The land we're looking at

2,560 acres on Boulder Pit Road, Salmo — the West Kootenays parcel the founding crew is forming around.

2,560 acres, 5 minutes from Salmo

The parcel we're circling is DL 1243 Boulder Pit Road, Salmo, BC — 2,560 acres in the West Kootenays, five minutes from town, in unincorporated Regional District land (no municipality, no city hall telling us what our home has to look like).

It is completely outside the ALR (the Agricultural Land Reserve), so building homes is allowed. A creek runs through it for about 4 km, and it holds the key access point to the west side of the Darkwoods Conservancy — one of the largest private conservation holdings in Canada. The listing flags it as a High Conservation Value property.

Logged once, growing back

It's been logged before — which, for us, is a feature, not a flaw. There's still a significant volume of merchantable timber on it, and the already-cut ground is exactly where the shared buildings and the active reforestation projects should go: you build and replant on the disturbed land, and leave the standing timber standing. The forest we bring back is land our own labour restores.

What we still need to confirm

We're doing this with eyes open. Before anyone moves, the things that actually decide whether 500 homes is realistic — and that we're gathering now:

• The water licence on the creek (domestic vs. waterworks volume) — this, not acreage, is what caps how many of us the land can hold.
• A timber cruise — merchantable volume, species, replant area.
• Title & access — fee simple, rights-of-way, the road status, and the tax classification (the low tax bill suggests a managed-forest status, which carries its own obligations).

The headline price is $4,600,000 with a property-tax bill of about $6,661/year — the entire carrying cost while we fill the roster.

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