Joffre Lakes Closures: Should Popular Parks Close in the Summer?
Located a short drive north of Pemberton, British Columbia, Joffre Lakes Provincial Park is one of the busiest parks in the province.
On a summer afternoon, you’ll find not one or two, but three parking lots packed with cars. It’s so busy you need to register for a day pass in advance to hike it most of the summer. The backcountry tent sites next to its uppermost lake are some of the most coveted in the entire province, if not the country.
But Joffre Lakes Provincial Park also sits on the traditional territory of the Líl̓wat Nation and the N’Quatqua First Nation. Since 2023, they’ve been working with the British Columbia government to implement seasonal closures that allow the nations to access the parks for restoration, traditional harvesting and ceremony. This year, the first closure started on June 20.
Why Are These Closures Happening?
For generations, the Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua communities used this beautiful area for ceremony and harvest. The nations didn’t get a say when the park was created.
“We remind the public and BC Parks that there has never been consultation on the creation of this park, and this legacy of exclusion continues today,” a 2025 statement from the Líl̓wat explained.
But when the BC government passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act in 2019, the government directed BC Parks to start working with Indigenous nations to co-manage parks and protected areas.
On August 23, 2023, frustrated with the slow process of that work, the nations announced they would be closing public access to the park. One big reason they cited was the massive growth in park use over the preceding years. Recreational use was damaging the fragile alpine ecosystem. They argued that their community’s ability to access and use the lands was “overshadowed by importance placed on tourism” in the park.
“While successes have been gained through our partnership in terms of implementing a cap on the number of visitors and a day-use pass permit, access to the resources by Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua has not been prioritized,” the Nations’ statement explained.
The government agreed to that closure and, since then, have tried to work with the communities to close Joffre Lakes for a few weeks a year, typically in the spring, around Indigenous People’s Day in June and for harvest in the fall.
But the province and the nations haven’t always agreed on dates. When BC’s Ministry of Environment and Parks announced the closure dates for 2026 in May, the province committed to close the park for 31 days, one week in June and the rest in August and September. But the nations had requested 75 days, including a longer fall closure and another closure earlier in the spring. Both sides say that conversations about the closure lengths are ongoing.
What Happens in the Park During These Closures?
A 2025 statement from the Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua describes the closures as “the time required for our communities to reconnect with the land, conduct ceremonies, gather food and medicines, and allow Pipi7íyekw the rest it needs to heal.”
In BC hiking circles, Joffre Lakes is held up as the avatar for what happens when a trail gets famous on Instagram. It plays out in the data as well, with the park seeing a 220 percent increase in visitor use since 2010, one of the highest spikes anywhere in the province. All these visitors have also had a major impact on the trails, facilities and ecosystem.
According to a report published by the province in 2021, Joffre Lakes was seeing “unauthorized new trails and off-trail exploration,” wildlife feeding and “garbage left behind.” There were also issues with “not prepared for the rugged nature of the park,” parking and challenges with trail overcrowding and inadequate facilities to deal with the traffic.
The nations argue that closing the park for a few weeks creates a bit of a buffer from those impacts. It also allows Indigenous communities to practice their culture on the land and harvest plants used for medicines and salves.
“The swamp tea, devil’s club, huckleberry [and] salmonberry,” Dean Nelson, political chief of Líl̓wat Nation, told the CBC, explaining the closure dates lined up with harvest windows for the plants.
“It’s a very short time,” Nelson explained. “They’re just dates that we see important for our members to have this time, to be here on their own and to actually enjoy that time.”
How Long Are the Closures?
The BC government has currently committed to close Joffre Lakes for 31 days in 2026. The first closure started on June 20 and lasts until June 27. The second round is from September 8 to 30. If you do the math, that represents 8.5 percent of the entire year. It’s also only about 15 percent of the park’s busiest season between May 11, 2026, to October 25, 2026 during which access is already limited by a daily pass quota.
It is a loss of access. But when you remember that the Nations weren’t consulted when the park was created, and the broader impact that the creation of parks and protected areas had on Indigenous communities across Canada, it’s a pretty small price to pay.
