Tuesday, May 1, 2012 Cyclists took over the streets of Maple Ridge this past weekend, for the 10th annual Race the Ridge.
Page A11 • LOCAL NEWS, SPORTS, WEATHER AND ENTERTAINMENT • mrtimes.com • 604-463-2281 • 36 PAGES
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Carlee Rear of Maple Ridge, she’s three-and-a-half, was intent on colouring her fish hat during her first ever visit to the Bell Irving Hatchery in Kanaka Creek Regional Park on Sunday. Meanwhile, Pitt Meadows’ Maggie Herout, almost two years old, made fishlips while helping her mother Jeanette, release tiny salmon into the creek.
Regional park
New hatchery centre plans unveiled by Roxanne Hooper rhooper@mrtimes.com
It’s expected to cost upwards of $1.4 million and take less than six months to complete phase one. It’s a new hatchery along the banks of Kanaka Creek in rural Maple Ridge. Plans for a multi-phase upgrade to the regional park facilities were unveiled Sunday during the annual Goodbye Chums event, where about 700 people came out to release tiny salmon fry into the creek – helping start their journey to the sea – and to celebrate this community’s bountiful waterways. But there was much more to celebrate, explained Kanaka Education and Environmental Partnership Society (KEEPS) president Dave Smith. In addition
to the new hatchery plans, he was showing off plans to the new Kanaka Creek Watershed Stewardship Centre. The current Bell Irving Hatchery building, located along Kanaka Creek where it crosses 256th Street, is old. Due to issues of mould and age, it needs to be demolished, Smith said. While unveiling the new plans, he acknowledged that this weekend’s release will be the last big public event on site before the centre is torn down in June. Prior to being converted into the existing hatchery 30 years ago, the current building served as a horse, goat, and sheep barn up to 1982. Since then, it has been renovated a few times over to better suit its existing purposes. But now, Smith said, the structure simply needs to come down. In its place, there will be an 880-squarefoot new hatchery erected on the same foundation, and it will be operational for October – in time for the return and harvesting of chum, coho, and pink salmon broodstock. The new hatchery will house the incubation, wet storage rooms, and a work-
shop, and include a large covered area and Pacific Salmon Foundation. for relocated hatchery troughs, that need But KEEPS still needs to come up with to be moved back from the creek, Smith almost half – $700,000 – to make the explained. The bonus, he said, will be to project reality, and Smith said a fundraisprovide a sheltered, yet open-air working blitz is already underway. Letters are space. going out each week to more businesses, In addition to the new hatchery buildorganizations, agencies, and various levels ing, Smith said hopes are to complete a of government asking for support, and new stewardship building by spring 2013. Smith said KEEPS members are making That part of the centre has been a goal at least eight to 10 presentations a week of KEEPS for more than seven sharing news of their plans and years, he explained. making requests for donations. Adjoined to the hatchery by For instance, plans for the new covered walkways, this building centre were revealed to Maple will be built into the bank of the Ridge council a few weeks ago, hillside, and house KEEPS offices, and accompanied a “subtle” as well as space for hatchery request for financial help, Mayor More staff and Metro Vancouver parks Ernie Daykin said Sunday afterPhotos interpreters. It will also boast a noon as he and his wife Judy multi-purpose meeting room and departed from the chum release. Online exhibits for the 20,000 visitors “KEEPS does such great work – many of them children – who that I think we’ll have to figure discover the hatchery each year. out a way to do what we can,” Daykin This project will cost roughly $1.4 milsaid, noting that his family has been lion, $500,000 of which has already been enjoying all that the Kanaka Creek watercommitted by Metro Vancouver, as well as shed has to offer for more than a century. • More online at www.mrtimes.com monies from Pacific Parkland Foundation
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A party Sunday at the Bell Irving Hatchery was about much more than the annual chum release, it marked a new era for Kanaka Creek Park.
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