Birkenhead River

The Birkenhead River, formerly known as the Portage River, the Pole River and the Mosquito River, is a major tributary of the Lillooet River, which via Harrison Lake and the Harrison River is one of the major tributaries of the lower Fraser River. It is just over 50 km long from its upper reaches in the unnamed ranges south of Bralorne, British Columbia (these ranges are sometimes called the Noel Ranges or the Birkenhead Ranges); their western area towards the named Bendor Range east of Bralorne is sometimes called the Cadwallader Ranges.

Originally known as the Pole River, the lower Birkenhead's valley is part of the Long Portage of the Douglas Road, also known as the Pemberton Portage. The height of land on this route has been variously called Pemberton Pass (officially), Birken Pass, Gates Pass, and (in gold rush times) Mosquito Pass. The river is a major salmon resource for the Lil'wat subgroup of the St'at'imc people, whose reserve community Mount Currie which spans the lowland between the very lowest reaches of the Lillooet and Birkenhead Rivers.

At Owl Creek, a few miles up the Birkenhead, there was one of the major missions of the Oblate missionary organization, to which Lil'wat people from up and down the Pemberton Valley (Lillooet River valley above Lillooet Lake) moved, ultimately to become the Mount Currie community. Owl Creek is now a large non-native subdivision on the west side of the local highway from Mount Currie to N'quatqua (D'Arcy).

Just under 25 km up from its mouth, the main Gates Valley branches east off the north-aligned Birkenhead River's valley via Poole Creek, which drains the westward side of the Pemberton Pass; Birken Lake at its summit is part of the Gates River system which drains towards Anderson Lake and Lillooet. In this area there is a large stone with a foot-shaped impression on it - still there to this day and witnessed by Alexander Caulfield Anderson on his journey through the area in 1846 - where it is said one of the transformers stamped his foot in the rock to make a boundary between the people of the Canyon and those of the Lillooe

Flows through: Canada.

River data from Wikidata (CC0); lengths normalised to a common unit.