Take Canada’s first national park, Banff, for example. Established in 1885, the park first decided to remove the local Stony-Nakoda nation from its postcard-perfect mountains and valleys. At the time, George Stewart, Banff’s first superintendent, worried that their presence was despoiling the wilderness they wanted to market to the world.
“Their destruction of the game and depredations among the ornamental trees make their too frequent visits to the Park a matter of great concern,” he wrote in his first annual report.
Families that had lived on that land for generations were pushed out. But Banff wasn’t the only place that happened. A similar story played out in Jasper a few decades later. It also happened in Kootenay National Park where the official Parks Canada website explains how “many Indigenous peoples were excluded from the park and lost physical ties and cultural connections with places of importance within their traditional territories.”
“This was not just a geographical disconnection but a total disconnection from an important part of their identity,” they add.
But perhaps the most egregious example was in 1922, when the Athabasca Chipewyan were forced out of what became Wood Buffalo National Park. Some members of the Nation tried to return to their homes, but when they did, they discovered that park staff had burned them to the ground.
Joffre Lakes wasn’t created until the 1980s. But just because it lacked the violence of some other examples, it doesn’t mean the park didn’t dispossess the communities of the lands in the park. When the park was established, the focus became Western ideas of recreation and conservation. And as it got busier, the land paid the price.
Is This Only Happening in Joffre Lakes?
No. There is one other provincial park in British Columbia that has similar, albeit shorter, park closures. Botanical Beach, a park near Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island, is closing for three days around the same time as Joffre Lakes to allow members of the Pacheedat Nation to engage in cultural practices and harvesting.
There are also other parks across the country that are already successfully managed with Indigenous communities, even if they include some similarly small restrictions on either activities or access periods. Nahanni National Park, one of Parks Canada’s crown jewels, has involved the Dehcho First Nations and Nahʔą Dehé Dene Band since it was first established in 1972. Its neighbour, Nááts’įhch’oh, is also cooperatively managed with the Sahtu Dene and Métis peoples.
In Nova Scotia, national parks and historic sites are now governed by something called the Toqi’maliaptmu’k Arrangement.
Signed on December 10, 2025, the agreement is “a formal partnership between Parks Canada and the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia for co-managing protected areas” in the province. The exact details of what it all means are still being hashed out, but for the Mi’kmaq, the intentions are clear.
“This Arrangement is the first of its kind for the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia; it is a tool for us to fully co-manage and govern some very important areas within our traditional territory,” said Chief Sidney Peters, Co-Chair of the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs and member of the Glooscap First Nation, Maw-lukutijik Saqmaq.
Public Reaction to the Closures: Anger, Sadness and More
There is a lot being said about these closures online, with hundreds of posts on platforms like Reddit, X and Facebook.
One of the most widely shared came from political commentator and BC Conservative leadership candidate Caroline Elliot, who railed against the closures during her campaign, calling it an “ancestry-based park closure.”
The Public Land Use Society, an organization launched in 2025 by a group of former and current mining lobbyists to advocate for crown land access, suggested the closures lacked legal backing.
“Joffre Lakes is a public provincial park,” they wrote on a Facebook post with more than 250 comments. “No court has established Aboriginal title over it and no treaty covers it.”
But those comments ignore the history of park creation and that about 95 percent of British Columbia is unceded land. That means that while some people may think parks like Joffre belong to them, in truth, they’re built on land that the province got formal authority to manage or develop.
It’s why British Columbia Green Party MLA Jeremy Valeriote described many of the comments as “an unspeakable amount of online racism,” when he addressed them in the provincial legislature.
I’m among the first people concerned when the outdoor community loses access to beloved trails and parks, but these closures are a rounding error in a provincial park system with more than 640 sites and a country with more than 12,000 parks and protected areas. Hikers and other outdoor enthusiasts should celebrate these closures, both for the step they represent towards reconciliation and because, frankly, they’re helping to mitigate our own impact on the land. I think losing a few days of access is, in the grand scheme of things, a pretty small price to pay. Especially in a place like British Columbia, where you can look up a nearby adventure on Explore-mag.com, drive 10 minutes in from the trailhead and find another trail, like Rohr Lake, that is just as beautiful.
