Save Rady Creek

The 1914 survey describes the trunk trail from Trout Lake to Six-mile creek, “thence by a series of long switchbacks on an easy grade past the Winslow mine on to the summit of the Silver Cup ridge” — the same switchbacks now scheduled for full re-contour. The 1934 report returns to the ridge and records the Foggy Day group at the head of the South fork of Brown creek, and prospecting carried on by Mrs. Jowett — Alice Jowett, whose memorial still stands up this road.

Communities and rural residences are tiers one and two. Recreation is tier three — the only tier Rady could ever have qualified under.

The parties are FLNRORD, Kootenay Region, the Arrow Lakes Ridge Riders Snowmobile Club and the Trout Lake Recreational Club — nobody else. This is the agreement under which the clubs gave up riding area in caribou habitat. The clubs signed it in February 2021 — Trout Lake on the 4th, Arrow Lakes on the 15th. The Ministry signed on 24 March 2021, more than a month after them. The club’s copy carries a “Working Draft” watermark; it is the signed copy they hold.

Every price cell is blank, and so is the Total Estimated Bid Price. This is the blank offer form issued with the tender — not a priced bid and not an awarded contract — so every dollar figure below is built from published rates against the Province’s own quantities. Seven priced rows; the table below takes them one at a time.

The ten-hour day is the specimen contract’s: “Where the Unit of Measure is a day, 10 hours is the equivalent of one day.” Read at that day, the excavator’s 160 hours is sixteen days on the ground, with a further 40 hours billed to move it in and out. The quad, the pickup, the labourer and the accommodation are eighteen days each.

The Province would not fund maintenance on this road and now says it is too dangerous to keep. To close it, it has scoped eighteen days of quad travel on it, and requires the driver to hold five years of ATV, side-by-side or UTV experience on rough, eroded, steep roads or trails and competence on 25% to 35% grades — for works whose prescription header reads “Access Level Remaining after Deact: NO ACCESS”.

One term on the form is defined elsewhere in the same package. “Access Improvement” is “Approximately 5.3km’s of minor road access improvement from Hwy 31 to the bottom of the deactivation site”. The Province will improve 5.3 km of access in order to remove 4.4 km of it.Offer Form — Quoted Price Schedule, contract EN27DSE008, Offer Form pages 5 and 6 of 9, at pages 22–23 of the Tender package issued 9 September 2026 via BC Bid opportunity 233877. The access-improvement definition is in the scope of work in the same package. Quantities are the Province’s.

It is the fourth paragraph of the passage that tells bidders what the job is, between the November completion date and the list of works. Contentious is the Ministry’s own word for it, written for contractors rather than for the public. It records that the Ministry expects opposition and has planned around it.EN27DSE008 Tender package, page 3 of the Information to Bidders — the passage is quoted whole in the image above

The same finding in the document the successful bidder signs — and here it is the first bullet under the heading Safety. The bullet beneath it is about the road: gradients “between 23% and 35%” with “severe levels of erosion and uneven road surfaces.” Public opposition is the first item under that heading; the condition of the road is the second.EN27DSE008 Specimen Contract, page 5, Schedule A – Services, clause 1.04.

The hazard list the Ministry gives bidders, complete and in the Ministry’s own order: dangerous trees, the public, potential soil mass movement, and road grades of +25% to +35%. Four items. The second is people.

Working a machine on a steep, eroded road beside people who object to the work is a real safety problem, and a contract that plans for it is a contract doing its job. It is also the Province recording public opposition to its own decision as a field hazard, in a list with unstable ground and dangerous trees, and undertaking to keep security on site twenty-four hours a day for the length of the job.EN27DSE008 Tender package, pages 3 and 4; EN27DSE008 Specimen Contract, page 5, clause 1.04 — the three images above

Across the twenty-seven-page tender package there are twenty-two mentions of security. Twenty-one of them are money — bid bonds, performance bonds, and the definitions and default clauses that hang off them — and the two that would have applied to this contract are struck out on this page. One is guarding, and it is the sentence above. In the twenty-two-page specimen contract the word appears once in the whole document, and it is that same sentence again.

So the only security this contract involves is people on the ground, the words are “The Ministry of Forests will provide”, and there is no row anywhere in the price schedule for a bidder to quote it on. Round-the-clock security for the length of the works is a cost the Province carries, and it sits in nobody’s bid.

