Helmcken Falls

Interesting facts

A 1963 hydro plan proposed a 137-metre dam downstream that would have flooded most of Helmcken Canyon and drowned the bottom 10 metres of the falls.

The dams were stopped after volunteers ran bus tours in 1972, asking passengers to picture the valley under water; the plan was shelved within a year.

As early as 1918 the falls were studied as a power source for Kamloops, and in the late 1940s Alcan weighed them before choosing Kitimat instead.

When motorists campaigned for a park in 1925, lands minister Duff Pattullo refused, arguing there was no point protecting waterfalls that would not go away.

The park was finally named after Arthur Wellesley Gray, the lands minister who created it in 1939 and whose nickname was "Wells".

Helmcken is often listed as Canada's fourth-highest waterfall.

The winter ice cone peaks from late January to February, caves in during March, and leftover chunks can linger at the base into June.

Ice routes here were successively graded W10, W11, W12 and finally W13 between 2010 and 2020, each time pushing the top of the ice-climbing scale.

Below the falls, Helmcken Canyon leads to the meeting of the Murtle and Clearwater rivers, some 250 metres beneath its rim.

Of the six waterfalls upstream on the Murtle, Meadow Falls is so hidden that it can practically be seen only from the air.

Why it is worth it

Helmcken Falls drops 141 metres in a single plunge from the rim of a lava plateau into a huge amphitheatre of dark rock in Wells Gray Provincial Park, British Columbia. The Murtle River goes over the edge as one heavy white column into a deep, rounded basin, the classic form of a punchbowl fall. In winter the spray freezes around the base into an ice cone that often grows to 50 metres and in some years climbs halfway up the fall. The falls were one of the main reasons the park was created in 1939.

The landscape is volcanic. Starting some 200,000 years ago, lava welled up from fissures in the Wells Gray–Clearwater volcanic field and filled the broad valley of the Clearwater River, flow upon flow, until it formed the Murtle Plateau. At the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, enormous floods cut down through these layers and carved Helmcken Canyon below the falls. Upstream, the Murtle drops over six more waterfalls, among them Dawson Falls and The Mushbowl.

Railway surveyors passed to the north in the 1870s without noticing the falls. On 24 July 1913 a provincial land surveyor, Robert Henry Lee, walked west along the Murtle from his camp and came out at the brink. He wrote to the Premier, Sir Richard McBride, proposing the name McBride Falls. Three weeks later the reply came that the falls would instead honour John Sebastian Helmcken, a Hudson's Bay Company doctor who had arrived in Victoria in 1850 and helped bring British Columbia into Confederation in 1871. Helmcken died in 1920 at 95, never having seen the falls himself. In recent decades the frozen walls of the amphitheatre have become a centre of extreme ice climbing. Routes here, from Spray On in 2010 to Mission to Mars in 2020, are among the hardest ice climbs ever graded, and the place has been called the Yosemite of ice climbing.

Getting there

The falls are about 35 km north of Clearwater in a straight line. The Clearwater Valley Road, also known as the Wells Gray Park Road, leaves the Yellowhead Highway in Clearwater and runs paved for 42 km to the Helmcken junction, where a short side road leads to a viewing platform on the canyon rim. The nearest airport is Kamloops Airport (YKA), about 140 km to the south.

Helmcken Falls

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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