a provincial park in 2008 in conjunction with the Wet’suwet’en people of the area. Somehow all that history, and how close the area came to being irrevocably changed, makes the untouched scenery seem that much more special.

Below is a preview of our trip through the park, more stories to come!