Talk:Columbia Valley

There's two of these....actually three

The only officially-gazetted "Columbia Valley" in BC is the rural locality between Cultus Lake and the US border, adjacent to Lindell Beach, British Columbia. I don't think it has a post office or anything more than a few farms; it's only a name and rarely referred to, other than appearing on maps and perhaps in government/muni/RD reports. But it's a legal name, whereas the current article invokes a colloquial usage, i.e. for the Golden-Canal Flats area. It should also be noted that this article's title may be confusing for non-BC visitors, particularly Americans, as "Columbia Valley" you'd think would refer to the valley of the Columbia River, and indeed that's exactly how the lower Columbia below Grand Coulee is described, whether it's Walla Walla or Kelso/Longview. Given those three meanings, I'm of a mind that this page should be a disambiguation, and there should be three articles or disambig entries anyway; not sure how to break out the titles. Further, Columbia Country is a term which applies to the Revelstoke-Big Bend-Golden loop of the Columbia, plus the Invermere-Windermere-Panorama area, commonly heard in the combinations Columbia-Kootenay and Shuswap-Columbia or whatever, with the "Country" implicit in the formation of those compounds (as also "Shuswap Country".Skookum1 (talk) 17:01, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Ya, I agree with Skookum1; if this not-even-officially named area gets an article then what about the one at the back of Cultus? It should have an article on it too. I've got a friend that lives up there by the way. AndrewEnns (talk) 18:30, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm going to make the one by Cultus, and even though it's the officially named one the East Kootenay usage is by far the more common and well-known, so Columbia Valley (Lower Mainland) will be the dab. I'll ask User:Pfly and/or others who worked on Talk:Columbia River and its daughter articles to pen up Columbia Valley (United States). If need be this one can be converted into a dab page but generally dabs are made according to the sequence something is made in; there's no need, for now, for this to be Columbia Valley (East Kootenay), but that would be its eventual dab, I'd think, if someone insists on a geo-disambiguation page. Another case like this is Cariboo Plateau, which like so much else isn't in either BCGNIS or CGNDB but its most common usage remains the portion of the Fraser Plateau from Clinton to Quesnel (some even use it to refer to the Chilcotin Plateau! - and also the Kamloops Plateau, which is also unofficially named; Bonaparte Plateau is another term for it, at least its northwestern side, but in reality that's a small area between Clinton and Loon Lake...so, similarly, the official Cariboo Plateau is in the Monashees/Shuswap Highland east of Sicamous, but it's very small and almost unknown and rarely used in general speech/writing. There won't be much to put in the Cultus Lake one, though I think it was the route of the Whatcom Trail, or one of the routes (a lot easier than via the swamps of Sumas Lake). But I've never found specifics on the route of the Whatcom Trail, it's only a suspicion or well-educated guess....Skookum1 (talk) 15:59, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

GNIS gives two Columbia Valleys, one in Nevada, U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: Columbia Valley and the other in Washington, U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: Columbia Valley, the same one by Cultus Lake I think you are talking about. I gotta run, more later. Suspect the Columbia Valley AVA is a kind of neologism for the wine industry rather than a term with much historical use. Could be wrong... bbl Pfly (talk) 19:59, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Added it, amended the latlong slightly so it's right on the border and as mid-valley as I could get it; what do you think about making Columbia Valley (disambiguation? - because when Columbia Valley (Nevada) gets made that hatnote's going to be even bulkier than it is now. Also to note that on the satmap (AcmeMapper, maybe data is identical to GoogleEarth) Reclaim, British Columbia is shown as being in the valley, but it's actually on the other side of Vedder Mountain, where the BCER line hits the foot of the mountain just north of the border, or rather the farmland/neighbourhood adjacent to it (BCGNIS lists it as a "railway point").Skookum1 (talk) 20:17, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I'd suggest adding Columbia Valley (Lower Mainland) to the hatnote on this page, unless you feel up to making this a disambiguation page, in which case, go for it. I did a quick web search on "Columbia Valley -wine -AVA" and nearly everything was about the BC valley around Invermere. I suppose a fair number of people searching Wikipedia for "Columbia Valley" may want to go the the AVA page (I certainly see the name all the time on lots of wine bottles in stores where I live). The Columbia Valley in Nevada may never have a page. It is in the middle of nowhere! Then again, looking at the USGS topo maps via GNIS, the valley looks curious. It is fairly large and filled with the "Columbus Salt Marsh". A couple of US "highways" pass through it. There is a little town called Coaldale--oh wait, Coaldale, Nevada--it's a ghost town. There's some mining activity around it. I guess someone might write up a page about it someday. As for the Columbia River itself, I searched a little and still think the term Columbia Valley is very rare outside the wine industry. As Meinig, my old standby author, points out in The Great Columbia Plain, the landscape along the river east of the Cascades is not what one would usually call a valley. The river is contained in canyons and the land above is generally level or rolling for long distances. The word valley might be appropriate where the river flows through the Cascades, but of course that is called the Columbia Gorge. Meinig quotes the journals of Lewis and Clark a little. They used Columbia Valley rarely, and then to mean what we now call the Gorge and areas below. East of The Dalles they generally wrote "Plains of the Columbia", or, in Clark's creative spelling, ""Grait Plains of the Columbia". Clark's map published in 1814, on the other hand, has the words "Columbia Valley" written in large letters across a huge region bounded by the Cascades to the west, the Rockies to the east, the unmapped north (Canada, unmapped by Clark anyway), and far south through the entire Snake River Plain (Clark placed the Snake River far west of where it really is). One of the Pacific Fur Company Astorians, after seeing the land east of The Dalles took to calling it the "Great Columbia Desert". The only other "valley" reference in Meinig is in the name of a short-lived railroad company called the Columbia Valley and Goldendale Railroad. However, in this case the "valley" is what we now call the Columbia Gorge. Anyway, to cut this rambling short, I think it is safe to ignore the idea of the Columbia Valley being a long-established term for the region along the river south of Grand Coulee. Then again, it is hard to prove a negative, and my search and knowledge are limited.

By the way, I've driven through the Columbia Valley south of Cultus Lake. From the Sumas border crossing it is easy to take the "scenic route" via the valley and down to Sedro-Woolley and I-5. It was a fairly scenic drive, and iirc the valley was definitely called the Columbia Valley, noted on signs, store names, etc. This being the case, perhaps the page Columbia Valley (Lower Mainland) ought to be edited to better reflect the international nature of the valley. If nothing else the page name's use of (Lower Mainland) seems odd if one is thinking about the WA portion. An alternate disambig term does not spring to mind though. Pfly (talk) 06:51, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

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