Cariboo Mountains

Mountain range in east-central British Columbia. The Cariboos are part of the Columbia Mountains section of the Rocky Mountains, and run for some 320 km/200 mi between the Fraser River and the Rocky Mountain Trench (in the east) and the province's interior plateaus (in the west). Their highest point is Mount Sir Wilfrid Laurier (3,505 m/11,750 ft), in the south of the range, just west of Yellowhead Pass.

Wells Gray and Bowron Lake provincial parks are on the western slopes of the Cariboos. This area was the scene of a gold rush in the early 1860s that centred around Barkerville, and attracted many fortune seekers, some of whom arrived via the Cariboo Road; as more gold strikes occurred throughout the Fraser River valley, the name ‘Cariboo’ came to be loosely applied to areas as far south as Lillooet, 177 km/110 mi north-northwest of Vancouver.