New protected area in BC gives wildlife safe passage between mountains

At the new Geddes Creek conservation area, if you go up the winding road that once was part of the Christmas tree farm, you can look out at the Columbia River wetlands, where herds of elk gather, thousands of waterfowl live and grizzly bears meander. In winter, you can often see deer tracks in the snow.

Now, this stretch of land that serves as a wildlife corridor between Kootenay National Park and the Columbia Wetlands Wildlife Management area has been declared a conservation area, restricting development to help preserve fish and wildlife habitat.

Geddes Creek is adjacent to Kootenay National Park and just east of the Columbia Mountains and Purcell Wilderness Conservancy. It’s an important piece of the Radium wildlife corridor, said Richard Klafki, program director for the Canadian Rockies at the Nature Conservancy of Canada, which purchased the land in partnership with Parks Canada, the Fish and Wildlife Compensation Program and the Regional District of East Kootenay’s Columbia Valley Local Conservation Fund.

“We’ve been proactively looking at various areas that will be able to provide linkage corridors for wildlife in this relatively undeveloped area that will allow grizzly bears to continue to work their way down the creeks and the Rocky Mountains, down onto the floodplain,” he said.

Before this land was bought as a conservation area, from the 1950s until about the 2000s, Klafki said it was mainly used as a Christmas tree farm. As such, for a while, he said the forests in this area were kept in a perpetual young state. However, since it hasn’t been touched in almost 30 years, the now middle-aged trees are starting to knit themselves into a dense, thick forest.

Geddes Creek is an important connecting piece for the corridor because it’s a low-elevation valley, which tends to be less protected than higher-elevation geography like the Rocky Mountains. These vast swaths of protected land are essential for wide-ranging species like grizzly bears, whose habitats are increasingly fragmented due to development and land conversion. Bears use the land at Geddes Creek to search for food, mates and denning sites.

Additionally, species like elk, bighorn sheep, mule deer and white-tailed deer need lowlands to escape the harsh weather conditions in the mountains during winter.

“People like to live and develop the valley bottoms,” Klafki said. In hindsight, he says they should have protected more valley bottoms as the land in national parks is predominantly mountains. 

The new conservation area will help connect many of the surrounding parks, providing nearby animals with a large area of protected land which is important for habitat protection and climate adaptation.

Going forward, the conservancy will continue to work with the Shuswap nation and Akisq’nuk band, part of the Ktunaxa nation, who have ties to this land. In addition to both nations living on the land for generations, the Shuswap band had many community members who worked on the land when it was a Christmas tree farm, and will continue to partner with the Nature Conservancy of Canada.