Nineteen thousand one hundred and forty-six people live in Pitt Meadows, on 86.34 square kilometres of river-bottom between Vancouver and the mountains. Eighty-six per cent of that ground sits inside British Columbia's Agricultural Land Reserve, which means the province has decided by law that it will grow cranberries and blueberries and cut flowers rather than subdivisions. In the southwest corner, on land three and a half metres above sea level, there is an airport that logged 127,284 aircraft movements in 2022 - the third busiest in the province and the ninth busiest in Canada. It is a small farming city with more traffic overhead than most cities twenty times its size.
Three rivers define the place and always have. The Pitt runs down its western edge, the Fraser along the south, the Alouette through the middle, and the effect is a community naturally cut off from the rest of the Lower Mainland - the urban mass of the Burrard Peninsula sits on the far bank of the Pitt. Those rivers were the roads before there were roads, and the fishery, and the source of the floods that laid down the silt the farms still work. This is Katzie territory; the nation's band office is here, and the eagle on the city's own symbol is an acknowledgement of who was here first. The Fraser today is a working navigation channel; the Pitt is quieter, its foreshore given over to log storage.
Pitt Meadows incorporated as a municipality on 25 April 1914, and for its first three decades it was wet, awkward country that flooded when the rivers felt like it. After the Second World War a large group of Dutch farmers arrived and reclaimed much of the low ground, which is why the marsh at the south end of Pitt Lake is called the Pitt Polder - a name imported wholesale from a country with four centuries of practice at taking land back from water. Most of the polder was drained and put under the plough. The northern part was left alone and is now protected habitat for migratory birds, which is a reasonable division of the spoils. What grows on the reclaimed ground: cranberries and blueberries, greenhouse peppers and cut flowers, pasture and dairy.
North of town, Pitt Lake is a fjord that forgot to stay salty. It runs about 25 km long and 4.5 km at its widest, covers 53.5 square kilometres and drops to 150 metres deep - and it is tidal, one of the relatively few tidal lakes in the world and among the largest of them. The Pacific reaches it through the Pitt River and the Fraser, but the tide arrives exhausted: the Strait of Georgia and the lower Pitt swing about fifteen feet, while the lake itself rises and falls roughly three. Twice a day, forty kilometres inland from downtown Vancouver, a freshwater lake breathes with the ocean. Mountains close in on both shores, and the head of the lake is wilderness almost immediately.
Pitt Meadows Airport has three asphalt runways, the longest 1,525 metres, and an elevation of twelve feet. Its 127,284 movements in 2022 were almost entirely light aircraft, flight training and helicopters, which is what happens when a flat, cheap, uncrowded field sits an easy hop from a major metropolitan area. A water aerodrome operates a nautical mile to the southwest. The roads came later and all at once: the Golden Ears Bridge opened in 2009, linking Pitt Meadows and Maple Ridge south across the Fraser to Langley and Surrey, and that same autumn a new seven-lane Pitt River Bridge replaced the old swing spans to the west. In 2011 the Lougheed Highway got HOV extensions and bus queue-jump lanes. Transit has been a harder sell: in 2018 a TransLink stop on the Lougheed was voted the sorriest bus stop in America by the transportation site StreetsBlog, which is a remarkable result for a stop in Canada.
About 85 per cent of residents commute out of the city to work, and Pitt Meadows became a city in name on 1 January 2007. Its most widely seen export is scenery. Most of the golf in Happy Gilmore was shot at the Swan-e-set Bay Resort and Country Club here; the Porsche that goes off a bridge in the pilot episode of Smallville went off Silverbridge on Harris Road; a sawmill on Bonson Road stood in for somewhere else entirely in 3000 Miles to Graceland. What residents actually use is quieter - the dike-top trails that run along all three rivers, open to walkers, cyclists and horses, and boat access to the Alouette, the Pitt and the Fraser. The dikes were built to keep the water out of the fields. They turned out to make excellent paths.
Pitt Meadows centres on 49.2333°N, 122.683°W, on the north bank of the Fraser River about 35 km east of downtown Vancouver, with its airport - CYPK, elevation 12 ft - in the southwest corner of the city. The layout reads clearly from the air at 2,000-3,000 ft AGL: a flat green quilt of diked farmland and cranberry bogs bounded by the Pitt River to the west, the Fraser to the south and the Alouette running through the middle, with the built-up town strung along the Lougheed Highway. Landmarks are easy - the long dark finger of Pitt Lake reaching north into the mountains, the white cable-stayed Golden Ears Bridge crossing the Fraser on the east side, the seven-lane Pitt River Bridge to the west, and the double summit of Golden Ears at 1,716 m standing over everything to the north. Treat the airspace with respect: CYPK handled over 127,000 movements in 2022 and is one of Canada's busiest general-aviation fields, with three runways, constant circuit training and heavy helicopter activity, plus a water aerodrome a nautical mile southwest. CYNJ Langley lies about 12 km south, CYVR Vancouver International roughly 35 km west, CYXX Abbotsford some 35 km southeast. Summer gives reliable visibility; from November to February the valley floor fills with radiation fog that can close the field while the mountains stay clear.