Transition and change can be two of the most frightening words in English vocabulary. But for the Village of Valemount, they are also two of the most necessary.
Tucked away in the Robson Valley, surrounded by three mountain ranges, Valemount is used to going it alone. A small community of little more than 1,000 people, the village is part of the Regional District of Fraser-Fort George, but its isolation has forced it to create a unique identity.
Mayor Andru McCracken said Valemount, like many communities, is guilty of trying to dress itself up as something else.
"There's sort of an old-school mentality around attraction, retention - attraction of tourists, retention of people who are here - where you try to doll yourself up in a way that you're really not," he said. "Valemount's not Jasper - we don't have a bunch of easy access trails yet. The realization is, we don't need it to be that."
Learning to reject that train of thought and create a made-in-Valemount solution was key for a village that was left floundering after the Prince George-based Carrier Lumber closed the local mill in 2006. More than 100 jobs were lost after Valemount Forest Products bowed to the pressures of the logging industry and permanently closed its doors.
An economic downturn in the 1990s had already illuminated the necessity of a shift in focus to tourism.
A brand new visitors centre, opened in 2007, sits along the Yellowhead Highway and for 10 years the College of New Caledonia's Northern Outdoor Recreation and Ecotourism program trained adventure tourism guides locally until the certificate program was suspended in 2011.
But with the loss of a business which kept nearly 10 per cent of the population in well-paying jobs, more is required.
"The community needed something new to increase population, that's the bottom line," said Bruce Wilkinson, head of the Valemount Ski Society.
Put together a little more than two years ago and now boasting more than 200 members, the society is the driving force behind one of the biggest projects on the village's radar right now - Valemount Glacier Destination resort (VGD).
Currently in the the master plan stage, the project to set up a year-round ski operation on the glaciers of Mount Arthur Meighen has been on the books since 2011.
"We know that tourism is our ace in the hole since forestry had such a downturn, since our mill got closed," Wilkinson said. "We still have some logging happening, but all the logs are going to Prince George."
The society began as an ad-hoc committee and spent a year finding developers and planners interested in taking on bringing a ski hill to the area.
"We've got everything that Banff and Jasper have except we're not recognized as a destination," said Wilkinson, adding that for years Valemount has been, at most, an overnight stop for tourists on their way to major centres. "A big resort would make us a destination."
Prepared by Pheidias Project Management Corporation and Oberti Resort Design (who are also behind the similar year-round Jumbo Glacier ski resort near Invermere), VGD proposes to be a 2,000-bed resort next to the world's longest in-bounds ski run and the largest vertical drop with the additional draw of being North America's only summer skiing destination.
Despite the fact that big-names like Oberto Oberti are attached to the proposal in its current form, the fact that the project was initiated by village residents is an example of the grassroots, self-sufficient nature that's become one of the community's touchstones.
For McCracken, one of the village's defining moments was the effort put into the construction of a replacement Valemount Secondary School. Rejecting a prefabricated solution, residents pushed for a full-sized gymnasium for their provincially competitive basketball team and an auditorium.
The community put up nearly $250,000 for the extra 120 square metres of space and amenities.
"The ownership over that building is absolutely incredible," said McCracken of the new school that opened in 2005. "And that's what makes a really great structural investment last the test of time, because everybody believes in it."
There are other examples of that community drive in and around the village, from the development of Valemount Community Television - one of only a handful of communities in English-speaking Canada to have a license to broadcast community TV picked up by antenna - to the plan for a destination mountain bike park on McKirdy Mountain spearheaded by the Yellowhead Outdoor Recreation Association.
"People are good workers and developers," said Wilkinson. "That's what we have here, is go-getters. If something's a good idea, they'll work on it."
