The Jumbo Glacier Resort mystery
Just when everyone thought it was dead, B.C.’s proposed mega-ski resort is still alive and kicking. But its opponents can’t figure out why
This article was featured in our Winter 2008 issue.
July 31, 2007 was a hot day in Invermere, B.C., and Gerry’s Gelati was full of locals trying to cool off. One customer was enjoying his ice cream when he overheard a bit of gossip that made him sit up straight: Glacier Resorts Ltd. had hired earthmoving machines to build a road and ski lift in the Jumbo Glacier area. For the ice-cream buyer, a long-time opponent of the proposal to build a ski resort in the nearby Purcell Mountains, the day suddenly got a lot hotter.
The local grapevine sprang into action, e-mails flew, and within hours, a small group of protestors from southeastern British Columbia had set up camp on a logging road that leads into the Jumbo region. They found that a rough existing road was being extended through the alpine toward the toe of the Farnham Glacier, one of several glaciers in the area.
For the next eight weeks, through August and September, nearly 200 people from across southern British Columbia worked in shifts to block the Farnham Creek road and prevent construction equipment from passing through. The blockade was one of the longest public protests over a land-use conflict in B.C. since Clayoquot Sound in the early 1990s. The protestors broke camp at the end of September, after Glacier Resorts and the B.C. government offered assurances that no further road building would occur in 2008. The earthmovers were gone, but the swath they cut across the alpine terrain remains—along with dozens of unanswered questions.
British Columbia has never seen anything like the proposed Jumbo Glacier Resort. Billed as “the Zermatt of North America,” it would be the only resort on the continent to offer year-round glacier skiing and sightseeing, with a chaser of fine dining, Euro-style, in the town at the base of the mountain.
Located in a remote area of the Purcells in southeastern British Columbia—about 55 kilometres west of Invermere and 35 kilometres west of the Panorama Ski Resort—Jumbo would live up to its name, with a peak elevation of 11,000 feet, an all-natural-snow vertical drop of 5,500 feet—the longest in North America—and up to 23 lifts shuttling 2,700 skiers a day between four glaciers. In addition, the development would erect a mini-Whistler with a population of 6,250—including hotels, condominiums, chalets, staff housing, retail stores, restaurants, roads and parking lots. And the project carries a jumbo price tag—a billion dollars at last count, an estimate that has ballooned from around $70-million when it was first proposed.
Jumbo is the brainchild of Oberto Oberti, the Vancouver architect and real estate developer behind Glacier Resorts Ltd., who once said his dream is to make Canada’s mountains accessible to everyone, as in Europe. Over a 20-year construction period, the company says, the project will pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the regional economy, deliver $12-million annually in taxes, protect the environment, and create 800 permanent jobs.
And yet the proposed resort is facing stiff opposition. “We don’t want it, plain and simple,” says Nolan Rad, a 74-year-old trapper from Invermere, who helped man the blockade and says his views are shared by most people in the East Kootenays. The project’s critics point to a list of potential economic, environmental and social pitfalls that they say could turn any Jumbo resort into a giant white elephant. They include a slowing market for recreational real estate; a host of nearby ski resorts that aren’t busy; a chronic shortage of workers for low-paying service-industry jobs; climate change that is causing glaciers to shrink; and recently, new data revealing that the grizzly bears in the area are already struggling, without a resort in their midst.
Even if the project made sense at one time, Rad and other opponents say, it doesn’t make sense today. As far back as 2004, Canadian Business magazine opined that the development didn’t have legs: “The B.C. government has been struggling with an easy question: should it plant a potentially uneconomic project on a melting glacier in an area that doesn’t want it?”
For reasons that are entirely unclear, it seems the government’s answer may be yes.
The Jumbo Glacier Resort has drawn heat since it was first proposed in 1989. For nearly two decades, the proposal has inched, at what can only be called a glacial pace, through a complicated government approval process that has involved a broad range of interested parties, including Indian bands, scientists, rival ski tourism companies and local citizens.
