make things happen
in BC.

Our Industrial and Regional Development
Program (IRDP) helps entrepreneurs make
things happen here by providing financial
assistance to:

establish encourage innovation
modernize or expand 3 improve productivity

develop new products vale develop new markets
and services

If you are involved in
manufacturing, resource
processing or tourism,

find out how we can make
things happen for you.

Talk to us....here....in British Columbia.

Regional Industrial | Expansion industrielle
Expansion régionale
Hon. Edward Lumley, Minister/Ministre

iv

Simply fill out this coupon and mail it
to us or phone our Business Information
Centre in Vancouver— 661-2202

or Zenith O-3200

Department of Regional Industrial Expansion

P.O. Box 49178 Bentall Tower #4, 1101-1055 Dunsmuir Street
Vancouver, B.C. V7X 1K8

PLEASE SEND ME MORE INFORMATION
ON I.R.D.P.

Name

ivi Title

Address
City
Postal Code _

“And it seems being 4 director on the Valhalla
Wilderness Society board has been a fulltime job these
days.

The society has been dedicated to having a section of
the Valhalla Mountain Range set aside as » provincial
park, and is only one of the parties engaged in the
controversial land-use debates that have been going on
here for years.

“It's all laid out at my feet here,” Pettitt muses.
“Up here above the treeline the competition for resources
isn’t too bad. There are a few mining people who want to
make sure they don't lose the right to put mines in, and
there are us recreation types, and the wildlife. But down
below, in the forests, that’s where it’s tough.”

And indeed, here in the West Kootenay, where the
forest industry is the largest single employer, forest
management is a major source of resource-use conten
tion. Forest products companies need a constant supply
of wood.

On Feb. 16, 1983 a 60,000 hectare
shoreline-to-mountain-peak area
was declared a wilderness park.

The Ministry of Forest's responsibility is not only to
provide good forest management, but also to insure thata
healthy forest industry is maintained. Recreationists
want wild lands protected.

Conservationists demand that wilderness areas and
the environment's ecological integrity be maintained.
Tourism operators know their customers want pristine
mountain scenery. Miners argue the importance of their
industry and defend their access to mineral deposits.
There's lots to fight about.

But this afternoon Pettitt is keeping away from all
the issues. He's simply appreciating the beautiful land.

The vista Pettitt is mediating on is mainly crown

Silverton

SD
Ainsworth
7. Hot Springs

Slocan

-
va
w

forestland and a part of that area d by the
Ministry’of Forests as the Arrow Timber Supply Area
TSA). Beginning at the U.S. border, the TSA boundaries
run north, approximately along the tops of the Selkirk
and Monashee Ranges, narrowing into a strip of moun-
tains east of Revelstoke. -

It includes the Arrow and Slocan Lake systems and
such towns as Castlegar, Trail, New Denver and Nakusp.
The area's forests are managed as a unit to provide a
regular timber supply.

Slocan Forest Products is the major forestry
operator in the Arrow TSA. ATCO, Kalesnikoff Lumber
and several other operators also have cutting rights here,
but the region's largest operator is BC Timber, formerly
CanCel and Kootenay Forest Products.

It operates partially within the Arrow TSA bound-
aries on Tree Farm License 23.. TEL. 23 is spread. out
along the Arrow Lake system, and its logs are floated to a
sawmill and pulp mill at Castlegar.

This part of the world wasn’t always primarily a
wood producer. In the late 1800s it was opened up by a
mining boom. Prospectors routinely burned off whole
watersheds to make rock outcrops more visible and to
make travel easier.

Predictably, the boom fizzled out, leaving boom
towns such as Silverton, New Denver and Sandon
struggling. Some became ghost towns while others
became the basis for a slowly diversifying economy:
mixed farms and orchards, a little logging, some mining;
it grew slowly. Lending stability to the region were the
hard-working Doukhobors with their self-sustaining
farming and logging economy.

In the 1950s and 1960s, development accelerated.
The mill and smelter at Trail grew to be the largest such
complex in the world. Sawmills, a pulp mill and a plywood
plant sprang up. Roads snaked into the backcountry to
provide access to wood to supply those mills.

The forest industry became king. B.C. Hydro was
busy too, building dams on the Arrow and Duncan Lakes.
Some of the best forest and farming land in the interior
was flooded.

Kootenay Lake, east of the Slocan Valley, became a
popular summer resort area. The population grew. The
regional Ithough below the provincial average,
seemed healthy enough as wood to feed the mills poured
in.

By the early 1970s, the development bubble was
beginning to burst. More and more people were moving
to this beautiful, mountainous ares, looking for rural

ng was
placing more i int on forest
Many of the newcomers came with educated, middle-class
backgrounds, escaping what they perceived to be the
excesses of the big cities. They came with different
values, an ability to handle complicated issues, and a
willingness to make their wishes known. Tensions were
unavoidable.

