Five national parks and more than 300 provincial parks offer an assortment of terrains. Recreational activities vary from sport fishing to big-game hunting. Large tracts of the timber-laden slopes covering more than half of the province contribute wealth in the forms of lumber and its products. Dams on swiftly flowing rivers provide electricity for home and industry. On rivers flowing into the Pacific, fish ladders alongside dams allow salmon to swim upstream at spawning time and permit their young to return to the sea.
Large areas are rich in minerals copper, coal, gold, lead, molybdenum, silver, and zinc.
Refineries near Vancouver process crude oil from Alberta, as well as from British Columbia itself. The once-thriving fur trade brought the earliest white settlers to British Columbia. The discovery of gold in the Fraser River valley in 1858 drew prospectors north from California. The Dominion of Canada was extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific in 1871, when British Columbia became the sixth province. Permanent migration to the province took place in two major spurts.