attempted to improve the trail, though the effort was abandoned in 1907 due to high costs. Moodie recorded the name as "Ta-ta-chi-ca" during his explorations of the region and later produced a map labeling the river as "Kachika". In 1914 Major E.B. Hart of the Royal Geographic Society noted that the inhabitants of the area pronounced the river with an 'e' rather than an 'a' sound and proposed the spelling "Kechika", which was officially adopted by the BC Geographic Division on March 3, 1925. However, as late as 1949 the river was still colloquially known as "Big Muddy". In 1939, John Ogilvie "Skook" Davidson, a northern BC packer and guide, settled in the Kechika River valley and established Diamond J Ranch. For more than thirty years Davidson supported packing expeditions for geology and survey crews, as well as guiding hunting expeditions. Davidson helped scout the route for the Alaska Highway, which was built past the Kechika–Liard confluence in the 1940s, and helped transport supplies for construction crews. The confluence of the Kechika with the Liard, where supplies were offloaded from boats on the latter river, became known as Skook's Landing. In 1970, Davidson retired to Vancouver after a fire destroyed the ranch. Skooks Landing is still regularly used by hunters to access the Kechika River, particularly during the elk season in September. In 1996, the Kechika River was designated a BC Heritage River along with two of its tributaries, the Gataga River and Frog River. Ecology and protected areas Almost the entire Kechika River basin is within the western part of the Muskwa-Kechika Management Area (M-KMA), which includes four of fourteen biogeoclimatic zones in British Columbia. The Alpine Tundra zone, consisting mainly of shrubs, grasses mosses and lichens, occupies elevations higher than . Mid-elevations are occupied by the Spruce-Willow-Birch and Engelmann Spruce-Subalpine Fir zones, where the dominant trees are white spruce and subalpine fir, with Engelmann spruce frequently found along steeper, more rugged slopes. The lower valleys are part of the Boreal White and Black Spruce zone, which is dominated by white and black spruce, paper birch and subalpine fir. In addition, muskeg flats are common in the northern half of the basin. The wide, open valleys of the Kechika and its tributaries are home to an abundance of wildlife including moose, caribou, Stone sheep, mountain goat, grizzly bear, black bear, wolf and elk. In 2000 BC's Land and Resource