Whitecourt

Whitecourt is a town in Northern Alberta, Canada that is surrounded by Woodlands County. It is approximately 177 km (110 mi) northwest of Edmonton and 279 km (173 mi) southeast of Grande Prairie at the junction of Highway 43 and Highway 32. It has an elevation of 690 m (2,260 ft).

Whitecourt is also located at the confluence of four waterways – the Athabasca River, McLeod River, Sakwatamau River and Beaver Creek. A Canadian National rail line runs through the town.

The Town has branded itself as the Snowmobile Capital of Alberta and its motto is Let's Go.... The Whitecourt meteor impact crater is found on nearby Whitecourt Mountain.

The community was formed in the place known by the Cree as Sagitawah (the place where the rivers meet). The first Hudson's Bay Company trading post was established at the site in 1897, and Klondike gold rush-ers used the place as a way station on the overland trek to the goldfields. The first permanent resident on the present day townsite was HBC employee and farmer John Goodwin, who settled there in 1905. A post office was established in 1910, and Walter Hartwell White, who carried the mail from nearby Greencourt, was honored with the name Whitecourt. The name "Whitecourt" was chosen in 1909 by Walter White, the postmaster of the young community. White was the son-in-law of former Kansas governor John W. Leedy who also settled in the community. The name conformed to the style of the name of Green Court, White's previous hometown, located nearby.

In early 1910, MLA Peter Gunn announced that a government wagon road had been opened from Entwistle to Whitecourt. With the expansion of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway in 1910, immigrants were encouraged by Premier Arthur Lewis Sifton to settle in the vast scarcely inhabited area between Edmonton and the Peace River Country.

With the growth of settlement in the area and as it was on the route to the Pine Pass through the Rockies, the Canadian Northern Railway line was planned to be completed to Whitecourt in 1913. But it was not until after that railway company was rolled into the Canadian National that a railway was built to Whitecourt.

Whitecourt has three identifiable geographic components:

Whitecourt has a subarctic climate (Köppen Dfc), falling just short of a humid continental climate (Dfb) due to May and September having mean average temperatures just below 10 °C or 50 °F. Winters are long and cold (though milder than many areas farther east, even at lower latitudes), and summers are fairly short and relatively warm.