The river begins in the southern arm of Whitehorse Wildland Provincial Park, about 5 kilometers east of the eastern boundary of Jasper National Park. The McLeod River originates from a northward basin between Tripoli Ridge and the Cardinal Divide,[2] a watershed divide that separates water that eventually drains north into the Arctic Ocean and east into Hudson Bay.[3] Headwater tributaries of the McLeod River flowing from the eastern slope of the Rockies include Thornton, Prospect, Whitehorse, Cadomin, and Luscar Creeks.[4] The river snakes through the foothills and is soon joined by four major tributaries, the Gregg, Erith, Embarrass, and Edson rivers before meeting the Athabasca River near the town of Whitecourt, Alberta.[5]
Throughout the 1950s and the 1960s the Alberta Government undertook a number of planning studies that discussed diverting water from the Athabasca-Mackenzie watershed to the North and South Saskatchewan Rivers. In 1970, a preliminary engineering report on the McLeod Valley Dam was released by the provincial Department of Agriculture.
"The main embankment would be 5810 feet long with crest elevation at 2780 feet and a maximum height of 140 feet. Dykes, 13,230 feet long and with a maximum height of 15 feet would also be required. Two diversion tunnels, one of which will later be converted to a low level outlet, are proposed to handle river flow during the construction period. A gated ogee crest spillway has been designed with a discharge capacity sufficient to route a 1:500 year flood through the reservoir. The dam would create a reservoir approximately 12 miles long with a total storage area of 562,700 acre-feet (694,100,000 m3) at full supply level of 2770 feet."[6]
The McLeod Valley Dam, as well as the larger Athabasca-to-Saskatchewan diversion scheme, was shelved in the 1970s due to rising construction costs and environmental concerns.
^McLeod River headwaters, Irvine, R. and Jackson, L., Spatial variance of nutrient limitation of periphyton in montane, headwater streams (McLeod River, Alberta, Canada), Researchgate.org
^Development Planning Branch, Water Resources Division, Alberta Department of Agriculture, Preliminary Engineering Report on the Investigation and Design of the McLeod Valley Dam, Edmonton: 1970.
