BACKGROUND - British Columbia: Including the Alaska Highway - page 707

The landscape is defined by parallel north-south mountain ranges and a series of parallel
valleys. The steep Coast Mountains, an unbroken chain extending for 1,500 kilometers
(932 miles), rise abruptly from the Pacific Ocean. Their high point, and the highest peak
completely in British Columbia, is 4,016-meter-high (13,180-foot-high) Mount Wadding-
ton. The province's highest point is shared with Alaska; 4,663-meter (15,300-foot) Mount
Fairweather (sixth highest in Canada) is part of the St. Elias Range, a northern exten-
sion of the Coast Mountains that straddles the BC-Alaska border in the extreme northw-
est corner of the province. The province's eastern border is defined by the Continental
Divide off the Rocky Mountains, which reach a high point north of the 49th parallel at
3,954-meter (13,000-foot) Mount Robson. In the south of the province between the Coast
Mountains and the Rockies lie the Columbia Mountains, the collective name for the Cari-
boo, Monashee, Selkirk, and Purcell Ranges. These ranges rise to peak elevations of just
over 3,000 meters (9,900 feet) and are separated by deep valleys and long, narrow lake sys-
tems. Only the highest of the Columbia Mountains—including some glaciated peaks in the
Selkirks and Purcells—are snow-covered year-round. In the northern half of the province,
the ranges are lower, wider, and less well-defined, rising to vast plateaus that extend hun-
dreds of kilometers in all directions. The least obvious of the province's mountain ranges
lies mostly underwater, off the west coast. The range rises above sea level at thousands