Yellowhead Pass

Pass on the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains; altitude 1,146 m/3760 ft. The Yellowhead Pass links the Jasper National Park in Alberta with the Robson Provincial Park in British Columbia, near the headwaters of the Fraser River. Major railway lines and highways cross the Rockies at this point.

Used by Hudson's Bay Company traders in the 1820s as Leather Pass, it was later named after a blond Iroquois trapper nicknamed ‘Tête Jaune’, who stored his goods immediately west at Tête Jaune Cache, British Columbia. Although Yellowhead Pass was originally chosen by the Canadian Pacific Railway as the place where the country's first transcontinental railway line would cross the Rockies, it eventually built the line further south, at Kicking Horse Pass. Subsequently, the Grand Trunk Pacific and Canadian National railways adopted Yellowhead as their crossing point. The term Yellowhead Highway applies to two routes that converge here. The first is Highway 5, which approaches the pass from Kamloops, to the south-southwest. The other is Highway 16, from west of Winnipeg, Manitoba, which crosses central Saskatchewan and central Alberta, by way of Edmonton, and after traversing the pass runs northwest through Prince George, British Columbia, ending at Prince Rupert on the Pacific Ocean.