Mount Seymour’s Expansion Plans Are Raising Concerns for the Future
It’s a dark and clear, rare cloudless winter morning in Vancouver’s North Shore mountains. Behind me, the city lights flicker in the distance. Ahead, my headlamp lights up the path, a well-worn skintrack that winds through cedars, fir and hemlock.
My touring skis swoosh with each step. And though the cold air and movement are helping wake me up, I still can’t stop thinking about that coffee that I’ll grab at the bottom of the road when I finish. I check my watch; it’s nearly 8 a.m. The first rays of sunrise are hitting the horizon. I’m about halfway to the top. If I keep this pace, I can make it to First Pump Peak and ski down in time to start work.
This is just one of dozens of memories of Mount Seymour Provincial Park that I have from my time living in Vancouver. In the winter, the mountain was a place for quick early-morning or after-work ski-touring laps. It’s where I took, then later taught, avalanche courses. In the spring and fall, I taught wilderness medicine out of the ski patrol shack. In the summer, I hiked, ran and camped throughout its trails and backcountry.
I haven’t spent as much time around Mount Seymour since I moved out of the city nearly a decade ago, but Brent Hillier has. A guide, outdoor educator and trail builder, he’s been working in and exploring Mount Seymour Provincial Park for the past two decades. It’s why, when I heard that Mount Seymour Resort released a proposal for a massive expansion project, I sent him a message. And I wasn’t the only one.
“When the proposal came out, I had a lot of people message me over the last week, just like, ‘have you seen this?’” Hiller said.
His initial reaction was torn. On the one hand, he thought the idea of adding 10 more ski lifts and close to 50 more runs to the resort was exciting.
“I think it’d be really cool to have something like that closer to Vancouver,” he said.
But he also had questions about what the expansion, which would extend the resort’s footprint over an additional 100 hectares of provincial park, would mean for public access. He’s also worried about increased traffic, with questions about parking, environmental impacts and even how climate change could affect the project’s long-term viability.
“Is it sustainable?” he asked. “It looks like a lot of the lifts that they’re proposing are quite low in elevation, and we know that winter just doesn’t happen at certain elevations.”
Research suggests that Mount Seymour is among the most climate vulnerable resorts in Western Canada. Its relatively low elevation makes it more susceptible to warmer temperatures, with precipitation increasingly falling as rain instead of snow. For Hillier, that raises big questions about the expansion, which is being pitched as a 60-year plan.
“What is winter going to look like in 60 years?” He asked.
The resort’s plan wants to address this with a snowmaking program and by expanding into higher-elevation areas. But even those ideas come with questions. Snowmaking requires water, but water sources on the North Shore are also under stress from climate change. And those higher elevation zones they want to build into are some of Vancouver’s most popular backcountry ski and snowshoe areas.
“It’s beautiful backcountry terrain and great skiing,” said Hillier. “One of my favourite places to ski, in this new proposal, has a ski run going straight through the middle of it.”
The resort says that it recognizes this reality and wants to “continue Mt. Seymour Resorts’ history of being a staging area for all park users” by creating “an improved access trail, dedicated return trail and publicly accessible warming huts” for backcountry users. But Steve Jones, another long-time park user who organizes the backcountry advocacy group North Shore Dawn Patrol, isn’t so sure.
He argued that there’s a big difference between a backcountry, wilderness park and an uphill trail through a ski resort. And he said that backcountry use has been deprioritized as the ski resort has gotten busier and busier.
“Backcountry users, for many years now, have been trying to work respectfully, collaboratively with both BC Parks and the ski resort to find some solutions,” Jones explained. One of those solutions has been asking that Mount Seymour Road open an hour earlier on weekdays, at 6 a.m. instead of 7 a.m., to allow people to ski or snowshoe before work.
“Unfortunately, there’s been absolutely no movement on that request,” he said. “It’s very, very disheartening to see [the resort] come forward with this proposal when there has been no willingness to make progress towards the existing problems that we’re facing.”
Existing problems like parking. Both Hillier and Jones highlighted existing parking issues at Mount Seymour, where demand outstrips capacity. Both the resort and the provincial park have tried to address the issue through programs such as day passes and shuttle buses, but those create their own problems.
“We already have a huge parking issue down at the bottom of Mount Seymour, because people are choosing to take that shuttle bus,” said Hillier. “…the library is upset with people using their parking lot all day to carpool out of, [and] the shopping centre that’s down there is upset that people are parking down. We just don’t have parking.”
It’s a problem that the resort acknowledges. The expansion proposal, which would see peak day visits rise from 1,700 to more than 4,500, would increase the number of parking spaces from 820 to 1,347. That won’t be enough to absorb the increase, so the proposal also suggests building a gondola from the base of Mount Seymour to the resort area.
All of this is also fuelling concerns about conservation in Mount Seymour Provincial Park. A map of the proposed expansion, which also includes a number of new chalets, warming huts and “glamping” yurts, shows it extending into areas of protected old-growth forests. Some of these areas are shaded in blobs of green labelled for “thin glading” or “dense glading.”
“One of the reasons why I love skiing in that area is because you’re skiing in between these huge old-growth cedar trees,” Hillier explained. “It’s such a unique thing to have, I haven’t really experienced that type of skiing in any other part of British Columbia or Canada.”
Cutting down old-growth trees and building infrastructure could compromise the park’s ecological values. So too could plans to increase summer operations at the resort, with more trails, amenities, camping and lodging.
“It’s one thing to kind of have a winter resort operating in a provincial park; it’s a totally different beast to have a summer resort operating in a provincial park,” said Hillier. “It’s a lot more kind of heavy impact on the ground.”
According to BC Parks, Mount Seymour is home to “old-growth Douglas fir and western red cedar” below 1,000 metres of elevation and “amabilis fir, yellow cedar and mountain hemlock” higher on the mountain. In the summer, “some of the higher meadows are cloaked with sub-alpine flowers.”
But Steve Jones points out that Mount Seymour Provincial Park doesn’t have a park management plan, a sort of north star document that BC Parks develops to guide decisions about park use.
“They’re developed over a fairly extensive consultation process that involves all of the stakeholders, and they provide the vision for what types of activities will happen in a park,” he explained. “How much of the park will be reserved for wilderness versus backcountry recreation, intensive recreation and commercial activities. Without having a management plan for the park, it’s really hard to have any kind of a proper conversation about how commercial activities should or should not expand within that park over a 60-year period.”
Jones thinks that “BC Parks has really got this whole thing backwards” and should pump the brakes on this resort expansion proposal until a park management plan is approved. Hillier agrees, saying that he wants to see a 60-year plan from BC Parks “of how they’re going to give us more backcountry facilities, more front-country facilities and just a better management plan” first.
But BC Parks isn’t giving any indication that could be on the table. Instead, Jones worries that they’re rushing the resort expansion, giving the public just four weeks to comment on the proposal.
“By doing it as a one-month process, it’s like they’ve snapped their fingers, and they expect everyone to dance,” said Jones. “If we don’t get back to them within these 30 days, there’s a fear in the community that they’re just going to be able to forge ahead without any opposition.”
Both Jones and Hillier were careful to say that they don’t necessarily oppose resort expansion. But they do think that this proposal, coming without a park management plan and with only four weeks for public input, needs to be changed.
A detailed breakdown of the proposal is available online. The public can submit comments until June 26.
