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Decision on Morning Mountain fund nears

A dozen years after fire destroyed the ski lodge at Morning Mountain in Blewett, the Regional District of Central Kootenay is closer to disbursing the insurance settlement.
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The annual Fat Tire Festival is held on Morning Mountain. Twelve years after fire destroyed the ski lodge there

A dozen years after fire destroyed the ski lodge at Morning Mountain in Blewett, the Regional District of Central Kootenay is closer to disbursing the insurance settlement.

Residents were asked at a well-attended public meeting last month how they would like to spend the remaining $187,000, which is earmarked for recreation.

“It’s been sitting there for a long time and has been used for a couple of community projects,” says director Ramona Faust, whose area includes Blewett.

“The idea will be to use [the rest] very judiciously, where it can get the most bang for its buck and help with enduring projects.”

Faust called the meeting “constructive,” and says many ideas came forth from the over 100 people in attendance. She says there was strong support for preserving Morning Mountain as a recreation area for mountain biking and sledding, as well as providing new amenities like washrooms, garbage cans, and picnic tables.

At the top of the list, however, is securing the area to prevent things like burning, bush parties, and mud-bogging. “That’s threatening to undo work already done,” Faust says. “The first step is to signify it as a park and try to change some of that behaviour.”

While deterrents might involve signage or gating, someone also suggested having a live-in caretaker on the piece of property the regional district owns.

Since the fire, the ski hill area has remained open to the public as a recreation area, and the Nelson Cycling Club recently applied for tenure over a portion where the annual Fat Tire Festival is held. About 20 club members were present at the meeting, which president Paula Owen described as very positive.

“We came away from it hoping that we will be the stewards of the area,” she says. “We weren’t looking for a big chunk of the money, but it helps us apply for future funding to have a sanctioned area that we can call our own.”

Owen says maintenance of existing trails is an ongoing concern: “We need support for that. We try to reroute trails where they’re highly eroded. We fix it up every year because mudboggers damage it quite a bit.”

Other groups represented at the meeting included the Taghum Hall Society and Blewett Conservation Society.

Faust says the next step for her and neighbouring director Ron Mickel is to work with regional district staff on freeing up some of the money, although she isn’t sure in what amount.

“A lot of good ideas [were suggested] and it’s for director Mickel and I to think about perhaps doing a recreation plan with some of the things they mentioned,” she says.

Morning Mountain operated as a ski hill from 1974 until 1999 when the lodge burned down. The community decided not to rebuild and instead funds from the insurance settlement were reserved for recreation projects in Taghum, Blewett, Beasley, and Bonnington.

Some of the money went toward building Bonnington Regional Park and replacing playground equipment in Blewett.