B.C.'s northernmost town making an economic comeback with new winter festival

This story is part of CBC Daybreak North's series called The Comeback: Fort Nelson.

It chronicles how British Columbia's northernmost municipality has been hit by the loss of jobs and opportunities, and how people there are working to help the community survive and thrive in the coming years.  

It's the final weekend of the British Columbia's first ever Northern Lights Festival, which brought together hundreds of international tourists and one very large snowman.

The winter festival in Fort Nelson, the province's northernmost municipality, was created to put the small town on the map and revitalize its struggling economy.

"It's been absolutely fantastic. It's put a smile on our community's face," said Cory Howden, the director of the Fort Nelson Event Society who organized the event.  

"People are walking around more — they're out on the streets and they're enjoying what their place has to offer."

Around 200 international tourists came to experience a true north winter, complete with snowmobiling, dog-sledding and, of course, a glimpse of the colourful northern lights.

"Sometimes, when you have guests who travel halfway around the world and tell you how awesome where you [live] is, it can change your perspective," he told Carolina de Ryk, the host of CBC's Daybreak North.  

Thawing out the economy

Part of the purpose of the winter festival is to thaw out Fort Nelson's economy.

For the past few years, the region has been struggling with a dormant forestry industry and a downturn in the gas sector.

"The downturn for me has been like it is for a lot of people," said John Roper, acting mayor of Fort Nelson.

"Business is down, real estate values have decreased. And what I'm seeing is a loss of people [moving out], which I consider our most valuable asset."

Fort Nelson is looking at a number of different power-generating projects to ignite the economy in the future, including contributing natural gas from the northern Rockies to the proposed LNG facility in Kitimat.

Those projects are still being discussed and investigated, Roper said.

In the meantime, Fort Nelson is focusing on different ways to bring in money.

"We're really focused on economic development. We're racking our brains trying to come up with different creative ways to get out of this recession," he said.

Diversifying the economy

City council is not the only one looking for new sources of income.

"We were so involved in the development of natural gas for the last 20 to 30 years now," said Curtis Dickie, chief of the Fort Nelson First Nation.

"When the downturn happened, we felt it."

That made economic diversification all the more crucial, he said.

"We recently purchased the Fort Hotel, the oldest hotel in Fort Nelson, and we have the Liard Hot Springs Lodge just up the highway," Dickie said.

"We're positioned really well to really participate in the tourism economy now and Indigenous tourism, I believe there is a space for that."