Regional District North Okanagan: Fill & Download for Free

Hate rain? Love a desert like climate?There is a region of Canada's most western province of British Columbia, it's protected from the wet and rainy coast and the cowboys from Alberta, except for in summertime.Its sort of Nappa Valley mixed with a few rattlesnakes, cactus, fruit orchards and where you can experience over 176 vineyards, many are dotted along the 5 km wide, 135 km long lake. Its the only major water resource besides snowfall in winterertime.BC’s Okanagan Valley Wine RegionHead to the Okanagan Valley. Winter is cold but short, relatively speaking, hardly any rain and good powder snow with excellent ski hills.And…. The #2 ranked university in Canada, UBC has a campus there. Why not study at University of British Columbia in not the expensive Vancouver Point Grey campus, the Kelowna campus has a much better climate in the sunny Okanagan!Spring +15, comes early in march and blazing heat, +35 and +40 from July, August and into long into late September.Tons of golf courses, too! Thompson OkanaganKelowna, the hub of the valley is not too small; “ Kelowna is the third largest metropolitan area in the province and ranks as the 22nd largest in Canada, with a modest population of 194,882.Kelowna International Airport is approximately 10 minutes northeast of the city centre.The Okanagan district is roughly half way between Calgary and Vancouver and just north of the US border with the charming town of Osoyoos being the international border crossing in the south Okanagan.Unbelievable snow conditions with few crowds, might want to brush up on Australian, though.Spring & Spring Beer!The Ultimate Thompson-Okanagan Craft Beer Brewery List - British Columbia MagazineJust that it's mostly tourists and retired people, jobs are rare like gold there.Lastly, if you need your hockey fix;“The Kelowna Rockets are a major junior ice hockey team based in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. The Rockets play in the Western Hockey League (WHL), out of the Canadian Hockey League (CHL). They play their home games at Prospera Place”.Thought the photos would be more descriptive. And Okanagan Spring Brewery is quite good when you get sick of the locally brewed cider and wine.

South Western BC? Never heard of it. That would be the Lower Mainland I guess. (There is no Upper Mainland.) Lower Mainland would include the Fraser Valley but the Valley is sometimes a separate region because it is largely rural, compared to the environments of Vancouver which is urban.Most people would recognize these regions. It depends on what the regions are supposed to separate. Haida Gwaii is sometimes classed as a separate region especially for ecological purposes. Cariboo is sometimes called the Central Interior.Lower Mainland (includes Vancouver and the Fraser Valley)Vancouver Island (includes the Gulf Islands)Sunshine Coast (above and to left of Vancouver)Thompson / Okanagan (aka "the interior" or "southern interior")Kootenay (aka "the Kootenays")the Cariboo (aka "central interior")Northeast (includes the Peace River district)Nechako (aka "the bush")North Coast (may or may not include the large offshore islands called Haida Gwaii)

