Wednesday - May 7, 2025 - Ski resort gets deadline to remove temporary homes

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There is a reason the military uses a 24-hour clock. Every day, we schedule the next morning’s story to be published at 5:45am. Yesterday, we hit the little “pm” button instead and woke up to all your emails looking for our promised story on hidden streams. Well, here it is. Sorry for the confusion!

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News

Hard work, long coffee breaks, and a new home

It’s a sunny, windy day in Lytton—is there any other kind?—and a quartet of smiling men are banging nails into plywood to create a new home’s floor.

Within a few weeks, what is now a cement and wood platform will grow walls and a roof. By the arrival of Lytton’s ferocious summer heat, the house will be complete, and a young family of four will have a home to replace the one they lost four years prior.

Unless you count the coffee, no one on this job site is getting paid. Depending on the crew, some might be using their own vacation time to volunteer building a home with the Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS).

Mark Rempel lifts a piece of plywood into place, gives a wave, and steps off the platform to greet his crew’s unannounced visitor with a smile and handshake.

• Today, Tyler talks to Rempel about building a home for free, and how volunteers, laughter, and coffee are the ‘gold’ that pulls the effort together.

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Need to Know

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👏 Search and rescue equipment stolen from volunteers looking for a missing Chilliwack girl has now been returned [Fraser Valley Today]

🔊 Hundreds of people in Hope marched to remember murdered Indigenous women [Hope Standard]

🚫 Illegal drinking and vandalism led to the cancellation of this year’s Fort Langley Night Market [Langley Advance Times]

⛳ A young Chilliwack golfer is headed to the national championships after winning a regional event in Abbotsford [Chilliwack Progress]

🚔 Police recovered a stolen semi during a raid on a rural property in Hope [Hope Standard]

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The Agenda

Sasquatch resort gets two more years for ‘temporary’ staff homes

A local ski hill has two years to come up with a permanent housing solution for temporary staff, the Fraser Valley Regional District (FVRD) says.

The district granted a second permit to Sasquatch Mountain Resort this spring, allowing seasonal staff to continue living at three temporary buildings located on crown land.

The approval comes eight years after the FVRD issued its first temporary permit for the resort, which houses just under 100 people per season. The work camp-style buildings, commonly used in the oil and gas sector, also host construction workers during the off season.

The resort had asked the FVRD for an additional three years to come up with a permanent solution once its second permit—issued in March 2022—expired last month. But staff suggested shortening the permit to 18 months, citing the need for a connection to a community sewer system as opposed to a disposal system that is maintained on site.

Mel Waardenburg, Electoral Area C director, said the permit should be extended to 25 months, suggesting that would give the resort a bit more flexibility.

When the temporary permit was first issued in 2017, Sasquatch Mountain said they would connect the buildings to a community sewer system in the Hemlock Valley. However, progress was slowed by the need for provincial permits for an extension over a creek, which threatened the resort’s opening for the 2017/18 ski season.

Since then, the FVRD has allowed the mountain to operate two Fraser Health-approved septic tanks on-site.

FVRD staff suggested the reduced timeline as the buildings have been operating as “temporary” for nearly a decade, and a permanent solution is needed.

The temporary system doesn’t result in unsafe conditions in the community, according to staff, who left the door open to rezoning the land and consulting with another group to see if the temporary use could also become permanent in the future.

Although the permit was approved once again, the habit of greenlighting multiple temporary permits for the same program is worrying, said Hugh Davidson, Electoral Area F director.

“To me, this certainly has the feel of a run-on, recurring scenario that won’t be the last time we hear about it and that does concern me,” he said.

The extension for the site will run until 2027.

-Josh Kozelj, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

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