The package states no figure, and a bidder never sees one. What can be said is where it sits: the costing above prices the works, and it does not include this — because the tender does not price it either.EN27DSE008 Tender package, page 10 of the Conditions of Tender, and its Tender Price Schedule at page 22, read in full. Counts run across the whole 27-page tender package and the whole 22-page specimen contract.

The sentence quoted above, in the document it came from. Mike Kit, RPF, opened the referral on 14 January 2020 with three recipients — a heli-ski operator, a guest ranch and one individual, not one of them government — and Kim Smith answered for ATVBC on 27 February, attaching the association’s letter of response. The thread did not end at those three. By Mike Kit’s reply of 2 March it was carrying two Ministry officials as well — the exhibit directly below. That attached letter is the one document in this exchange we still do not hold.

The header of the reply, in full. The January referral above went to three recipients and not one of them was government; by 2 March the Cc line holds two Ministry officials — John Hawkings, and Tennessee Trent of Recreation Sites and Trails BC, the one agency that could have designated these routes — alongside two further ATVBC addresses. The reply itself is reproduced whole further down this section.

The sentence quoted above, in the document it came from. The same referral states the Ministry’s reason in its own words, and it is not safety — it is that the road no longer qualifies for maintenance money. It also states the outcome flatly: “There will be no motor vehicle access remaining after the deactivation works have been completed.” The consultation form of 27 April 2021, two exhibits above, had promised the opposite. What the funding policy is, and how a road stops meeting it, is section 02.

Written by the club’s secretary-treasurer nine years before the Section 57 application. It records the trail list going to Travis Mitchell at Recreation Sites and Trails BC and her telephone call to him; the meeting with his supervisor is what Mitchell proposed in return. The body is written to the membership — it opens “Hi everyone” — but the copy we hold went from the club’s role account to one named recipient at a private address, which is what the header above shows.

Eleven days after the club’s list went in. The reply attaches the Section 57 application and its guidelines and lists four things to weigh: formal establishment could be considered, “but I would be asking your group to do a lot of work in helping mitigate concerns raised from the referral process”. His recommendation is a couple of small staging areas instead — “a very effective way of securing use without ruffling feathers and causing a referral nightmare.” The header names both attachments. The email closes: “At this time I don’t see the need for a face to face meeting however if you choose to move this process forward (via formal application) I think a meeting would be a good idea.”

A side-by-side with two people and a dog; a bike standing unattended. The cutslope above has shed rock — that material is real, and the prescription’s cross ditches are addressed to it. What the photographs do not show is a road that has failed. The club’s caption asks what the file still does not answer: “Why was The Code Red authorized on this road and who authorized it?”

Anyone who has spent time in these mountains will recognise this for what it is: an ordinary mountain switchback. Steep, narrow, loose on the cutbank — the normal condition of a forest service road in the Selkirks, and the condition it has been in for decades.

Two other lines on the same page matter as much. “Access Level Remaining after Deact: NO ACCESS” — but that is the header on the revised copy. The original of 7 October 2020 reads “ATV”. The outcome was substituted on 11 May 2021, not arrived at. And “Date Prescribed: October 7, 2020” is the date the original was written — the file’s own embedded properties record it printed 27 April 2021 and modified 11 May 2021, fourteen days apart. The reversal came after the clubs signed the caribou stewardship agreement, and six weeks before the Regional Executive Director wrote that staff would work with the engineer to maintain “the highest possible level of access for future recreational use.”

The credential appears twice in the Ministry’s own document, and both copies released to the club are unsigned. The last two entries in the summary table are the two lines that would execute it — “Prescriber: B. Zimmermann, RFT ______” and “Date Signed: ______” — and both rules are empty. Neither line is redacted and neither is concealed: we opened the released workbook and read every row, and no row in it is hidden. It is simply an unexecuted document. The file’s embedded properties record its author and last-saved-by as “Zimmermann, Tina FLNR:EX”, and its filename begins TZ. Five years on, the prescription that removes 4,395 metres of public road has not been produced to anyone in signed and dated form. The request for the executed copy, and for the name and registration number of any professional engineer who sealed any part of it, is published here ready to file.

