In planned British Columbia ski resort, residents fear slippery slope
Dustin Godfrey
NEW DENVER, British Columbia (CN) — In theory, Tyler Bradley is just the type of person who might be excited about the prospect of a new backcountry ski resort in this remote corner of southeast British Columbia.
He and two friends want to open a brewpub in New Denver, a village of 500 where tourism is largely confined to the summer months. A boost to winter-season tourism traffic could be just the safety net that kind of business needs.
“May long weekend ’til Labor Day — that’s your time where you make money locally,” he said, referencing a Canadian federal holiday that falls around the same time in May as Memorial Day in the United States. He noted that at least three local cafes had closed, unable to remain viable.
As climate change makes wildfires more frequent and severe, Bradley is concerned a bad fire season could cut short that already narrow season. The mountains around Slocan Lake are still scarred from a fire in 2024. Besides, as a backcountry snowboarding enthusiast, he also co-owns a small property near the base of the proposed resort, where property values could go sky-high.
Sitting at a picnic table at Slocan Lake on a brisk afternoon in February, Bradley said that at first, he was indeed cautiously optimistic. The resort would be named after Zincton, a nearby ghost town.
Boosters compared the project to a resort in Silverton, Colorado, which only sees about 100 skiers per day.
“I was actually pretty keen on that. I liked the notion of that,” Bradley said. “Low-impact, no big development of real estate holdings. Not the bigger, better, faster resort town vibe.”
But opposition soon mounted. Backed by the company Zincton Farms Limited, the project would become by far the largest ski resort in Canada.
Indigenous groups came out against it. Locals and researchers fretted about overdevelopment, impacts on wildlife and the cost of living. An environmental group sued, hoping to compel an environmental review.
As details of the project came into focus, Bradley’s vision of an unintrusive, single-ski-lift resort felt increasingly at odds with the reality of the proposal.
He grew ambivalent. He thought about his previous home in Rossland, about a two-hour drive away near the border with Washington state.
There, the nearby Red Mountain Resort has managed to elude the consolidation of mountain resorts. But it’s also no longer the humble operation of a local ski club, and with that has come affordability concerns.
“It came into private ownership,” Bradley explained. “That really advanced the whole real-estate boom.”
Even so, proponents say the region needs something. The economy has been hit hard over the decades by the decline of extractive industries like timber and mining.
In British Columbia’s southern interior, where New Denver sits, the allure of lakes and mountains is an attractive currency. Some see tourism as just the right industry for the region. But for others drawn to this remote area, a surge in tourists is exactly the thing they hoped to avoid.
Part of the draw of New Denver is its seclusion. Nestled on Slocan Lake in southeast British Columbia’s Columbia Mountains, it’s far from the big population centers that might have turned it into a tourist trap.
Vancouver, by far the biggest metro area in British Columbia, is about an eight-hour drive away. Calgary, Alberta — though much closer — is a similar drive, requiring a roundabout journey across several mountain ranges.
Unlike Okanagan Lake to the west, Slocan Lake doesn’t get crowded with boaters, wakeboarders and jetskiers, Bradley said. Nor is there a big ski resort to draw tourists in the colder months — at least not yet.
This area wasn’t always so quiet.
Known as the West Kootenay region, prospectors flooded here during a silver rush in the 1890s. Several nearby ghost towns including Sandon and Three Forks were at one point among the fastest-growing communities in British Columbia.
Although the silver rush was brief, resource extraction remained a major economic driver for decades. Zincton was the site of a zinc claim, which remained productive until it closed in 1959.
In naming his resort after Zincton, the project’s main proponent, David Harley, is invoking that booming history.
Though Zincton has a team behind it, it’s Harley’s name that has become synonymous with the proposal.
Harley got his start running a small outdoor clothing and gear store on Slocan Lake. It’s since grown into a successful Canadian retail chain, Valhalla Pure Outfitters. Harley, who was busy sailing in the Caribbean, was unavailable for an interview.
In emails, Harley made his pitch for how a Zincton ski resort could revitalize the region. “There used to be close to 10,000 miners living in mining camps above Sandon,” he wrote. “Now, there are exactly five.”
“It’s all gone. The miners and the [British Columbia provincial government] took all the money,” Harley added. “The only thing they left was lead-contaminated rivers and a lot of thousand-foot-deep mine shafts.”
Many locals see value in Harley’s pitch. In New Denver and the nearby town of Silverton, residents seem to be about evenly split for and against the resort.
The fight has gotten nasty at times — though many say the hostility has been largely contained to social media.
“First thing you need to do is, get the hell off Facebook,” New Denver Mayor Leonard Casley said in a phone interview. “People say shit on there that they’d never say to your face, on both sides.”
