News

Well Happy Canada Day everybody, hopefully everyone enjoyed their day off.   Hey wait, we don’t get a day off up here in the valley!  There is work to do and we’re sitting here in front of a computer.  Guess it’s not too bad – enjoying watching the vehicles fly by at 100km/h, plus according to our new valley weather station its 33.6 C out there right now, so perhaps I’ll keep on writing.

Ok, so where did I leave off…

Weather Pages

Lets talk about the weather, as that is always on the back of everybody’s mind.  Earlier this year the foundation purchased a weather station, this station is commercial grade that runs via solar power and updates this website in real time.   Here’s a picture of it just in case your wondering…

That temperature you see in the website header is what the temperature is outside your front door.  Now if you click on that temperature or “Our Weather” it will take you to our current condition page…this page gives you basically everything you need to know for today.  It also allows you to view previous weather history as well (like how much rain fell yesterday).

Under that “Weather” drop down menu, there is a “Forecast”….now this is a 10 day forecast provided for the general area, not our valley in particular.  It is based on several reporting stations and agencies.

Another menu is “Historical”…this is incomplete, but remarkably Paul Harper has recorded the weather in this valley since 1980.  We have access to this data and we will be making this data accessible for “year over year” charts for:  temperature, snow, and most importantly precipitation.  Stay tuned if you’re into that.

Last but not least, our weather provider has several applications that you can download to your phone and/or tablet.  Definitely useful when you’re in Hawaii, sitting on the beach, and wondering if you’re missing anything back home.  Follow the instructions on that page to download and install.

Resident Pages

Let’s move on to Resident Pages.  Well we have the Ashlu Creek Foundation pages that acts as a document repository with financials, meeting minutes, and notices.  There is also an application to be a member, pretty basic stuff for the most part.

Moving on we have a page dedicated to the Valley Internet with information on Base Wireless, contacts, plans, etc.

After that we have a Community Calendar…if you have an event that you want people to know about make sure you let us know in the forums and we will gladly add it.

Regarding the “Community Services” pages, we’re envisioning services provided for our local community…snow clearing comes to mind as an example….maybe babysitting (sign us up).  Things like that…a start to get you thinking of what’s possible.

Last but not least are the “Forums” and of course the “Valley Post”.  We’ve started some generic forums to keep the topics organized, but if you have any ideas on how to improve or want your own forum (horse people?) we’re all ears.  There is an excellent Facebook group that works really well and these are not here to replace that but to complement; perhaps the less time sensitive issues on a wider base.  If you have a Facebook account, we encourage you to join “The Upper Squamish Valley” group.  As well, we encourage Facebook posters to keep the News & Banter forum current for our non-Facebook residents.

Public Pages

Let us start by saying that we come from more of a tourist background, where the more information the better.  Some people may disagree and would rather keep this information private on the pretense that this may keep people away.  You can imagine we have a very active outdoor population that utilize the USV: hunters, fishing, hikers, off-road enthusiasts, and of course campers.  We could have loads of information there for visitors or not…either way this is our website so if we need some information regarding “where to camp” and the likes we can discuss this in the forums.

History page, wow if you haven’t read Hank Tatlows story, you should!  An easy read and all about the USV back in the early days.  Keep an eye on this page as we will get some of our ‘old-timers’ to get their history in there.

The “Squamish River” page has the current water level graphs from Environment Canada for easy viewing.  “Living on a floodplain” explains flooding conditions, some research documents, a FAQ and a gallery.  We know there are more pics out there, get them to us!  The fishing page is what we would refer to as a visitor information page, as we explained earlier, we are a fishing family so we snuck it in there.

Our Artists – the idea here is to showcase portfolios of different valley people…if this remains public or private, is to be determined.  We feel this section is going to be big hit…stay tuned.

Local Business and Farms is a business directory…We’ve added a couple as an example.  Get us your details and we will gladly add you.

SLRD and ALR is pretty standard information.

“Horse Heaven”, what do you think?  …Since this is the next biggest demographic here, ha ha, soon they will be voting!

Last but not least, is the “photo gallery”, please peruse and don’t be shy to offer images!

Final Word

We would like to thank Ellie!  She has been instrumental in collecting information, pictures, and ideas from people…she has really pushed this project through for the community and hopefully everyone enjoys the new website.  Now, hopefully we can turn it over to you and we can continue to build this for everybody’s enjoyment.

Thank you, Devin and Yasmine.