The file’s own metadata records the same author. It was last printed on 27 April 2021 and last modified on 11 May 2021 — the revision the district was working from while telling the club it would try to preserve access.

The District Manager — herself an RPF, not an engineer — states plainly who wrote it. An unnamed engineer is credited with recommendations for the switchback at 1+150–1+160. Nobody with that title authored the document, and in November 2021 the District Manager could not say whether any report existed. She also declines a site visit for the second time in three weeks, and Michael E. Ferguson of the Ministry is copied.

The original header. There is no Revised line on this version.

At the same switchback now given as the reason the whole road must come out, the instruction was to take the fill back and keep a trail. The line appears twice, on consecutive rows. Two rows up: “Decompact & waste material on inside ditch-use to build up ATV trail.”

At the bottom of the work, a barricade an ATV could pass. In the May 2021 revision that became a ninety-metre re-contour, and the note reads that the re-contour “will act as a barricade.”

She is specific about the difficulty and specific about the intent: the switchback at 1+150–1+160 will make it hard, keeping access will cost stability, and it is “not the first preferred option by the Professional Engineer.” Even so — “FLNRORD realises the heavy current ATV use by the public on this road and will attempt to achieve both stabilising the road and maintaining ATV access.”

Read the engineer’s role carefully. He is “the Professional Engineer who reviewed this part of the prescription with me” — a document, reviewed with the person who wrote it. Nothing on the record says he attended the site, and he is never named.

Her own email acknowledges the reversal: “In the previous referral to you shown below, it was stated we would attempt to leave ATV access open at the expense of stability.” This is the day the prescription file was last saved.

And here is the reason the Ministry gave its own stakeholders in May 2021. District management decided that “protecting the Caribou Habitat within the GAR area” and stabilising the perched sections “were priorities over maintaining public access for recreational purposes.” Caribou is named first, and the input came from a wildlife biologist with the BC Caribou Recovery Program. This is the reason as it stood that month, not the reason as it stands now — by October the Ministry was telling the public the decision was not based on caribou at all, and four more reasons have followed since.

And here is exactly who “you” was. The 28 April notification went to five addresses; this reversal went to those five and a sixth: daveb@cmhheli.com, the heli-ski operator; kim@atvbc.ca, the ATV association; julius@grizzlybearranch.ca, a lodge; dan@porcupinewood.com, a wood-products contractor; and two residents, [resident’s private address] and [resident’s private address]. Not one is a government address. Recreation Sites and Trails BC — the office holding the club’s trail maps, and the only body that could have designated these routes — is not on the list. Neither is the Trout Lake Recreational Club. The heli-ski operator that had told the Ministry its runs were being affected by “unregulated snowmobile use from Trout Lake” is on both lists. The organisation those snowmobilers ride with is on neither. ↗

The orange highlight is ours. The yellow one is in the Ministry’s document. Everything else is as released.

The surveyor’s own note at the top of the road, beside “9.83 Km from HWY.” This crop is the 7 October 2020 sheet — header ATV — but the row is unchanged in the 11 May 2021 NO ACCESS revision.

The club’s own description, written to the Ministry. The wording is theirs.

This is the header of the form carrying the description above. The copy released to us is page one; it ends at “MAPPING & GEOSPATIAL DATA”.

That is the difference between other agencies deciding with you and other agencies being sent a notice, and the form does not record which of them happened here. What it does record is a single decision maker: under AUTHORIZATION TYPE it reads District Manager responsible / Forest Service Road. Recreation Sites and Trails BC — the agency holding the club’s trail maps, and the only one that could have designated this road — appears nowhere on the page. No referral to it, and no reply from it, appears in anything released to us, and it is on neither of the stakeholder notifications the district did send — five recipients on 28 April 2021, six on 11 May (section 04). We hold page one only; if a route was recorded, it was recorded on a page we have not been given. Nothing on the form is marked, and we have added no emphasis of our own. The term on the form runs 27 April 2021 to 31 March 2026; the work was scheduled for August 2026 and was re-tendered on 9 September 2026.

The same day the letter arrived, BCSF asked to sit down with the engineer who wrote the prescription and review the plan — with the explicit goal of deactivating in a way that addressed the environmental concern while keeping snowmobile access. That meeting never happened. The prescriber’s name reached the club only when the document itself was released a year later.