In 1994, B.C.’s major provincial land-use planning exercise—the Commission on Resources and the Environment—was divided about how the Jumbo area should be zoned. But neither of its two choices allowed for any type of permanent settlement in the Jumbo Creek valley. Yet in 2004, after a long and contentious environmental-impact assessment, Glacier Resorts was granted a time-limited, conditional environmental assessment (CEA) certificate. This spelled out a list of conditions the company would have to fulfill, both before it could advance to the next stage in the process, and during construction.
However, on July 13, 2007, Glacier Resorts did advance to the next stage when the Ministry of Tourism quietly approved the company’s master plan—a blueprint for the final step in the approval process. And yet the company had not satisfied a key requirement of its CEA certificate: a negotiated agreement with the Ktunaxa Indians. The Ktunaxa Nation is in the middle of treaty negotiations with the federal and provincial governments that include the Jumbo area. Both the Ktunaxa and Sinixt Nation, which also claims title to the Jumbo land, oppose the resort. (One local native community has endorsed it; the Shuswap Indian Band, which has a small reserve near Invermere, struck an agreement with the company that gives the Indians scholarships, resort jobs and other business opportunities.) Kathryn Teneese, chief treaty negotiator for the Ktunaxa, however, says the Ktunaxa have received “no satisfactory answer from the province” about why it endorsed the company’s master plan in the absence of an agreement with the natives. “This is part of our ongoing difficulty in dealing with the provincial government,” she says. “The province has its rules—and isn’t abiding by its own rules.”
The province may also be changing some of the rules. Back in 2004, when the CEA certificate was granted, the provincial government said ultimate zoning approval for the Jumbo project would be up to the Regional District of East Kootenay. Jumbo opponents were pleased, because they want the decision to remain in local hands. But according to a confidential tourism ministry document dated November 17, 2006, Glacier Resorts “requested [that] the province consider looking at an alternative local governance model under the Mountain Resort Association Act.” A few months later, in the spring of 2007, the government passed Bill 11, a law that explicitly gives it the right to create a “mountain resort improvement district” on Crown land without interference from local governments. Glacier Resorts then formally asked the Ministry of Community Services to do just that for Jumbo, and—according to another ministry document dated November 5, 2007—the Ministry of Tourism will work to make it happen.
Meanwhile, Glacier Resorts recently gained significant control over some of the very Crown land it wants. In December 2007, the tourism ministry quietly granted the company a 10-year licence to use 14 square kilometres of land near the Farnham Glacier, one of the glaciers that would be part of the resort’s terrain area. The licence absorbs a previous, smaller licence on the land, and gives Glacier Resorts the right to ski, sightsee and build and maintain an access road. (The previous licence was held by the Calgary Olympic Development Association, which continues to run a summer ski camp on Farnham Glacier.)
Opponents of the resort plan knew nothing of this development. As far as the public was aware last spring, everything seemed quiet on the Jumbo front. Government MLAs hinted to Jumbo opponents that the ski resort was “off the radar” of Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government, which they said is preoccupied with looking “green” ahead of a provincial election this coming May and the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Then in June, a cabinet shuffle made Bill Bennett—the MLA from Cranbrook who is one of the resort’s biggest boosters—minister of tourism. Barely a month later, the Jumbo battle exploded into public view when Glacier Resorts started to build its road.
Jumbo opponents say the government broke its own rules when it expanded the size and scope of the previous licence without public notice or without notifying some overlapping or nearby licence-holders (notably RK HeliSki, a helicopter skiing business that uses the Jumbo Valley and opposes the Jumbo project). They also insist that the company should not be permitted to build a road and ski lift on public land without applying to the proper authority for zoning changes and building permits.
The company reportedly said it was building the road to help amateur skiers gain access to Farnham Glacier in the summer. But Dave Quinn, the Purcell Mountains program manager for Wildsight, a conservation group based in Kimberley that is spearheading the anti-Jumbo forces, sees the road building as a desperate move by Glacier Resorts to keep the project alive before its CEA certificate expires in November 2009. The developer must demonstrate substantial progress on the Jumbo resort before that time or face another lengthy environmental assessment that would examine new scientific information—about grizzly bears, in particular—that could put the brakes on the project.
