"About forty Chinamen are working the bench by shooting the gravel down to the Clearwater River, and are making from $4 to $9 a day. With proper water works this bench would yield a large amount of gold, and its extent offers employment to hundreds of miners." Neither of these reports suggests the specific location of the activities on the Clearwater River and, as mileage calculated in those days was generally inaccurate, the figure given by the B.C. Tribune is practically meaningless. Later reports about hydraulic mining, however, indicate that the Chinese miners were probably working upstream from Hobson Lake. The spark that ignited a flurry of prospecting and mining activity along the Clearwater River was probably provided by H.R. Bellamy of Nelson in 1899: "I believe that all the streams from the west, flowing into the North Thompson River have brought down more or less gold, especially the Clearwater...This river has no doubt brought down vast quantities of gold and deposited it along the bed of the Thompson..." By the 1920s, much of Hobson Creek and the Clearwater River above Hobson Lake had been staked and active mining or hydraulicking was underway. The Blue Ice Mine on Fred Wells Creek, a branch of Hobson Creek, was a unique endeavour. The name aptly described the site, located at an altitude of , just away from an active glacier. Although showings of gold and silver were of an economical quantity during a 1938 survey, the site was never fully developed, because of the unpredictable movements of the nearby glacier. Canadian Pacific Railway Between 1872 and 1881, about 20 survey parties fanned out across British Columbia trying to find the best route for the new railway between Yellowhead Pass in the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Coast. Three survey parties visited what is now Wells Gray Park. In 1873, Marcus Smith, searching for the ideal route to Bute Inlet, visited Hobson Lake and wrote in his diary: "The Clearwater River rises in a range of mountains to the northeast of Quesnelle Lake, and nearly due east of the latter it expands into a lake, which can be reached by a pass...said to be easy and not very high. There is the short space between Clearwater lake and the north fork of the North Thompson River, about which I can get no information....This is undoubtedly part of the Selkirk Range, and I have