The meeting was the Ministry’s own offer. The club replied two hours and nineteen minutes later with five dates.

Jeanine Ross, Secretary-Treasurer of the Trout Lake Recreational Club, put five dates on the table — June 29, or July 6, 7, 8 or 9 — to meet at Rady Creek and look at the road together. The reply came seven days later: “as much as I would love to meet you on site I just won’t have the time to do so.” Skype, Teams or Zoom were offered in its place, if the club would arrange the call.

The Ministry postponed the work in the autumn of 2021 and said in writing why: to allow for consultation. The covering note makes clear this was not a private assurance — “a bit of what has been sent to most people who have written”. The same promise went to everyone who wrote in.

Five years later, no consultation for Rady Creek appears anywhere on the record. The same letter also states that the decision “is not based on the importance of the habitat for Caribou recovery” and rests “strictly on public safety” — a reason the Ministry has cited repeatedly since.

The chain reads newest first, so it runs backwards. Four exchanges, forty-nine minutes.

2:55 pm — a member of the public’s letter arrives and is passed along: “And another one. At least these people are from BC.” That letter had asked about search-and-rescue access, wildfire response, people who cannot climb from the valley bottom, and the Alice Jowett memorial.

3:23 pm — “I think we will treat this as a letter writing campaign now and just create a stock response.”

3:27 pm — the officer is holding the letters, unanswered.

3:36 pm — “Anything addressed to the minister will come to us through CLIFF and be answered by the RED, so you can just throw those ones away.”

CLIFF is the ministry’s correspondence tracking system; RED is the Regional Executive Director.

The permit exempts club members from the Motor Vehicle Prohibition Regulation across the Central Selkirk Snowmobile Management Area. It succeeds CB19-598335, which ran from January 2020. Both rest on a Stewardship Management Agreement the Province co-signed. The Province negotiated it, issued the permits under it, and is now removing the ground access the permitted activity depends on. The authorisation runs more than three years past the month the road is due to come out.

The two amounts are printed on the face of the permit — PERMIT FEE $250.00 and HCTF SURCHARGE $25.00 — and they are set by regulation, not negotiated. Schedule 3 of the Wildlife Act Permit Regulation, B.C. Reg. 253/2000, sets a $50 fee and a $5 habitat conservation trust fund surcharge for a permit under section 3 (2), the exemption section this permit is issued under. Section 22 (3) makes those “the annual fee and habitat conservation trust fund surcharge that are to be charged for each full year or portion of a year for which the permit is issued.” Five years, so $250 and $25. The amounts are unchanged in the consolidation current to 25 August 2026. ↗

The permit is not the only thing the Province granted. Recounting it in August 2026, the recreation officer says his office told the club that “authorization was not needed to utilize these roads for public use” — and then went further, approving trail names and directional signage on them. The Province put its own wayfinding on this corridor and told the public it was theirs to use. Signage, a stewardship agreement, and two Wildlife Act permits: four separate acts of recognition, each one made by the same government now removing the road they point along.

Club members say it plainly in the LetsGetLost documentary: they handed the province their full trail list in 2017 — the list that produced these signs — and watched the areas on that list narrow and close ever since, in step with what the heli-ski operators were asking for. That is their testimony, on the record, in a published film. Whether the two were connected is not something we can show from the documents, and we do not claim it. What the operators asked for in writing is set out in section 07.

Above: the complaint itself, nine months before the notification — CMH’s own management plan, reproduced in full as Exhibit 05 below.

The 28 April notification went to five: CMH, ATVBC, Grizzly Bear Ranch, Porcupine Wood Products and one resident. The 11 May reversal went to those five plus a second resident. Both notification emails are reproduced in full in section 04.↗ Every one outside government — and the Trout Lake Recreational Club is not among them. The club is not hard to reach: the letter it sent the District Manager in November 2025 came from its own address, the same one it has used with the Ministry throughout. ATVBC, a provincial association, was the only recreation organisation on the list. The club whose members ride this road was not written to at all.

Nine months before that notification went out, CMH had told the Ministry in its own management plan that the Silver Cup runs were “becoming increasingly affected by (and less useable as a result of) unregulated snowmobile use from Trout Lake”, and that there were “areas that we can no longer ski due to the snowmobile traffic.” It then received both halves of what the district decided about the road those snowmobilers use: on 28 April 2021, “Every effort will be made to maintain ATV access”; on 11 May 2021, “NO ATV ACCESS LEFT OPEN AFTER THE RADY FSR IS PERMANENTLY DEACTIVATED”.