EDIT: The OP has expressed an interest in additional details, with apologies for the delay, I am editing in those details. (If anyone besides my guilty conscience noticed that I was noodling around on Quora yesterday without addressing the question, it was because I was procrastinating. Wait. That’s a terrible excuse. It was because of chemtrails.)What do you mean by untapped?This picture was shot near the former postal location of Alvin, British Columbia. A farming region less than twenty kilometers from Greater Vancouver, it is all but abandoned, and very large parcels of land are available there at reasonable prices. The run-up in real estate prices in the area around Vancouver has made land in Alvin very cheap, compared with places at a similar straight-line distance from the district boundaries, but there is no road there, and it would be expensive to build one, so the land goes unsold.This is the Douglas Lake Ranch, which is on the tableland between the Nicola and Okanagan Valleys. Unlike Alvin, it has good road connections. It’s not actually on the “Okanagan Connector” that links Vancouver with the thriving resort/commercial/retirement community of Kelowna, but places like it, are. Since land in Kelowna and Vancouver is expensive, you’d think there’d be development here. There isn’t, though, because real estate doesn’t work like that.This is Fauquier, a little slice of heaven in the Arrow Lakes region of my province. There’s a whole series of little towns like it along the highways that meander through this region, including an entire abandoned valley that once held three towns. (There are other abandoned valleys, closer to Vancouver, too.) The only problem with Fauquier is that there aren’t enough people who want to live there.This is Ocean Falls, at its height. (It’s basically abandoned, now.) It’s quite a bit more isolated than the other communities I’ve mentioned, but the old pulp mill there was served by a “stranded” 10 mW dam that is still sitting there, waiting to be plugged in and used for something. Apparently, all that free energy hasn’t been enough to persuade a business to relocate to the middle of nowhere, although I notice an “Ocean Falls Blockchain” search return, so maybe people are going there to mine bitcoin.This is Grand Forks, BC. It’s not isolated, at all. On the contrary, it is a major stop on the southern highway that joins Vancouver with Lethbridge, Alberta. (On the other hand, Lethbridge.) It has one, or possibly still two mills, and a growing agribusiness sector.So at this point I’ve introduced three four “untapped” regions. In Alvin, in the valley above the Pitt Lake, about 30km from downtown Vancouver, you can buy 700 acres of land for a list price of just a bit more than six million Canadian dollars, and either farm it, or hope that the Province builds a road connecting it with the city, in which case your land will increase in value a thousandfold. Who wants to be a billionaire? But it would be a terrible investment, because the road won’t be built, because mountains. Except, well, there’s lots of mountains around. Ocean Falls is a vacant industrial site with a port and 10 mW of free hydroelectric power sitting on the table. It would be a good place for a factory, except that’s already been tried, and it failed. Grand Forks isn’t isolated, doesn’t lack industry, and has plenty of commercially viable farmland. And yet more of its farmland, and certainly plenty of houses, are on the table in a seller’s market.There are interesting facts (and I have opinions about them!), but the OP is interested in Fauquier, in the Arrow Lakes district of the province, because it looks like, and is, a pretty town.I’m scraping the heck out of the photos posted at Google Maps for the rest of this answer. Most of them seem to come from the Klopp family’s website.Here’s a scrape from Google maps to orient you.It’s got Vancouver, Seattle, Calgary, and a little town called Portland that you probably haven’t heard of, it’s kind of cool, I guess. So you can see that Fauquier isn’t off in the Far North or wherever.Here’s a slightly smaller-scale scrape. it’s more useful for orienting yourself if you know where Kelowna is.If you don’t, it’s the place that used to have the giant Fred Flintstone. Nowadays, it’s probably closer to being to Vancouver what Las Vegas is to Los Angeles. (Or maybe Palm Springs? It’s an imperfect analogy, but it’ll do.)Vancouver isn’t Los Angeles, and Kelowna definitely isn’t Las Vegas, but it’s got something going for it.Now here’s the satellite scrape at the lowest scale where I could fit the entire length of highway between Fauquier and the regional centre of Nakusp into the frame.Unfortunately, this still too high to see what you can’t see. (Houses, that is.) So let’s drill down a bit more. This is the townsite of Fauqier and its surroundings.Our normal idea of a North American town is a “thickened up” conurbation of buildings, mainly retail and high density housing, sitting in the middle of a countryside full of every kind of human use from farms to strip malls. Fauquier isn’t like that. You could basically build a wall around it to keep the bears out, if you wanted, and no-one would care. The only thing outside the wall would be loggers, logging operations, and some cabins along the lake. (It’s actually the Columbia River, but it doesn’t count as a proper geographical name unless it’s confusing.)So, what do people do in Fauquier?i) Service campers. The problem with that is that there’s a lot more wilderness than people who want to use it, which means that Fauqiuer’s motel and cottages are competing with a great many other towns.ii) Feed and put up people who miss the last ferry of the evening. (The highway has a ferry.) Now that’s cooking with gas! (The campground at the top of the image is for sale, if you’re interested.)iii) Work in logging, ranching, or in farming hay to support the logging.iv) That’s it. Nothing else.This lack of economic opportunity explains why it is easy, and comparatively cheap to buy land and business opportunities in the Arrow Lakes district. This is probably not the sense in which the OP means “untapped,” however. For that, you want to go outside of town and buy some of the land that looks so green and empty. Can you? Yes, although you’ll have to deal with the ranchers and logging companies who have rights, including perhaps ownership, of the land. There’s plenty of Crown (government-owned) land, but the timber rights have been sold.Unfortunately for the would be homesteading pioneer, this is a pretty universal problem. Residual First Nations claims, mineral stakes, and timber rights complicate title to practically every bit of empty land in the world. I doubt that they’ll be hard to deal with if you are prepared to spend some money, but you can’t have the land for free, or even the cost of “improvements,” as in the old homesteading days.That being said, there are advantages to civilisation. If I haven’t already made this clear, the local government in the Arrow Lakes is desperately eager to have you and your investment money, and will do everything it can to get you into the kind of property that works best for you, and you will have all the remote acreage you want. Unfortunately, there’ll be pesky inspectors around to make sure that you’re carving the side of the mountain into a skull in an environmentally friendly way, and that the sharks with friggin’ lasers on their head have a humane tank environment. If that’s an issue for you, this is not “untapped” land.I’d say more, but tl;dr, amiright? The point is, the First World is depopulating, and there are places like this everywhere, and until that trend reverses (which it probably will at some point due to Global Warming and all that stuff), there’ll be more depopulation, and more untapped land.