Local services include a post office, fire department, library, and general store, among other small businesses.

[1] The result is a location similar to Interlaken, Switzerland, with two fjord-style lakes flanking a narrow and very short strip of land between them.

Much of neighbouring Shalalth is on these alluvial benches, but Seton Portage is entirely situated atop the rubble of the great slide, but covered with good soils from the inroads of vegetation over the millennia.

Two 1890s-vintage churches built by the Oblate Fathers, and some of the adjacent log-cabin rancheries, still stand today though the one at Slosh, St. Christopher's, is in a state of decay.

[2] Within a few years that traffic had disappeared (see Douglas Road) and the non-First Nations population of the Portage from then until the arrival of the Oblates in the 1880s was few, if any at all, although travellers still occasionally used the route of which the location was intrinsically a part.

Further settlement came with the building of the Pacific Great Eastern Railway, which was open through the Lakes by 1914 and which required the housing and feeding of hundreds of men, and with that the beginnings of the Bridge River Power Project.

Most likely the "railway" - known as Dozier's Way - was drawn by horses and mules in one direction, and run on gravity in the other - was not used much after the colonial government built the Cariboo Road through the Fraser River canyon, in 1864, via Ashcroft, which bypassed Seton Portage and Lillooet, and was abandoned shortly thereafter (c. 1870) although its roadgrade survives today as the main local thoroughfare, Portage Road.

The valley became an important food supply for the booming goldfields in the Bridge River from the 1920s to the 1950s because of its lower elevation (255 metres or 837 feet) and hence warmer climate and long growing season (favorable enough for bigleaf maple at the northeast corner of its natural range).

[3] The locality is known for its fine fruit-growing weather - McIntosh apples grown here are considered some of the best in the world, but there is only one commercial orchard today.

The event was covered by provincial and national television news media and led to province-wide protests in support of native land claims.