A 1970s subdivision on the bench above the shoreline, with the fire hall, the store and the school all inside it.
Where Welcome Woods sits, and the other places we attend
around Halfmoon Bay. Every name on the map is a link.
Bench land above the escarpment, cut into lots in the 1970s
Welcome Woods is a residential neighbourhood in Electoral Area B, inland and uphill from the shoreline strip. The Halfmoon Bay official community plan, Bylaw 675, describes it as "a residential area, located on a bench land upslope from the Sargeant Bay and Redrooffs escarpment areas" (page 3). It is not waterfront. The plan dates its subdivision to "the 1970's" (page 19), thirty years after the Redrooffs corridor. That is why the lots are larger and more uniformly serviced and the houses more often full-time homes than cabins.
The street grid on the regional district's Connor Park field map runs Redrooffs, Northwood, Southwood, Frances, Wildwood, and Westwood Roads. Fawn Road, Eureka Place, Evans Road, Annex Road, Leaning Tree Road, and Belair Road run alongside. The regional district's directions are Redrooffs Road from Highway 101, then Southwood and Westwood Roads to the end, about ten minutes north of Sechelt. Road routing on 12 September 2026 gave 16.3 kilometres and 20 minutes from here to Sechelt Hospital.
The plan calls this a hub, and it has the shops to match
Bylaw 675 names only two "small neighbourhood commercial areas" in the entire plan area: Welcome Woods and the heart of Halfmoon Bay (page 3). It also designates Welcome Woods one of two community hubs (page 34). The store is Welcome Woods Market at 7816 Fawn Road. Halfmoon Bay Elementary is in this part of Halfmoon Bay, and in June 2026 a regional district fire-flow study flagged severe deficiencies in the water supply around the school. When the replacement community hall was taken off the Coopers Green site, the Connor Park site in Welcome Woods was supported instead.
Connor Park is 17.6 hectares, with a grass playfield, two baseball diamonds, a playground, washrooms, trails, and a bike skills area maintained by Sprockids. Adjoining it is Welcome Woods park, 73.1 hectares of forest with hiking and biking trails. The shíshálh Nation Elders Language Group gave the park the shashishalhem name ch'emalaḵ, meaning cold wind, referencing the wind conditions experienced at the park. Houses on the back edge of the grid have that forest directly behind them.
Two hundred houses lost water in November 2021
On 15 November 2021 the regional district shut off water in the Redrooffs area at about 9 a.m. after road erosion compromised a main. A boil-water advisory followed at 1:30 p.m. and a state of local emergency at 6 p.m. The main failures affected approximately 200 residences in Welcome Woods. The advisory was not lifted until 20 November, five days later.
potential problems with washouts of water mains and loss of protective pressure in the water system
SCRD Emergency Operations Centre, on the effect of heavy rains and snowmelt, November 2021
Welcome Woods is inside the Chapman water service area under page 45 of the plan, so a burst pipe in an empty house here runs on a metered regional district connection rather than a well. Chapman supplies about 90 per cent of the lower Sunshine Coast population, and its restrictions reached Stage 4 in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
Hall 2 on Fawn Road is the one the district has been trying to replace
The second Halfmoon Bay fire hall is on Fawn Road, inside the neighbourhood. A 2021 plan to rebuild on the same site was shelved, and in October 2023 the board took up recommendations to run a strategic planning process instead, and to explore alternate sites within the neighbourhood. More than $35,000 had already gone into needs assessment and design work since 2021. Fire halls must be built to post-disaster standards for a 70-year lifespan, and the staff report was direct about the bill:
Capital development costs in the order of millions of dollars should be anticipated.
SCRD staff report on the Halfmoon Bay fire hall, October 2023
The four regional district departments moved to a paid-on-call model in August 2025.
What a check in Welcome Woods covers
The regional district water connection, meter box and interior shut-off, and the taps run after any main repair
Ceilings and floors below every bathroom and the laundry, for a slow leak nobody is there to hear
Heat on and holding through the heating season, or the lines drained and the valve closed
The forest edge behind the lot: dead limbs over the roof, needle load in gutters, wood stacked against a wall
The community mailbox and the mail itself, after the break-ins on Leaning Tree and Belair Roads
Sheds, trailers, and tools, given the 2023 footage requests on Westwood and Wildwood
Freezer and fridge contents after an outage, and the generator and its fuel
A dated photographic record of every item, filed the same day
Community mailboxes on Leaning Tree Road and Belair Road were broken into on 18 January 2022. In October 2023 the RCMP asked for camera footage from Westwood and Wildwood between 3 and 5 a.m. in a construction-trailer theft investigation. On 4 and 5 November 2024 most of Halfmoon Bay was without power into the evening of the second day, and Halfmoon Bay Elementary closed because it had no electricity, heat, phones, or internet.
Most household policies put a limit on how long an unoccupied house can go unvisited during the heating season. The Insurance Bureau of Canada's advice is that most policies spell out how often a competent person must check the house so that the heat stays on. Shutting off the water and draining the system is the alternative in some wordings. The exact wording in your own policy, four consecutive days in some, is what the schedule is set to.
What it costs
A scheduled check at Welcome Woods 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.
