CALGARY

Sunshine Village closed to accommodate staging area for fire crews

Colleen Schmidt Managing Digital Producer | CTVNews.ca & BNNBloomberg.ca

Published Friday, July 21, 2017 2:49PM MDT Last Updated Friday, July 21, 2017 7:19PM MDT

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Fire crews are working hard to keep the Verdant Creek wildfire from spreading and have set up a temporary staging area at Sunshine Mountain Resort.

“So far so good and they’re putting kind of a full court press on it today and tomorrow just to develop a really strong fire break in that area and then we can reopen and get back to business,” said Dave Riley, COO Sunshine Village. “There's about 160 people that we had to move into Banff reservations, of people coming, we had to relocate, and that’s all worked quite well actually we were able to find rooms for everybody.”

The ski hill was closed on Friday at the request of Parks Canada and will remain closed for several days.

“I’m confident that this next tactical push on the firefighting effort is going to be successful,” said Riley.

Parks officials say the fire is still on the west side of the continental divide but that it continues to spread into Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park.

The wildfire covers an area between 2500 and 3000 hectares and officials say they are making progress to keep the fire from spreading to key areas.

Several trails and campsites within Kootenay National Park and Banff National Park remain closed to backcountry use including:

Sunshine Village (Banff)
Fatigue Creek (Banff)
Brewster Creek (Banff)
Egypt Lake area (Banff)
Verdant Creek (Kootenay) south to the Simpson River

The fire is about 2.5 km away from Sunshine and 24 km from the Banff townsite.

A fire ban remains in effect for all mountain national parks to prevent the possibility of human-caused fires.

This fire ban includes ALL open fires, EXCEPT, provided they are under direct supervision and Canadian Standards Association (CSA Group) approved or Underwriters Laboratories (UL certified):