Save Rady Creek

Rady Creek is a single-lane road that leaves Highway 31 east of Trout Lake and climbs. In under an hour it lifts you from the valley floor to fifteen hundred metres of alpine on Silvercup Ridge. There is nothing else like it in the Kootenays.

Miners cut the first grade here more than a century ago to reach the Silver Cup mine, which pulled roughly a million and a half ounces of silver out of this mountain between 1895 and 1915. The ore ran out and the town emptied — a thousand people in 1897, seven by 1959. The road stayed, and people kept using it.

Today it carries dirt bikes, ATVs, mountain bikers, hikers and horseback riders through the summer. In winter it is the primary safe route into the riding area locals call Foggy Day. It reaches some of the oldest active mineral claims in the province. And it serves what is left of Trout Lake — a community whose three remaining industries are tourism, mineral exploration and recreation. All three go up this road.

It is also the middle of only three ways onto Silvercup Ridge. An old miner-built pack trail runs the length of that ridge. Take out the centre access and anyone in trouble up there has to reach one of the far ends, or wait for a helicopter.

In November 2020 the Auditor General of British Columbia audited how the Province manages its forest service roads. The conclusion was that the Ministry was not maintaining them to its own policies — and the audit explains exactly why.

Every year the natural resource districts — the people on the ground who inspect these roads and know what they need — submit maintenance budget requests. Every year the Engineering Branch funds a sliver of them.

Then narrow it to this region. The South Area, which contains the Selkirk district and Trout Lake, asked for $4.5 million for its priority roads in 2019/20 and received $1.7 million. The single largest slice of what it asked for was recreation access.

The record-keeping was worse than the money. Of eight districts the auditors sampled, seven kept no historical inspection data. Two kept no maintenance records at all. An internal ministry audit had found the same failures in 2008 — twelve years earlier. Nothing had changed in between.

The Ministry's funding policy ranks maintenance money in three tiers. First, roads serving communities of fifty or more year-round residents. Second, roads serving rural residences. Third — and this is the one that matters — high-value recreation sites, as designated by the Recreation Sites and Trails BC representative.

Roads that clear any tier become what the Ministry calls capital roads. The Auditor General describes capital roads as unlikely to be deactivated, and as requiring continual maintenance. About twelve thousand kilometres of road in this province carry that protection.

Trout Lake has around two dozen residents. Nobody lives on Rady Creek. Tiers one and two were never available. Tier three was the only door — and it swings on a single administrative decision by a single agency.

In 2017, the Trout Lake Recreational Club went to that exact agency and did everything right. They asked Recreation Sites and Trails BC to make their riding areas official. RSTBC sent a mapping team. The club handed over its list of trails. RSTBC made them trailhead signs — the first of the new-style signs issued anywhere in the province. A member drove to Nelson to collect them and volunteers put them up at a work bee.

Four years later, when the Rady deactivation was circulated for comment, Recreation Sites and Trails BC filed no concern.

The newest reason for removing Rady Creek is that an engineer in the Nelson office has identified it as a landslide hazard requiring removal for public safety.

No terrain stability assessment has been published. No geotechnical report. No hydrology report. The petitioners say none has ever been disclosed to them. The engineer has never been named.

What has been published is the deactivation prescription itself, produced on 7 November 2025 and available to anyone on the Ministry's own website. It lists 79 waypoints across 4,376 metres, each flagged in the field with ribbon and orange paint.

Seventy-five of those waypoints prescribe cross-ditches, fill pull-backs and water bars — work a grader could reverse in a week. Four prescribe full re-contour, which nothing reverses.

And at waypoint 74 — the top of the work, the furthest point the excavators will reach — the Ministry's own surveyor wrote a note that appears on the published map.

The Incomappleux River road sits in the same valley, in the same district, under the same District Manager, on the same timeline. When the Ministry decided to remove that one, this is what it did.

It published a fifteen-question public FAQ with a file number on every page. It mailed notices to landowners and interested parties in 2021, then again in 2023, then again in 2024. It advertised the draft plans in the local paper. It opened a formal public comment period, ran it, closed it, and committed on the record to reviewing every submission before proceeding.

For Rady Creek: none of it. A map and a data file posted to a webpage last November, and a sign on a switchback.

