Uh, you peeps all know about the situation with the Squamish River Valley, right?
Like the bear last summer, First Nations, and the meeting with the Crown in the spring, where they basically laid the law down on organized events on crown lands?
Tip: if you're going to be crazy enough to try and throw an event up there, Mile 36 is a big risk, given it's status as a recreational site and coho salmon reserve. Tim Hoskins, the Crown Enforcement Specialist emailed me a list of the penalties, and they can get kind of nasty (like losing a sound system, and paying massive fines).
That's part of the reason the Alluvium and Karma festivals were cancelled this year, and why many of the others have taken place in new locations (like Beheshto's event on the Sunshine Coast).
Soundproof and the Burn in The Forest crew (now Sizzle) went with private lands this year, a legally much safer way to go.
I guess that I should have gotten around to doing a write up on the provincial meeting, since Dreadnex.Inc was there (mine was the first party cancelled last year because of the new permit process), but I figured you folks had heard about it through the grape vine.
I sent a message to the FNK admin about the meeting, but never got a response.
But seriously, with some of the stuff going on in the legal and political background (like for instance the Puyam reserve being willing to set up road blocks on the only access road to the valley, because they've gotten sick of finding trash all over their ancestral lands, as well as other stuff), it would be a good idea to look for somewhere that hasn't been massively abused by a large number of people who look at a forest and see a giant free venue.
The number of people using the sites increased significantly over the last four years, and if you remember how what it was like back in the day, well, most of the sites ended up flattened by human impact during the last two summers.
If anyone wants more info on what happened with the Crown, who was at the meeting, etc, contact me, and I'll steer you towards some of the threads and/or people who were involved.
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