A NEW REC-TECH SUMMIT REIMAGINES HOW WE LIVE, WORK AND PLAY IN RESOURCE AND TOURISMDEPENDENT RURAL COMMUNITIES

BY ANDREW FINDLAY

We’ve just finished a two-hour session at Kimberley’s Spirit Rock Climbing Centre. Now I’m sitting in the back of a car for the ride up to my lodgings at the base of the ski area, and I’m sandwiched between a pair of engineers deep in an electrifying discussion about the science of manufacturing aluminum foil. To my left is Ben Britton, an associate professor in materials engineering at the University of British Columbia. To my right is French Canadian wunderkind Cedric Everleigh, also an engineer, who is reinventing the mountain bike drive train. The collective IQ between these two is so high you can almost taste it, so I have little to contribute to this dialogue. However, such impromptu nerdy conversations are to be expected when a hundred or so inventors, technicians, engineers, entrepreneurs and economic development bureaucrats gather for a conference to share stories and swap ideas about designing and making outdoor gear.

Over a few days last fall, this east Kootenay community of around 8,000 people hosted the first ever KORE Rec-Tech Summit. KORE is a catchy acronym that stands for Kootenay Outdoor Recreation Enterprise. It materialized from the back of a napkin as the economic and social disruption of Covid-19 was set to unfold, when Matt Mosteller, a long time Resorts of the Canadian Rockies executive, and his friend Kevin Pennock started scribbling down some ideas about small town economic resiliency and diversification. The pandemic would show how tourism could be just as vulnerable as bedrock raw resource industries like logging and mining.

Mosteller and Pennock felt it was time for a new twist to the community narrative and they were deeply interested in promoting BC-based outdoor gear design and manufacturing. We have mountains and rivers, and people with talent that are able and willing to work anywhere. So why not leverage these natural assets and build an outdoor gear cluster that would help attract and retain professional talent and diversify the economy? Maybe even nurture a small manufacturing base that would turn the conventional, design-here-manufactureoverseas model, on its head.

They were also inspired by efforts south of the border in places likes the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina that’s home to the Outdoor Gear Builders of North Carolina, with a roster of more than 60 outdoor brands including Cane Creek, a maker of high-end mountain bike components, and the climbing apparel company Kitsbow.

Mosteller and Pennock formed KORE. When they started shaking the trees to see who was doing what in the outdoor gear world, from Fernie to Rossland to Nelson to Golden and all points in between, they were more than surprised by the fruit that fell from the branches.

“We knew there were a lot but we had no idea how many,” says Kevin Pennock, KORE’s project manager.

Since launching in 2020, KORE now boasts more than 40 member companies and innovators. And it continues to grow.

IF REIMAGINING RESOURCE and tourism-dependent rural economies is what KORE is about, then Kimberley is an apropos venue to lead the movement. In its genesis, Kimberley was the consummate one-horse industry town. Set in a shallow valley where Mark Creek tumbles from the southern Purcell Mountains, the community sprouted up on the heels of a massive lead- and zinc-bearing ore body that was discovered when American Patrick Sullivan and three partners were prospecting in the East Kootenays. So promising was the strike that the founders wishfully named the town after Kimberley, South Africa, famous for its diamond mine riches. They were right. The prospectors sold their claim for $24,000 and the underground Sullivan Mine would grow into the largest lead-zinc mine in the world. But like all mines, the boom wouldn’t last forever.

On a clear October afternoon, I sip an espresso and work on my laptop at Kickturn Coffee Roasters in downtown Kimberley. Sunlight filters warmly through the windows. A half hour later I’m strolling through the Platzl. The town is quiet and I’m the only one standing in front of the world’s largest free-standing cuckoo clock (so the tourism promoters say.) Insert a Loonie into the slot, and Happy Hans emerges to yodel. It’s a kitschy holdover of the town’s once dominant Bavarian brand that community leaders conjured out of nothing back in the 1980s, believing it would be a fine tourist attraction to soften the blow of the mine’s inevitable closure. I stop briefly to pay homage to Happy Hans before continuing my walk for another few blocks to the Kimberley Underground Mining Railway, where I meet another relic of the past—a local hard rock miner named “Miner” Bill Roberts.

