The Alouette Reservoir is located in east Maple Ridge in southwest British Columbia. The Alouette River watershed is a relatively small system (144 km2) that arises in the Coastal Mountains of Golden Ears Provincial Park, approximately 50 km northeast of Vancouver, B.C. The upper watershed flows into an impounded reservoir known as Alouette Lake. At the reservoir’s river outlet, the South Alouette River flows for 21 km before entering the Pitt River near Pitt Meadows; and the Pitt River, in turn, flows south into the Fraser River at Douglas Island (Mathews, 2014).

The Alouette River was awarded Heritage status in 1998 under the BC Heritage Rivers System (BCHRS). The BCHRS is the first provincial system of its kind in Canada and helps to promote stewardship of this natural legacy for all British Columbians.

Building a fishway over the Alouette Dam would grant all species of salmon access into the Alouette Reservoir. This would allow sockeye salmon to complete their natural life cycle of spawning in the lake helping rebuild the Alouette sockeye run and would also open up substantial new habitat, upstream, and permit all five returning species of salmon to thrive.

Each small piece of the landscape has an important role in the overall health of our watershed. Paying attention only to the riparian zone, an area critical to a watershed’s release and filter function, will not make up for a lack of attention to the watershed’s uplands. Uplands play an equally important role in the watershed, the capture, filtration and storage of moisture. So, it is seamless management of the entire watershed and the environmentally responsible actions of each and everyone of us that ensures complete watershed health.