Throughout the 1970s contentious issues such as the
formation of parks, logging techniques, and uranium
mining filled the “Letters to the Editor” pages of local
newspapers. Although time and familiarity inevitably
taught the various factions to = along together, the
land-use conflicts only

To cope with the situation in ) the Slocan Valley, the
Sfocan Valley Planning Program, a joint regional and
provincial venture, was undertaken. Provincial govern-
ment resource agencies, the public, industry and the
regional district-worked together on various resource and
economic issues.

The list goes on and on:annual timber cuts, environ-
mental protection, recreation and tourism development,
preservation of agricultural land, mining

in the early 1970s at a meeting of the Kootenay Moun-
taineering Club.

Pettitt explains the reasoning behind it: “From
highway six, along the east side of the lake, you've got
this wilderness vista across the lake and the far shore,
and then all the way up the mountains there's a suc-
cession of forest types. And you've got some great peaks
up top.

“Slocan Lake is undammed and good for recreation.
The west shore is good for camping and hiking, with
beaches and waterfalls, and Indian rock paintings. There
are some hiking trails up the mountains; if it were a park
you'd have more. Up top there's great high-country
hiking and mountaineering. Climbers love some of those

“On the other hand, the forest ministry's district
manager Glen Allin notes that low altitude forestland in
the interior, such as much of the land trthe Valhalla park
area, is wood-producing country.

ough it doesn’t look like it now to an untrained
eye, a lot of the forested:park area was heavily logged
years ago and is stagnant now. It’s full of disease and
needs to be logged and put back into production by
planting a healthy forest there.”

Slocan Forest Products’ woodlands manager Terry
Dods expresses a common concern of B.C.'s forest
industry:“It’s a straight fact that we're suffering a loss of
our forestland base and it’s causing a loss in production.

“The planning process has has a lot to offer and
we've been involved in the Slocan planning process from
the start. But we had serious differences with the
committee on economic issues. They spent endless time
discussing a new tourism economy, but any time we tried
to talk about forestry we ran into a stone wall.”

“We're not against logging,” Pettitt counters. “But
you know, it seems that almost every major watershed in
both the East and West.Kootenays that I hunted and
fished in as a boy has either been flooded for hydro power
or has clearcut logging or open pit mining on it.

“We've got to diversity, and around here tourism is
one good way to do it. But who'd want to come here if the
hillsides were all hacked up with logging cuts?

“Besides, we've got the figures on our side. We have
a consultant's report saying that when we make the
Valhallas a park and develop tourism ina big way, we'll
have something like 15 or 20 times the number of jobs in
the valley than we would if we had just decided to log
that land.” 7

Dods stresses the point that tourism is a future
possibility. But logging, despite the currently depressed
economy, is a proven source of revenue for the region. “I
think it’s time we start thinking about protecting what
we already have.

“We've long advocated that the southern half of the
proposed Valhalla ‘k area be reserved — made into a
park or whatever, but that the northern half be managed
like the rest of the forests.

“Those people who want the whole area as a park
and want increased tourism refer to their consultant's
report that says that if $17 million were invested, in the
future tourism would earn so much. We employ 250 to 300
people and have a lot more than $17 million invested.”

Floyd Dykeman of the Central Kootenay Regional
District points out that although the recommendations of
the regional government were solidly “pro park” and in
favor of tourism development. “The regional board wants
economic diversity in the valley and so encourages
logging and mining as well. It asked that the whole park

settlement patterns and watershed management.
Provincial ministries generated inventories and
recommendations; local citizens’ committees wrestled
with the needs of residents and began realizing how
difficult and complex the problems were. The reports
piled up.
To insure public par public i were

area be pi | but the northern section
should remain within the Provincial Forest for integrated
use.”

Then, on Feb. 16, 1983, ELUC made its announce-
ment: having carefully weighed all the arguments, it
decided that the Valhallas should become a 60,000 hectare

t in peak | park to
be ly for its and tourism

organized and input invited from any and everyone in-
volved. But before any development plan could be put
into effect, the region had to await a decision that only
the Environment and Land-Use Committee ELUC of the
P ial cabinet could her or not to create a
new provincial park in the Valhalla Mountains.

The park proposal to reserve a 60,000 hectare area of
mountains along the west side of Slocan Lake originated

values.

With that issue finally decided, land managers can
give more attention to the other resource-use problems
still plaguing the West Kootenay. Leading the list is the
issue of logging in community watersheds.