In a 38-year career, he did it all, from drilling and mucking to crew supervision and mine rescue training. It was tough and often dangerous work. He once witnessed a fellow miner die at his feet when a slab of rock collapsed from the tunnel roof onto his head. During its lifetime, the mine produced 26 million tonnes of lead, zinc and silver concentrate, worth an estimated $80 billion. When it finally closed in 2001 it was one of the largest underground mines in Canada with 500 kilometres of tunnels.

For the past 20 years, Roberts has been giving the underground railway tour. He remains an employee of Teck, the Canadian mining giant that owned and operated the Sullivan Mine for decades. The railway is shut for the season, so I hop into the passenger seat of Robert’s CRV and we drive beyond the locked gate to the mine entrance. He fumbles with a lanyard full of keys before finding the one that opens the big steel door to the underground mine. I get the Coles Notes tour—a peak in the mess hall where miners took their lunch breaks, a look at the 135-pound jack leg drill, the ore trolleys and other mining paraphernalia. Still, it’s enough to give a sense of what underground working life was like. We pause next to a wall where hard hats are hung on hooks, as though a crew shift change had just occurred.

“It was the beginning of this town. More than 60,000 people worked in the mine over the years. I think people should know what happened here,” Roberts tells me, when I ask him what keeps him coming back year after year to share the Sullivan Mine story with tourists.

The rough and tumble world of hard rock mining is fading into Kimberley’s past, yet the underground railway tour still draws 11,000 visitors every summer, making it one of the town’s biggest single tourist attractions.

MINER BILL’S WORLD feels like a universe away from the youthful, outdoorsy buzz of gear makers, designers and innovators, many working with space-age materials, rubbing elbows at the KORE Summit’s opening night mixer, uphill from the mine entrance at the Kimberely Conference and Athlete Training Centre.

In many ways, the KORE Summit is symbolic of a tectonic shift underway in what it means to live and work in places like Kimberley, from logs and rocks to something nimbler and more innovative.

It’s not that innovation was absent from the Sullivan Mine—far from it. In the nearly 100 years of its operation, mining technology went through many of its own tectonic shifts; from miners using drills and their own bare hands to move ore, to mechanized mining using heavy machinery, not to mention the constantly improving methods for separating mineral concentrate from the ore. However, Sullivan Mine employees came to Kimberley for the work. Their pay cheques were inextricably linked to the mineral resources underfoot. For Kimberley it was mining, for other BC towns it was logging and fishing, communities whose fortunes were tied to

Over nearly 100 years of operation, the Sullivan Mine employed 60,000 people. Many of them worked underground in tunnels the boom and bust of resource commodity markets.

What the people at KORE are pushing for is a different kind of innovation—it’s about people moving to towns like Kimberley with their own skills and innovative ideas in the outdoor gear sector. As disruptive as the pandemic has been, on the upside it made a rapid case for remote working and the viability of taking one’s employment with them to places that tick a lot of the lifestyle boxes. Proximity to mountains, rivers, lakes, bike trails and other recreational amenities are now part of the pay cheque, and not necessarily just the promise of a high paying union job at a massive mine or lumber mill.

THE CONFERENCE HALL is filled with people who have followed this path in recent years; entrepreneurs and innovators who draw inspiration from landscape and community. PJ Hunton, senior design engineer at Norco Bicycles, relocated from the Lower Mainland to Kimberley so he and his wife could raise a young family in a community close to the outdoors. Equally important is the fact that he can pedal out his backdoor to test ride Norco prototypes on the enduro trails of Bootleg Mountain, or the more cross-country fare at the Kimberley Nordic Club and Ski Hill.