As mayor, Casley was quick to note that the project was outside his jurisdiction.
Even so, he said he understood why some supported it.
“We were a community of two resources: logging and mining,” Casley said. “When they shut down, you feel the effects. Then you’re left with what?”
A fourth-generation resident of New Denver, Casley is keenly aware of the economic challenges facing Slocan Valley.
The occasional ranch dots the east side of Slocan Lake, but the valley’s arable land and therefore its agriculture is concentrated further south. The economic benefits don’t tend to trickle north, in terms of farmworkers coming to town to shop or socialize.
With few flights in and out of the region, the pandemic didn’t bring a surge of remote workers. Right now, the economy is largely propped up by the public school and local hospital.
“We have to have something,” Casley said — “and there aren’t a lot of people coming forward with a lot of different ideas.”
But critics say the resort isn’t worth the potential impact to local wildlife. With a current proposed footprint of 5,500 hectares, Zincton would dwarf what is currently the largest ski resort in Canada: the 3,300-hectare Whistler Blackcomb resort north of Vancouver.
Despite its gargantuan size, Zincton is slipping under the threshold at which an environmental assessment would be mandatory. British Columbia environmental rules require these assessments for ski resorts with more than 2,000 beds. Zincton would have fewer than 1,700.
No matter the exact bedcount, the scale of the project means it will affect the local ecology, said Robyn Duncan, executive director at environmental nonprofit the Wildsight Society. Surrounded by four provincial parks, the area around Zincton has long been slated for conservation.
“The size of a resort like this, with the increased human activity, would have a big impact on grizzly bears, wolverines [and] mountain goats,” Duncan said in a phone interview. “All of these species are very sensitive to human interactions.”
In 2023, Wildsight asked British Columbia environmental regulators to review the project. The Sinixt Confederacy, an Indigenous nation in the region, made a similar request in 2024.
The province denied both requests. The project will require approval from the provincial government’s Mountain Resorts Branch, and in a July 2025 report, an official said that process would suffice.
Wildsight disagreed with the finding and sued in November. The group argues that given the scale of possible environmental impacts, a full review is important. The petition names British Columbia’s environment minister as well as Zincton Farms Limited.
The case is still pending at press time, with no responses filed by Zincton Farms or the provincial government. It remains to be seen if a judge would be willing to reverse regulators.
Wildsight has experience in this arena. In another underdog fight a few years ago, a similar coalition including Wildsight managed to kill a similar project. Like Zincton, the Jumbo Glacier ski resort was at one point slated to become the biggest in Canada. Now, it’s a conservation area led by the Ktunaxa Nation, a group representing four First Nations in southeast British Columbia.
On an unseasonably warm February afternoon, a group of Zincton opponents gathered for homemade cookies and tea in a home just outside the nearby village of Silverton.
The group included members of The Wild Connection, an informal local group that formed to fight against the Zincton project. Although not officially affiliated with Wildsight, they’ve backed the nonprofit as it’s pushed for an environmental review.
While the group’s concerns are primarily environmental, they also question the proposal’s economic logic — and who would really benefit from growth.
“I think it’s a matter of: be careful what you wish for,” Wild Connection member Don Sachs said. Referencing a nearby ski resort, he added: “I think people look at Revelstoke and go, ‘Yeah, boomtown, my property is going to triple in value.’”
Ann Meidinger, another member, chimed in: “And your kid’s never going to be able to afford it.”
While Harley invokes the mining boom that gave rise to the original Zincton, detractors see the bust that followed, with once-busy communities now hollowed out into ghost towns.
They point to a 2011 study on the impact of resorts on mountain towns in southeast British Columbia, including Bradley’s former home, Rossland. Led by Sanjay Nepal, a professor of geography and environmental management at the University of Waterloo, it warned of increasing rural gentrification as “well-heeled recent migrants” buy up second homes.
As demand for second homes drives up land prices, wages don’t always follow.
It’s an issue that Nepal encourages residents to press.
“These are the questions that people need to ask the developers,” Nepal said in a phone interview. “They might come and propose a pie-in-the-sky type of a scheme, but in reality, some of these schemes are simply limited to ideas and do not really translate to concrete jobs and skill development.”
While resorts can absolutely benefit communities, Nepal says people should avoid assuming that it always works that way.
“The only way they can ensure the benefits stay locally,” he said, “is just to have a strong voice from the get-go, and then see if the developers have a good plan for the communities.”
Zincton has also seen consistent opposition by Indigenous groups. In addition to Sinixt, the Ktunaxa Nation Council has also vocally opposed the plan.
