Cranbrook, British Columbia

Life in Cranbrook, British Columbia 

We arrived in Cranbrook late October to enjoy the remainder of the warm weather. Rocky Pines RV park is located on the eastern end of Cranbrook just off highway 3.

Rocky Pines RV Park was not our first or second choice for that matter. Cranbrook is not as touristy as Fernie which is just down the road but has a bigger population, we were hoping to spend winter on Vancouver Island but most sites were already booked out due to the Canada/US border being closed. The snowbirds need to go somewhere I guess, as it turns out Cranbrook was a better choice for picking up work quickly.

Cranbrook's main industry is logging and tourism and meth production. The last one is a judgment based on the amount of "tweakers" spotted while driving through town.

Since my time in Canada, I have found that working in BC seems to be treated as a privilege as most employers pay as little as possible and expect far too much for free. Locals just laugh this off and say that it's the "sunshine tax". I guess that is why my bias lies with Alberta.  

Rocky Pines RV Park is on the side of a hill where all the RV spaces are all cramped together with only dead pine trees for shelter. The park does have surprisingly fast internet speed that has a relatively good uptime. All sites have 30 and 50 amp power, water and sewer mounted conveniently halfway on the edge of each site. None of the sites have meters so each site has an additional one hundred on top of the six hundred per month for the site so it's a case of running as much as possible on electricity.   

As the RV park was landscaped in 2019 with power going in 2020, there is no laundromat (construction started in late 2020 with the intended opening in the first half of 2021. There are two laundromats in Cranbrook, a conventional laundromat complete with homeless and tweakers and a drop-off service.

Our first winter

Upon setting our RV at the park we had to look at skirting our RV for the winter and organizing a few 90 Lb. propane bottles. It is an obligation or a condition of wintering at this RV park that you skirt your RV with either a custom skirt or with wooden framing with insulation foam. While this is a common practice it seems wasteful to spend three hundred or so on materials only to give it away when we leave in mid March 2021. 

The general consensus is that skirting is necessary for sub zero camping. We have found that our cougar is good for minus 10 degrees C, we did find that the floor was cold even though the heating was set to 20 degC.

The median temperature in Cranbrook for December are supposedly around minus 5 degC but of late it's been around minus 6 at night to -2 to plus 6 degC I did some work under the trailer and did notice it was significantly warmer so I believe the skirting even in these mild temperatures would be saving in heating costs.

We found that at temperatures above minus 15 degC we have to turn down the furnace as the two small space heaters are sufficient to maintain an average temperature of around 20 degrees inside the RV. There is one distinct advantage  that 5th wheels have over travel trailers (caravans if your an Aussie) is that as the bedroom is the highest point it's generally the warmest room especially when you have a kelpie and a kitty sleeping on you.

Cranbrook, located in the East Kootenay region of British Columbia is similar in climate with The Okanagan which is further to the west. The Okanagan has a higher population with Pentiction and Kelowna both being larger that Cranbrook.