Qualla: Pitt Meadows

Pitt Meadows: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Pitt Meadows: Hemmed In by Water

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 t...

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Pitt Meadows: The Dutch Came With Shovels

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 wh...

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Pitt Meadows: The Lake That Breathes

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Pa...

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Pitt Meadows: Ninth Busiest

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ho...

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Pitt Meadows: Somebody Else's Golf Course

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 o...

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