Crown Land Tenure: Trouble in the Backcountry

Miners and loggers used to pose the greatest trouble to backcountry and wilderness travel, now with the B.C. Liberals allowing more crown land to be tenured, the enemy comes from within. Some blame the competition, others blame the government, but all agree there’s a $1-billion industry at stake.

At last, the week you’ve been waiting for all winter has arrived. You’ve shelled out $2,000 for seven days of ski touring and pampering in a catered backcountry lodge nestled in the mountains of B.C. You’re following the guide to the top of an un-tracked ridge, snow as light as goose down, not a breath of wind, nothing but the sound of skis gliding across snow. Suddenly, a helicopter crests the ridge, shattering the silence. Moments later the mosquito-like buzz of snowmobiles destroying a basin of fresh snow across the valley is added to the scourge of sounds you paid good money to escape.

This is no place in particular, but it could be any place in the not too distant future, warns Paul Leeson.

Leeson is the outspoken owner of Purcell Mountain Lodge, a luxurious chalet with 10 deluxe suites and a gourmet kitchen nestled in an alpine meadow 20 kilometres due west by chopper from Golden. It’s a base for summertime hiking and winter cross-country ski holidays that caters to a largely American clientele. Leeson has seen a lot of changes in the outdoor tourism sector since he welcomed his first guest 16 years ago. Back then, there was just a handful of commercial backcountry lodges and B.C.’s mountains seemed like an inexhaustible draw for tourists. Now the market is increasingly busy, with snowmobile tourists competing against backcountry skiers for a chunk of wilderness, backcountry skiers butting heads with high-paying heli-skiers and hikers running into ATVers.

A lot is at stake. According to a study by the Wilderness Tourism Association, ‘nature-based’ tourists poured $909 million into the B.C. economy in 2001, with businesses reporting average revenue growth of 48 per cent over the five previous years.

“People aren’t just coming here for scenery, you can get that in Switzerland. If we can’t give a pristine product with wildlife like mountain Caribou and a little peace and quiet, we’ve lost our competitive advantage and we can no longer offer a world-class product,” says the bushy-bearded Leeson while sipping coffee in Jita’s Cafe in downtown Golden, a mountain-encircled town of 4,500 people three hours west of Calgary. The walls of the café are adorned with photos of folks seeking thrills on mountain bikes, skis and mountain walls. Around here, people cherish the outdoor lifestyle and it’s the reason people are moving to Golden. There’s a different kind of ‘gold’ in the hills that increasingly drives the local economy.

Four years ago, Gordon Campbell’s Liberals announced aggressive targets for revenue generation from the province’s Crown lands through property sales and tenure leases, which includes recreation enterprises like Leeson’s backcountry lodge as well as places such as gravel pits and fish farms. That was nothing new – previous governments had also set revenue goals for Crown lands. This time, however, the Liberals meant it. Land and Water BC, an agency within the ministry of sustainable resource management, was the powerful Crown corporation in charge of this vast asset. Along with specific revenue targets, LWBC was mandated to process new tenure applications in 140 days or less. The size and scope of recreation tenures ranges widely. At the high end, heli-ski operations pay the Crown anywhere between $50,000 and $150,000 per year for the right to build lodges and ski on public land.
Smaller scale operations without lodges, for example an outfit that offers day hiking trips, may pay less than $1,000.

Making money from Crown land and streamlining the process sounds well and good, however, Leeson charges that as far as commercial recreation goes, tenures are being awarded too fast and without determining what the wilderness can sustain before that elusive ideal of the wilderness experience is eroded – the solitude, quiet, pristine scenery – the very attributes upon which B.C. has built its Super, Natural reputation.

The situation came into sharp focus for Leeson two years ago. That’s when he learned that a nearby helicopter skiing outfit had been awarded a tenure to use the same terrain on which Leeson was selling tranquil, non-mechanized skiing to his lodge guests. He calls the practice “tenure stacking,” in this case between incompatible uses. It took the intervention of a government-appointed mediator and some last minute hand wringing to work out a compromise between the two businesses that would ensure their guests wouldn’t be treading on the same ground. Needless to say, it was a headache Leeson could have done without and it highlighted what some feel is the over-enthusiastic exploitation of B.C.’s backcountry. “It was a mistake. It shows what happens when you layer tenures on a limited land base,” Leeson says.

Though Leeson’s story may be an extreme example, in certain regions of the province conflicts in the backcountry are more and more common. Recently Valhalla Powdercats, a cat skiing operation in the West Kootenays, had to abandon its tenure in the mountains above Slocan Lake and move to a new location after locals protested the commercial use of Crown land that had for years been their backyard ski paradise. RK Heli-Ski, out of Panorama, is taking the provincial government to court over its environmental approval of a ski resort near Jumbo Glacier, where the company has been skiing for 35 years with clients who pay big dollars – $5,000 to $7,000 per week each – and expect fresh, untracked snow. And to the north, Christoph Dietzfelbinger, a mountain guide who owns Burnie Hut near Smithers, is battling snowmobilers over land use.

All this brings up troubling questions about the future of B.C.’s celebrated wilderness. How much tourism is too much tourism? And what about the public’s right to access Crown land that a lot of people treat as a de-facto playground? Rob Hood heads up the tourism department at Thompson River University in Kamloops and has a special interest in the backcountry sector. A whopping 94 per cent of B.C., or 948,600 square kilometres, is publicly owned – a higher percentage of Crown land than any other province. In the 1999/2000 fiscal year, LWBC grossed $30.7 million from all land and water tenures. Last year, that figure had jumped to $51 million, far exceeding projected revenues of $31 million (2004/2005 revenues are targeted at $37 million). By spring 2004, there were 743 commercial recreation tenures which, given B.C.’s wealth of scenic, sparsely populated country, seems like a modest number (Germany is half the size of B.C. with a population of 80 million people – no wonder they like it here).

However, considering that a single heli-ski tenure can be as much as 100,000 hectares, the potential for conflict grows. That’s why Hood says B.C.’s abundance of Crown land can be both a blessing and curse: a blessing because it’s an asset that in theory benefits all, but a curse because everyone wants a piece of it and nobody truly feels responsible for it. The tragedy of the commons, you might say.

“The growth in the number of applications and business start-ups is phenomenal. I don’t believe the people who work for LWBC have the skills or the people power to keep a close eye on this,” Hood says.

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  • Andrew Findlay, 
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