Same ridge, two users, and only one of them in the room. The clubs signed the caribou stewardship agreement in February 2021 and gave up riding area; the operation flying the same terrain faced no equivalent restriction, and was on the notification list for the road the clubs use. Nothing released to us shows CMH asking for this road to be deactivated — but it did not need to ask to be told, and the people it was complaining about were not.

The header establishes the relationship the rest of this section rests on. CMH’s Director of Sustainability is corresponding directly with the Ministry of Forests Director of Authorizations for the Kootenay-Boundary region — the region containing Trout Lake and Rady Creek — about six Licences of Occupation awaiting decision.

The long submission. Butler responds point by point, in italics, to the Ministry’s position on tenure term, caribou conditions and flight data. It is a lobbying document in the ordinary sense of the word — an operator putting its case to a decision-maker while a decision is pending.

Butler sets out what he calls a contradiction: being asked to do more on stewardship — flight data, greater separation distance from wildlife — at greater cost, while being offered shorter tenures. In the same breath he lists the pressures the company is under, and public recreation is one of them.

The closing appeal. “Lack of management of public recreation” sits in a list of grievances put to the person deciding the tenures, alongside a request that she weigh all of it — “not just what you receive from your government colleagues.”

The conditions the Ministry proposed writing into the renewed licences — and, for the Galena file specifically, a referral recommendation that a temporary caribou closure become permanent, amendable only in the event of extirpation. This is the ask that HeliCat had resisted for years, arriving as a tenure condition.

The government side of the same room. Senior officials across two ministries coordinating a briefing note for the Deputy Minister ahead of another meeting with the industry coalition — one of many. No equivalent thread exists for the recreation groups using this terrain, because no equivalent meetings took place.

The head of the same page, read on 30 August 2026. The regulation was last amended on 1 January 2026, and section 82 itself was last touched by B.C. Reg. 62/2024. This is the text in force for the work re-tendered in September 2026, not a superseded one.

Read the sentence as it is written. The barricade has to prevent access by motor vehicles — and then, before the semicolon, the regulation names the one class it is not required to stop: all-terrain vehicles. Delete those four words and a deactivation barricade must stop everything on wheels. Leave them in, as the Province did, and a quad is the single thing that may still get through. This is not a loophole we went looking for. It is the exception the Province wrote into its own rule — and it is the only exception in the sentence.

Section 82 (1) (a) is the barricade requirement for every road deactivation in British Columbia, and barricade appears exactly once in the whole regulation — here. Subsections (2) and (3), in the same image, are the only flexibility the section grants, and they run the other way: they let the minister excuse a barricade altogether, before work starts, on a road with no bridges or major culverts. Nothing anywhere in the section asks for a heavier one.

The header of the prescription for this road, on its own line beside the location and the date. NO ACCESS is not a qualified level. The same field on the original of 7 October 2020 reads ATV; that is the field the May 2021 revision changed, and §04 sets out the reversal.

The last waypoint on the summary table, in the column headed Comments. The barricade at the bottom of the work is not a structure set across the road surface — it is the ninety metres of full pullback that begins at 4+750 and ends here. A re-contoured slope does not sort a pickup from a quad, and the header on page 1 says it is not meant to.

The yellow band is the Ministry’s own. In the workbook it fills row 99, where the pullback starts, and it stops there: row 100 — the row quoted here — the Ministry left unmarked. Nothing on this image is ours.

The prescription is a consultant’s report, and this is the instruction it was written to — set in the report’s own bold, at the close of the section setting out the regulation, immediately before the deactivation plan begins. The requirement that no vehicle access remain came from the Ministry, before the engineering was done. It is not a conclusion the report reaches. It is a term of reference the report is handed.Rady FSR Road Deactivation, SNT Geotechnical Ltd., 8 September 2026, page 5. The bold is the document’s own, not ours.

The paragraph prescribing the recontouring at the switchback, shown whole above. It goes on: “It may be possible to cut a narrow ATV trail across the recontoured road surface at the time of deactivation works, however, the excess material generated from constructing the trail will need to be transported to a suitable waste site. This will result in an increased cost for the works above that of the prescribed recontouring.”

