Nature Wells Gray Education & Research
The heyday of education and research in the Clearwater Valley is not now. Rather it was about a half century ago, during a ten-year government funded study that brought a full-time wildlife biologist to Wells Gray Park, and stimulated dozens of other researchers to visit the park too. Collectively these early students of the Clearwater Valley generated scores of papers and an even greater number of unpublished reports. Those documents represent a tremendous contribution to our knowledge of the birds, mammals, fish, plants, lichens and mosses of this portion of the world. Fifty years later, they constitute an invaluable base-line summary of the park’s wildlife and vegetation in the years following the great fire of 1926, which blackened about 500 square kilometres. It’s fair to say that researchers have yet to “rediscover” the Clearwater Valley; but when they do their work will be supported by a considerable volume of earlier literature.
