About kootenaylake.org

Live ferry sailings, highway cameras, weather, lake level and a guide to every community on Kootenay Lake, BC.

Every figure on this site is meant to carry its own source and the date it was checked, and every live reading — ferry sailings, road cameras, weather, lake level, wildfires — states how old it is rather than reading a quiet feed as good news.

Beyond the live conditions pages, this site also covers fishing regulations, boat rentals and launches, camping and BC Parks properties, Ainsworth Hot Springs, and a guide to individual communities around the lake, each one sourced the same way.

kootenaylake.org is an independent guide published by Delcaro Media in Kitchener, BC. It is not affiliated with Nelson Kootenay Lake Tourism, the Kootenay Lake Chamber of Commerce, the BC Ministry of Transportation and Transit, Western Pacific Marine, BC Parks or any business listed on it.

This site reads several public agencies’ own feeds rather than publishing its own measurements. Weather data from Environment and Climate Change Canada, used under the Open Government Licence – Canada.

• Camera images and ferry status from DriveBC.ca, BC Ministry of Transportation and Transit.
• Road events from DriveBC Open511.
• Lake level from the Water Survey of Canada, station 08NH064 Kootenay Lake at Queens Bay, under the Open Government Licence – Canada.
• Wildfire incidents from the BC Wildfire Service open data.
• Avalanche forecast from Avalanche Canada.
• Park, campground and campfire-ban records from BC Parks’ own feed.

A smaller set of dated facts — resort hours and prices, fishing regulations, lake depth and length, road-weather notes — come from each source’s own site or document, read directly and dated rather than pulled from a live feed; every page that uses one links straight to it.

A scheduled job on this site runs on the cron schedule */10 * * * * in this site’s own deployment config — every ten minutes — refetching every live feed listed above in one pass.

The dated facts described above update on their own separate schedule: each one is checked by hand against its own source and carries the date of that check, not the ten-minute cycle the live feeds run on.

This site does not sell anything, run ads, or take a booking or a payment on behalf of any operator, resort or rental it lists.

It does not hold an opinion on which campground, restaurant or business is best, and it does not publish a fact it cannot point at a named source for.

It is not a substitute for an official channel in an emergency or a closure: DriveBC, Avalanche Canada, BC Wildfire Service and BC Parks each remain the authority on their own data, and this site only mirrors what they publish, on the schedule below.

Corrections and enquiries go to hello@kootenaylake.org.