What that establishes, exactly. A qualified professional retained by the Ministry states in writing that these works end vehicle access including ATV access; that a narrow ATV trail across the recontoured surface may be possible; and that cutting one would cost more than the recontouring alone. That is the whole of it. The report does not say the trail was assessed, costed or refused, and it does not say a narrow trail would be adequate. An ATV trail is mentioned in this one paragraph and nowhere else in the forty-two pages.

Read with the instruction above, the sequence on the record is this: the Ministry stated that post-deactivation vehicular access was not required; the prescription was written to that; and the single place an alternative surfaces in the document, it surfaces as an added cost.

This does not answer the question this section asks. No mechanism exists to hand this corridor to anyone to manage, and a prescription cannot create one. What it settles is narrower, and it is now in the Ministry’s own current document rather than in our reading of one: the works as prescribed end ATV access, and a trail across them is described as an added cost, not an impossibility.Rady FSR Road Deactivation, SNT Geotechnical Ltd., 8 September 2026, page 10, section 6, segment ∆16 to ∆18. The only other uses of trail in the report are in its general appendix, describing skid trails and backspar trails.

The province’s own intake record classifies the application as “Maintain an existing trail/facility, including long-term maintenance.” The club proposed to start on 6 June 2026 and finish by the end of that month, at its own cost.

Note the routing: the package went to the district recreation office for review and decision — addressed to two officers.

The email does not say who gave that direction. The application had been sitting since 20 April. It was expedited to a decision the morning after CTV News reported the story nationally, and the club was told to redirect its questions to the Regional Director the same afternoon.

The second paragraph is the part that matters most. Recalling a conversation from a decade ago, he writes that “authorization was not needed to utilize these roads for public use and no authorization was granted” — and that “I did approve the installation of trail names and directional signage for public safety reasons.”

That is the recreation officer confirming, in writing, that his office put the province’s signage on these routes and treated them as public. No referral to that office, and no reply from it, appears anywhere in what has been released to us — though a stakeholder submission shown in the documentary quotes the Ministry as saying referrals were sent to the agency and that no comments came back. We hold the film, not that letter; the text and its limits are in the questions.

The recreation officer then points the club at the only door he believes is open: “from what I understand the MOF has opened the door for the possibility of a License of Occupation.” He is relaying, second-hand, what another ministry might accept. He adds that there “may be capacity constraints on your end” and encourages the club to build capacity with the mining and business interests and apply.

Read the exclusion again. It ends “…or resource roads where an overlapping established recreation trail exists.” The Silvercup Ridge Trail is a registered recreation trail — REC2372, listed by Recreation Sites & Trails BC as open, maintained to its standards by partners or contractors, with motorized trail-bike riding among its permitted activities. ↗ Whether it overlaps this road is precisely the question the exception turns on. He quoted the whole clause. The only highlight in his letter is the yellow one above, on “including Forest Service Roads”, and it stops before the exception in the same sentence. The decision does not say whether the exception was considered, or how “overlapping” was assessed. A request for the assessment records is published here.

The application in front of the agency answered that question on its face. Asked whether the project sat in an established recreation site or trail, the club answered Yes, and named it: “Silver Cup Ridge Trail Rec # 2372 for 0.4 km/s.” Three pages later it stated that the deactivation prescription runs over “…0.4 kms of the actual Silver Cup Ridge Registered Trail # 2372.” That is the club’s assertion on its own form, not a finding by the province — and it is the assertion the province has never tested. If it is right, the excavators are not working up to a registered recreation trail. They are working on four hundred metres of one, and the exception the decision does not address is the exception that applies.

Nothing in the public REC2372 listing settles it either way: the listing names American Creek Road, Copper Queen Road and the Dirt Road as access routes and does not name Rady Creek. The overlap is a question of fact about where the prescription runs, and the only party with the survey to answer it is the ministry that wrote the prescription. ↗

And note what disqualifies the road in the decision: mining, business and highway vehicle interest. The busier and more economically useful the corridor, the less eligible it becomes for the designation that would protect it.

The yellow highlight on the letter above is in the document as it was released. We have added no emphasis of our own to this exhibit, and nothing on the page has been moved or left out between the reference line and the paragraph that ends it.