“We have expressed our opposition to the project from the outset,” Ktunaxa Nation Council Chair Kathryn Teneese says in an online statement, citing “extensive, Ktunaxa-led, scientifically sound research.” The Ktunaxa Nation Council declined to comment further.
That scientific research refers to a report published by the Ktunaxa Nation, as well as a subsequent peer-reviewed study by its authors. It found the conditions of wolverine and grizzly habitats in the area have already degraded significantly since precolonial times.
Since both species rely on deep snowpacks, some of that decline is driven by climate change. But increasing human interactions has also worsened the situation, a trend that would be amplified by a new resort.
One major issue is connectivity. Already, the nearby British Columbia Highway 31A creates a barrier for wildlife, according to the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) Conservation Initiative, an environmental nonprofit focused on the Rocky Mountain ecoregion.
The area is already at a “tipping point,” and a new ski resort could disrupt that delicate balance, Y2Y warned last year, citing the Ktunaxa research. The Zincton resort would hug the southern border of Goat Range Provincial Park and occupy nearly the entire breadth of a grizzly corridor that connects to nearby Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park.
“The research shows that the land can’t handle more in this region,” said Nadine Raynolds, a former New Denver village councillor who now works for the nonprofit.
Duncan, the Wildsight executive director, pointed to a population about 30 grizzlies south of Highway 31A, which she said could be cut off from grizzly populations to the north if the resort is built as planned.
“That’s a real concern with these species like this,” she said. “They need to be able to interact over longer distances to keep genetic diversity through reproduction.” It’s an issue that impacts not just grizzlies but other types of wildlife like wolverines which also avoid human contact.
Some of the Zincton pushback comes down to a perceived lack of compromise. Critics complain that one man’s vision — specifically, Valhalla Pure Outfitters founder David Harley’s vision — is being forced on residents.
“It becomes a yes-no conversation, and that divides people,” Raynolds said. On the other hand, if you come with an idea and openness to have a conversation, I think that’s really generative.”
The fight also highlights a bigger debate over the region’s ambivalent relationship with tourism.
“A lot of people do move here because they like it quiet,” Raynolds said. “They like that nothing’s going on.”
One survey from 2017 found that among locals, tourism had the third-highest support among 13 industries listed. And yet just a year later, the authors behind another survey concluded that “a focus on tourism does not appear to be generally supported.”
“We don’t want this place to be loved‐to‐death, which happens to many communities who focus heavily on tourism,” one respondent said.
Casley, the New Denver mayor, is wary of this mentality. “My question to them would be: Would you allow a mine, which is very good-paying work?” he said. “I can guarantee you not.”
If residents want to keep amenities like hospitals and schools, Casley argues they “have to allow something to happen.”
“There’s a whole segment of people wanting to see it just stay the same. Well, it doesn’t stay the same,” he said. “If we said no more people [and] close the door behind us, we’d miss out on a lot of really good people that we’ve got here.”
In one email, Harley argued that “the most prolific opposition Zincton has are sledders and hunters.”
Casley shared a similar criticism. He thinks some opponents have a perspective of: “Well, I skied there and I don’t want anyone else to know [about] it.” And yet the irony with hidden gems is the exclusivity itself often becomes a tourism draw.
“There’s more people with mountain bikes and snowmobiles on the backs of trucks,” Casley said. “You see it more than you’ve ever seen it before. The traffic is already coming. It’s there.”
Even so, it’s valid to ask whether a new ski resort will really serve the community.
When construction finishes and contractors go home, the work that remains will be mostly service industry and seasonal. Neither is known for high wages. By definition, seasonal work is also inconsistent.
Residents raised these concerns in the 2018 survey as well as in interviews with Courthouse News. Sachs, the Wild Connection member, invoked the concept of the “Aussie ski team,” a phenomenon where Australians come to Canada to work the ski season.
Opponents of the project say they aren’t opposed to economic development. They just want that growth to be community-led, attracting permanent residents over vacation homes.
Bradley pointed to his former home of Rossland, where Red Mountain began as an initiative to serve the people who already lived there. Since the mountain became an investment, the emphasis on growth has been unsustainable for lower-income residents.
In the Slocan Valley, he noted, many people are seniors on fixed incomes.
Sachs gave another example closer to home. New Denver is working to develop a community forest, a community-owned practice that pairs logging with forest management and business with environmental stewardship.
The Kootenay region has one of the highest concentrations of cooperatives in British Columbia. The idea of collectivist, community-run development resonates deeply with many here. “Zincton is the opposite of that,” Sachs said. “We want to have a process where we all decide what the town looks like, and it’s a democratic process. It’s not one guy coming in and saying, ‘This is what it’s going to be, and I’m going to save your economy, and there’s going to be a coffee shop on every corner.’”