While the last couple of years have been hard on tourism across the north, that hasn’t been the case for the museum says Museum Executive Director Zena Conlin at a recent presentation to council.
“Museum visitor numbers in 2020 and 2021 were comparable to average,” says Conlin. “We were closed for three months in 2020, but we were also open six days a week that summer, as opposed to five days a week in 2021. We have shown resiliency and even growth during a difficult two years as we continue to work on our foundational pieces while balancing a need to move our research and projects forward.”
Less than half the visitors are from the Peace Region, with 60-65 percent of visitors coming from farther away.
She says the museum has not been immune to the challenges of the last two years. “Ongoing uncertainties have made planning difficult, stress levels have been perpetually high, and we’ve struggled with recruitment, which has impacted our abilities to deliver services,” she says. “Yet, as we look back at the last 12 months, what we have achieved has been remarkable. To this success, I owe our staff, volunteers and partners a deep debt of gratitude.”
Some of those issues have been around finding staff. Last summer, the museum was looking to—and had grant money available for—fill three tour guide positions. “We were only able to fill one,” says Conlin. But that summer student did an amazing job. “She delivered 51 cabin pool and 30 Wolverine River tracksite tours and increased tour revenue by 18 percent. She also complied a gallery guide.”
Conlin says she’s not sure what positions will be funded this year, but she knows that student is excited to return this summer.
The last few months has seen the return of tour groups to Tumbler Ridge—the first since June of 2019. “There were 47 mostly international students and staff from the Fort St. John and Dawson Creek Northern Lights College campuses,” she says. “It was an all hands on deck sort of day, with staff and volunteers delivering track site and museum tours.”
There were two new—if temporary—exhibits installed in the main museum gallery in June 2021. “The first was Dr Lawfield’s curatorial debut and features Tumbler Ridge’s own 90 million year old lobster, Linuparus qualitus,” says Conlin. “The second is a guest exhibit from the Royal BC Museum entitled ‘Buster,’ featuring the first dinosaur species unique to the province.
Doubly exciting was a noticeable increase in local and regional visitors in the weeks after the exhibit was installed. As our gallery upgrade project unfolds, we will continue to monitor visitor numbers in the hopes of seeing a stronger correlation between new installs and local and regional visitors. The supporting data will help us continue to be successful in future funding for ongoing exhibit development.”
On the research side, says Conlin, two new peer reviewed papers were published in 2021, and exceptionally low creek levels revealed new sites. “Field work occurred quickly, as it was unknown if creek levels would drop as low this year.”
The museum also participated in a multi-stakeholder digital marketing initiative in collaboration with the District’s Economic Development Office and Northern BC Tourism. “This was an incredible opportunity for the development of a complete digital marketing strategy, including a content calendar and design templates. We could not have done that on our own.”
Over in the archive, volunteers recorded 200 hours in 2021, responding to several requests for photographs, studies, newspaper clippings and other information, much of it around the fortieth anniversary of the town. “They also completed the documentation of our Monkman Collection, which includes primary and secondary sources including maps, records and journals.”
But, says Conlin, the most exciting development of 2021 was the museum securing an initial $526,000 in funding agreements to begin working on a number of major projects. “This is both for the museum and in collaboration with the geopark. The projects included are the Dinosaur Discovery Gallery upgrade, the collections upgrade, the contribution to the Geo-Interpretive centre, a virtual collections database, an online exhibition, and the development of virtual tours. Not all the projects are fully funded yet, but this will give us leverage in seeking additional support. We are incredibly excited to move from planning to doing, and we will be incredibly busy over the next few years. This is a three to four year roll out on these projects.”
These changes will see a complete revamp of the main gallery, which will be re-organized as a journey through time. “It will take visitors from our earliest fossil records—which right now is 450 million years old—and go through to the end of the ice age,” says Conlin. “We’ve secured contracts from two world-renowned paleo-environment artists to do some artwork. We’ve recently received our first glimpse of what that looks like, and it’s going to be amazing.”
One of the biggest issues the museum has been facing and will continue to face for the next little while is operational funding. “We have applied for a summer intern position to fill in our programs coordinator gap. If successful, this would be from May to September as we work toward a more permanent solution for the fall. Pending getting this position, we are planning on bringing back our summer camps.”
Because they are dependant on summer student grants, Conlin says she’s not sure how many days they’ll be open this summer. “That’s what’s so frustrating about the way student funding works, and how late in the season we find out if we get that funding. Right now, I can’t say. We’re planning for seven days a week. We always plan for seven but it really depends on what staff we have and if these summer student positions get filled. And even last year, we had the funding for three summer students but not enough people applied. We were funded for seven positions and we were only able to fill four.”
Moving into 2022, there has already been one paper published, which has attracted plenty of attention, both regionally, nationally and even internationally. The paper was even featured on the CBC’s science program, Quirks and Quarks.
“This summer, we are expecting researchers from the Royal BC Museum, Western University and the University of Colorado,” says Conlin. “Additionally, Dr Lawfield continues to work with researchers around the globe, answering queries and coordinating loans of museum specimens to other institutions for study.”
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
