Spruce Lake Protected Area

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

Recreational activities in the park included hiking, cycling, swimming, fishing and hunting, and 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.

Background

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 Joyce Murray in 2004, with the new park's boundaries including 70% of the protected area and permitting limited resource extraction in the remaining area on the protected area's periphery.

The protected area designation resulted from the Lillooet Land and Resource Management Plan (LRMP), which attempted to address local community, environmental, recreation and resource interests.