The Trout Lake Recreational Club and Arrow Lakes Ridge Riders argue the Forest Planning and Practices Regulation requires public review and comment, and supporting assessments, before a decision like this. We have found no record that either happened here — and we have asked.

British Columbia keeps a public lobbyist registry. Every registered contact between a lobbyist and a senior public official is filed, dated, numbered and searchable by anyone. It takes ten minutes to learn to use, and nobody in this fight had looked.

Directly behind Silvercup Ridge sits Galena Lodge, operated by Canadian Mountain Holidays, which holds roughly three million hectares of commercial recreation tenure across British Columbia — tenure issued by the Ministry of Forests. The industry association for heli-skiing and cat-skiing is HeliCat Canada, and it retains professional lobbyists.

Those 162 filings are not history. Between December 2025 and July 2026, HeliCat's registered contacts include near-monthly meetings with the Director and a policy specialist of the provincial Wildlife Branch — the officials who run the caribou file that has been used to close this terrain. It reached two deputy ministers repeatedly across May, June and July of this year. It reached the Deputy Minister to the Premier. It reached the Minister of Environment and Parks directly.

In the same period, the people who use Rady Creek wrote letters. Steve Shannon's petition, which he believes passed ten thousand signatures, went to the Minister of Forests and got nothing back. When seventy people gathered at Trout Lake in July and invited the Ministry, it sent natural resource officers — who told the crowd they were not permitted past the barricade.

Rady Creek is one road. But the mechanism that condemned it — no transition pathway, no designation, no consultation, no record — is standard operating procedure for public access across British Columbia.

In this district alone, four more roads are already in the queue. There is no process anywhere in the province for turning a retired industrial road into a managed recreation route. The only tool the Ministry has is the excavator.

The pattern will not stop at Trout Lake unless it is stopped at Trout Lake.

This is the gap underneath everything on this page. When a Forest Service Road stops being needed for logging, British Columbia has exactly one tool for it: deactivation. There is no mechanism to hand that same corridor to Recreation Sites and Trails BC and keep it open as a managed recreation route.

Not a slow mechanism. Not an underfunded one. None. The Ministry of Forests cannot transfer a road footprint into the recreation system, because no pathway to do it has ever been built.

So when the industrial use ends, the only question a district can answer is how much of the road to destroy. And the Ministry told the Trout Lake club exactly what that means in practice: the road must be deactivated first — the slope returned to its pre-road condition — after which the club is welcome to apply for a permit and rebuild access over the same ground.

The BC Snowmobile Federation has put a four-point proposal in front of the Minister of Forests. It is not a demand to keep every road open forever. It is a request to build the missing pathway, and to use Rady Creek to build it.

Rady Creek is not an outlier. It is the front of a queue — and every road behind it will be resolved the same way, for the same reason, unless the pathway gets built.

In the Selkirk district alone, four more roads are already posted or under way. One of them, Heights FSR, carries an explicit note in the Ministry's own listing: there will be no ATV access after completion.

Province-wide the arithmetic is worse. Roughly 58,000 kilometres of Forest Service Road exist; around 12,000 carry the capital status that makes them unlikely to be deactivated. The rest sit at the wilderness minimum, and the wilderness minimum does not guarantee that a vehicle can get through.

This is how an adventure tourism economy gets hollowed out. Not by a single decision anyone would defend in public, but by a hundred district-level decisions taken quietly, each one individually reasonable under a policy that offers no alternative. The operators, guides, lodges, fuel stops and repair shops that depend on backcountry access do not lose it in one announcement. They lose one road a year until the trip is no longer worth taking.

Trout Lake has around two dozen residents and three remaining industries — tourism, mineral exploration and recreation. All three run up this road. Communities like it do not recover access once the bench is gone; they simply stop being places people drive to.

SaveRady.com is published by the Backcountry Coalition — a non-profit working on public land use issues that affect recreational users.

The Coalition was founded in British Columbia and works alongside established groups including the BC Snowmobile Federation, ATVBC, the Four Wheel Drive Association of BC and the Trout Lake Recreational Club. It is not a substitute for any of them. It exists to do the work volunteer boards rarely have capacity for: pulling public records, filing information requests, and publishing what the documents show.

Rady Creek is our first file. It will not be our last.