For years it was govet policy to
logging in areas away from settlements or major trans-
portation corridors. Towards the end of the 1970s the

supply of backcountry timber began to run out in parts of
the Arrow TSA, and plans were made to harvest hillsides
facing major valleys and in domestic watersheds.

Many Slocan Valley residents were outraged. They
had moved there for the natural beauty. Clearcuts didn't
fit the bill. Moreover, most residents wanted to live a
rural life. That means that virtually every small creek is
someone’s domestic watershed, and many landowners
feared that logging would foul their water supply.

Forest ministry district manager Glen Allin is aware
of these concerns, but explains:“It only takes a five-dollar
water license to tie up thousands of hectares of timber. A
big problem for us is that there's no community devel-
opment plan in the Slocan, no zoning. Almost every creek
is licensed, but you jtist can't take that much forest out of

the local depends-on it so
much. We've already lost so much of the land to settle-
ment, roads and the flooding of valleys.”

Adds Slocan Forest Products’ Terry Dods:“I believe
that, to one extent or another, every watershed can be
logged. Logging techniques have changed over the last 20
years — over the last five years — and they're still
changing. It’s time to get on with one of the management
functions, namely harvesting.”

It seems there will always be another watershed
issue to solve in the West Kootenay, but at least one
method for coming to terms with the problem is in place.
Over the years, ministry and local citizens have learned
to put their heads together to work out solutions for
specific watersheds, in the process preparing the ground

forest ministry's recreation resource
+ the @rea, found that his most enjoyable
‘was to maintain and monitor the use of a
system of ¢roes-country ski trails in the Paulson Summit
area Rossland.
As he Worked his way around the circuit on skis one
cloudy, winter day, clearing overhanging branches,
checking the trail condition and talking’ to users, he
explained something about the ministry's approach to
recreation.:.“We provide rustic, user-maintained camp
sites and pienic areas without duplicating services offered
by private campgroung operators, the Ministry of
Highways or the Parks Branch. Typically we'll have a
campside or pienie area, say near a good fishing lake up
some logging road.

“We aleo provide support for backcountry recreation
and are slowly producing an inventory of recreational
resources — lakes, hiking trails, good ski areas, that sort
of thing.

“The interest in cross-country skiing has mushroom.
ed over the past few years. These trails here, and the two
day-shelters were developed by local clubs. We only took

With the park a reality,
local residents look to tourism
to give a major economic
boost to the area.

them over when there was concern about the clubs
limiting the use of facilities on public lands. There's
always someone on the trails, every day of the week.”

North of Slocan Valley, on the Arrow Lake System,
the small logging community of Nakusp feels the disad
vantages of being a single-industry town. Through the
1981-82 depression in the wood market, unemployment in
Nakusp skyrocketed, businesses failed and the local
economy came to a near standstill.

From his mainstreet office one sleepy winter
afternoon, Ken Marhsall, a Nakusp real estate agent and
member of the Chamber of Commerce, gives his opinion.
“In the long run here we're going to have to rely much
more on tourism. It's the only way out of this boom or
bust resource economy we have now. There's lots of
tourism in the area, but we don't have much to keep them
here, except the Nakusp Hotsprings. That helps, but we
need more.”

Marshall is interrupted suddenly by a thrashing roar
low overhead. “That's the only economic bright spot in
town these days,” he says, gesturing skywards. “Heli
copter skiing is really helping the restaurants and
hotels.”

Tad Derbyshire, owner of Kootenay Helicopter
Skiing, spent part of his childhood in Nakusp and loves it
there. “We offer two things,” he explains. “Some of the
best wilderness skiing in the world — powder snow, deep
and steep and lots of it — and the beauty and atmosphere
of small-town B.C.”

Another type of wilderness skiing gaining popularity
is snow-cat skiing. By using snow-cats multi-passenger, _
enclosed tracked vehicles) in place of helicopters, and by
offering good ski runs and homecooked meals in rustic
lodges, operators are attracting customers from all across
North America. Valhalla Mountain Touring — run by
Pettitt and his partner Grant Copetant! — operates out of
their lodge 11 miles up Shannon Creek in the Valhalla
Range, just orth of,the proposed park area.

When the topic of backcountry skiing comes up,
foresters point out that snow-cats normally make their
way into wilderness areas on old logging roads, and that a
lot of skiing takes place in clearcuts.

Copeland, a planning consultant in the off season,
talks about the future:“All of us involved in tourism in the
area want to retain the rural atmosphere; people come
here for the beauty and the atmosphere. Nobody is
against logging or mining. But tourism could be and
should be an important partner in the local economy. I
just hope we get past this stage of everybody fighting
each other.”

STUNNING VIEW .. . A look at the Vathallas across Slocan Lake from
the top of Idaho peak neor New Denver.