Egmont

Egmont is the end of Highway 101 on the lower Sunshine Coast. Past it there is the Earls Cove ferry, and past that, Powell River. The regional district's evacuation guide for the area states the situation in one line:

Highway 101 is the singular egress route from the Egmont and District communities.

Sunshine Coast Regional District, Egmont and District evacuation route plan, April 2023

The guide estimates the population at 168. From the government wharf it is 57 minutes to the RCMP detachment in Sechelt and 59 to the hospital. The nearest supermarket is in Madeira Park, half an hour away. The ambulance is in Madeira Park too, if it is not somewhere else.

Four months

Sometime between December 2021 and the end of March 2022, someone cut the lock on the gate of a seasonal house in the 15200 block of Hallowell Road at Ruby Lake, pried open the door of an outbuilding, and took a Honda long-leg outboard motor and two trail cameras. The police report is dated 5 April. The owner found out when they arrived for spring.

Nobody knows which week it happened. Nobody knows whether the house itself was entered. There was no one to notice a cut lock for four months, because at Ruby Lake in winter there is almost no one.

Crime is not high in Egmont. The RCMP logged 17 calls here in a whole quarter, and 14 of them were false or abandoned. The difficulty is that whatever happens to an empty house happens unseen, for as long as the owner is away.

Who comes

The Egmont and District fire department has 18 members and one paid half-time position, split between the chief and the deputy. It covers about 350 homes in Egmont, Earls Cove, Ruby Lake and North Sakinaw Lake. The chief has said the department "will go several weeks without calls."

It has a water tanker, because there are almost no hydrants: the regional district's Egmont water system serves "approximately 25 residents and several businesses." Everything else is on wells, lakes and tanks.

Ruby Lake, Sakinaw, Nelson Island, Jervis Inlet and Old Egmont across the inlet are, in a resident's words, "boat-access-only country." Sakinaw Lake is outside every fire protection district. When a cottage at Ruggles Bay burned in July 2024, forty neighbours fought it from their docks with their own pumps before the Egmont and Pender Harbour crews and BC Wildfire arrived.

In May 2026 a wildfire at Earle Creek in Old Egmont, across the inlet from the village, grew from half a hectare to more than eight in three days, "burning in heavy timber nearby structures." A resident said a tree had fallen on the power line. The gravel mine two kilometres away shut down because it had no power.

The regional district now tells residents here to keep supplies for 144 hours — six days — "an increase over the 72-hour self-reliance time span recommended in previous years."

The ferry, and the road to it

On 14 April 2026 BC Ferries cancelled all sixteen sailings between Earls Cove and Saltery Bay for an electrical fault, and said "Alternative service is unavailable on the Saltery Bay/Earls Cove route due to lack of safe and accessible embarkation points for water taxis in Earls Cove."

Sailings were cancelled for crew shortages on Christmas Eve 2022, on Labour Day weekend 2023, and on 18 December 2023; for a vehicle stuck on the ramp in March 2023; and for a ramp fault in September 2024.

In summer the problem reverses. The ferry queue backs up past the Egmont Road turn-off — "more than a kilometre from the terminal" — and residents on Jervis Inlet Road and Greentree Road cannot get out. One wrote in August 2026 of "one or two volunteer firefighters on our road who cannot exit and go out to calls." Canada Post has been blocked from delivering. The flaggers were removed two years ago.

Between Egmont and Sechelt the highway crosses Trout Lake, which the road contractor describes as having "the most severe winter conditions of anywhere as it is the highest spot on the highway." In February 2025 it was closed by fallen trees. Thousands were without power "in Egmont, Pender Harbour, Halfmoon Bay," and BC Hydro said "access to some areas has been challenging."

Off the grid

The evacuation guide notes that at North Lake and Klein Lake "cell phone coverage is poor or nonexistent," that at Earls Cove "many are without internet," and that "some residents choose to be 'off the grid'." In 2020 Telus said a fibre build for Egmont "was ultimately determined not to be feasible." Towers were approved for Ruby Lake and the Egmont mine in 2021; whether both were built is not on record.

Off-grid cabins have their own risks. In June 2020 a man died of carbon monoxide poisoning in a 1950s cabin at Ruby Lake with home-installed propane appliances. Technical Safety BC said afterwards that "due to the nature of off-the-grid and recreational properties we tend to see a lot of well-intentioned, but potentially dangerous DIY installations."

Who owns the houses

In the 2021 census, Area A — Egmont, Pender Harbour and Madeira Park together — had 2,508 dwellings and 946 with nobody living in them: 38 per cent, the highest share on the Coast.

The regional district's plan says the area's dwellings are 59 per cent full-time occupied against 91 per cent for the province, and describes Ruby Lake as "a permanent and seasonal residential community" whose cabins "to the north and southwest of the lake are water access, or limited trail access only." Egmont's population, it says, "fluctuates as seasonal boaters visit."

What a check in Egmont covers

Every visit follows the same list and produces the same photographed record:

• The gate and the lock. The driveway. Tracks in snow or mud that are not yours
• Doors, windows, outbuildings, the boat, the outboard, the generator, the fuel
• Heat on and holding, or the house properly drained and shut down
• Water: the pump, the pressure tank, the tank if you collect rain; floors and ceilings
• Propane: tank level, fittings, the smell
• Roof and gutters from the ground; trees leaning on the house
• Signs of animals; signs of people
• After a storm or a closure: an extra visit as soon as the road allows

Most home insurance policies require an empty house to be checked at set intervals during the heating season — often within four days — by a "competent person," or the water shut off and drained. The dated, photographed record from each visit is what the insurer asks for. For a house at Ruby Lake, it is also the only way anyone will know what happened, and when.

What it costs

A scheduled check is $55 a visit, plus $10 travel. The travel charge is the same everywhere between Gibsons and Egmont. There is no minimum term and no joining fee. See the full price list.

Where these facts come from

Every figure, date and quotation on this page was taken from one of these. They are listed so you can read them yourself.

1. Sunshine Coast Regional District — Egmont and District evacuation route plan, and the quotation above
2. Coast Reporter, April 2022 — the over-winter theft at a seasonal home on Hallowell Road, Ruby Lake
3. Coast Reporter, 2024 — RCMP fourth-quarter report, calls for service in Egmont
4. Sunshine Coast Regional District — Egmont and District Volunteer Fire Department
5. Coast Reporter, August 2021 — the Egmont fire chief on call volumes, and the water tanker
6. Coast Reporter, May 2026 — the Earle Creek fire at Old Egmont, and "boat-access-only country"
7. Coast Reporter, September 2023 — the SCRD on 144 hours of self-reliance
8. Coast Reporter, 14 April 2026 — all sixteen Earls Cove sailings cancelled, and no water taxi
9. Coast Reporter, August 2026 — the summer ferry queue and the residents behind it
10. Coast Reporter, 2023 — Trout Lake highway conditions, and the contractor on winter there
11. Coast Reporter, 2020 — the fatal carbon monoxide build-up at a Ruby Lake cabin
12. Statistics Canada, 2021 Census — Sunshine Coast A, dwellings and unoccupied dwellings

Checked 11 September 2026. Newspaper and government pages do move. If a link no longer works, tell us and we will find where it went.