Similarly, Cam Shute, former head of product design at G3, grew tired of splitting time between his home in Nelson and the company’s Vancouver headquarters. So, three years ago, he made the decision to leave G3 and start his own hardgoods outdoor gear design company Dark Horse Innovations. Now based at his home studio in Nelson, Shute designs and tests gear at his favourite backcountry skiing zones around Whitewater Ski Resort and the local rock-climbing crags on West Arm of Kootenay Lake.

Cedric Everleigh, that young engineer who was nerding out with the UBC prof about aluminum foil, has a particularly fascinating story. While still living in his parents’ basement in Quebec, he set out to address a major weakness in mountain bike design—the derailleur, that dangling gizmo that moves the chain up and down the rear wheel cog and is prone to breaking and bending. In the process he decided to move to the Sunshine Coast where he could ride bikes and test his technology 12 months a year and launch a company—Lal Bikes. Now he’s poised to take on the giants of bike component brands—SRAM and Shimano—all from a little shop in Sechelt.

Dan Durston of Golden-based Durston Gear has an equally engaging, oneman-show business success story that’s grounded in a passion for the outdoors.

“I got really into long distance hiking,” says Durston. But he wasn’t in it to set speed records—far from it. However, he certainly covered some ground, completing the 4,200-kilometre Pacific Crest Trail from BC to Mexico, and the Great Divide Trail (in both directions), which traverses the spine of the Canadian Rockies along the BC-Alberta border.

With this obsession came an obsession with ultralight gear. He started testing and reviewing gear online. That led to tinkering with designs to make them lighter, simpler and tougher. Durston says he had no business background, or even aptitude for entrepreneurship. However, he has a knack for storytelling and social media marketing and his tents and packs now have a global following.

“I think I’m at the point where I’m going to have to hire someone,” he says.

THIS IS THE kind of entrepreneurship that gets community leaders excited. It’s the reason Kimberley mayor Don McCormick was more than happy to join the KORE board of directors, to get in on the ground floor of what he hopes will be a piece of the economic diversification and resiliency puzzle moving forward.

“We all saw how vulnerable tourism was during the pandemic,” McCormick says. “Tourism is fickle, it’s impacted by wildfires, Covid and so many other things.”

It’s important, says McCormick, but when communities are all in on tourism, global disruption can deliver some painful lessons.

Pat Deakin, Port Alberni’s economic development officer, came away from the conference so inspired by KORE that he’s already in the process of launching a similar initiative on Vancouver Island.

As Kevin Pennock discovered when he launched KORE, there are some surprising pockets of genius among innovators who are capitalizing on one of BC’s core assets—outdoor adventure.

From a young age, exploring the outdoors has been my way of exploring hidden corners of BC and meeting the people that give a place its soul. Even a fascinating event like the KORE Sum- mit, contained inside and surrounded by walls, is no match for a bluebird warm sunny day.

So, I check out early one afternoon with Cam Shute, load our rock-climbing gear into day packs, and drive for a rendezvous at Perry Creek with a couple of locals, Pat Bates and his inspiring climbing partner, Kenny Wilkinson, still leading sport routes in his 80s.

Though we’re just a 20-minute drive from Kimberley, the south facing quartzite crags of Perry Creek feel remote. We hike up the short trail then peruse the guidebook for routes. I put a hand on the rockface in front of me, like shaking hands with a new acquaintance. It’s also a touchstone of Kimberley’s founding, once rooted to the rocks like a tree is to the soft earth of a river valley. Bates, a talented outdoor photographer, was born and raised in Kimberley. His grandfather was the ice maker at the local hockey and curling rink. He’s been around here long enough to see the town through its ups and downs.

“I worked at the Sullivan Mine as an underground surveyor. It was a pretty good gig but those miners were a rough crew,” he says with a laugh, as he laces up climbing shoes.

THERE’S SOMETHING TO be said about honouring the past. But there’s also value in looking forward to a new vision, one that adds to the story of logs, rocks and putting tourists in hotel rooms and chairlift seats. If the folks at KORE realize their dream, Kimberley, and other BC towns like it, will become hubs of outdoor gear design and manufacturing.

SPRING