Tuesday - Nov. 13, 2023 - Selling fog

🌧 High 9C

Good morning!

I’m considering a grand criminal caper this holiday season. It’s a carefully planned reverse-heist where, instead of sneaking treasure out of a museum or bank, I’m sneaking it into my apartment. I’ll wear black and haul it up the back stairs in the middle of the night, past the doors of the neighbours, in defiance of, well, strata bylaws.

What is the object of this elaborate endeavour, you ask? A big, green, real-life Christmas tree.

– Grace

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Traffic & Weather

🌤 Local forecast: Langley | Chilliwack | Abbotsford | Hope

🚘 Driving today? Check the current traffic situation via Google, and find DriveBC’s latest updates.

🛣 Click here for links to road cameras across the Fraser Valley, including those for the Coquihalla, Highway 7, Hope-Princeton, Fraser Canyon, and Highway 1 in Langley and Abbotsford.

NEWS

Can Hope sell its fog?

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. When the weather gives you months of fog, you make a fog festival.

Hope’s tourist season has, historically, come to a screeching halt in the fall as the weather takes a turn for the darker.

Clouds creep down the nearby mountainsides, blanket town, and leave everything curtained in a fine, damp, unavoidable mist. It can be a bit dreary. But it can also be beautiful, leaving some locals wondering: what if Hope could package that fog up and sell it?

• Today, Tyler writes about Hope’s new fog festival, how the town is trying to capitalize on its gloomy winters, and how one man behind it got tired of BC pretending it was always sunny.

Related

Need to Know

🐔 Fraser Valley farmers have been told to vaccinate their flocks against avian flu as the virus spreads in the region [CTV]

🚨 A police standoff in a barn near Langley left one man dead; family are asking why they weren’t allowed to contact the man to try to resolve the situation [CTV]

🏗 The wall of a Langley condo building under construction collapsed and fell onto a car dealership [Langley Advance Times]

👉 An Abbotsford man who was once jailed for beating a man with autism has been murdered in Ontario [Powell River Peak]

🖼 A new piece of public art is coming to a Chilliwack roundabout [Chilliwack Progress]

🗳 Advance voting for Hope’s by-election begins this week [District of Hope] / There are four candidates [Election BC]

🎬 The Tashme Museum near Hope will be featured in an upcoming History Channel documentary [Hope Standard] / We profiled the museum in 2021 [FVC]

📚 Discover the truth about Indigenous life in Canada with Cree author, lawyer, and poet Michelle Good – in conversation with UFV professor Mark Kersten. Register to join us on Nov 22 from 2-4 pm at UFV’s Abbotsford campus.* 

*Sponsored Listing

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The Agenda

Politicos pick pickleball place

Mission’s pickleball pickle may be solved, for now.

The city has been seeking to create pickleball-specific courts in Mission for a couple years, while trying to minimize the sport’s notorious noise issue.

Mission’s first attempt at creating new pickleball courts failed spectacularly. In the spring of 2022, the city had repurposed empty tennis courts at Hatzic Middle School, despite opposition from neighbours concerned about noise.

By the fall, the project had been turfed, with staff declaring the project a failure and the school district vowing to never host pickleball courts again. This spring, the city came up with a new plan: to build six courts on a distant court in Wren Park, a little-used site in the Silverdale neighbourhood.

That proposal generated more support than opposition, according to a city-led survey. But it also did spark a petition from some local residents.

The response caused city staff to pivot and suggest trying pickleball instead at Centennial Park in the centre of Mission. But on Monday, Mission council voted to stick with the Wren Park plan. Soundproof cladding on the fencing surrounding the courts will also be added. 

“Our community is big enough and we do have a large enough pickleball community that we need to create this space,” Coun. Angel Elias said. While some neighbours opposed the use of the park for pickleball, Elias argued the park is a community amenity that is intended to serve all of Mission.

Mayor Paul Horn said it was time to face Mission’s pickleball demons once and for all.

“When somebody told me they were going on vacation and one of the reasons they were going on vacation was so they could play pickleball, I felt a shiver go up my spine with the mention of that word,” he said. “We’ve turned something that should have been simple into something far more complex.”

Council unanimously supported the pickleball courts at Wren, though the project will be reviewed in a year.

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SPONSORED BY WINTER HARP

Winter Harp 2023, 30th Anniversary Tour

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Catch up

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