19 degrees in Bella Bella: B.C.’s warm February rewrites weather records

VANCOUVER — It may be February, but Doug Pope says rescue season in the mountains that overlook Vancouver is looking more like spring.

North Shore Rescue’s search manager said Thursday that the organization is seeing “a very different winter season” than normal, with almost no snow pack on the mountains.

“We would typically be in the height of rescuing out-of-bounds snowboarders, skiers in steep avalanche gullies, or doing types of slips and falls by hikers and snowshoers in avalanche terrain, and obviously we’ve had very few of those types of calls this year,” he said.

Much of B.C. is seeing unseasonably warm weather, thanks to an air mass brought by a ridge of high pressure. Environment Canada says temperatures this week hit 19.5 C in Bella Bella, 650 kilometres northwest of Vancouver, smashing the record for its warmest February day by more than three degrees.

It was among 15 daily temperature records broken across B.C. on Wednesday amid an unusual winter that has seen ski runs close, flowers bloom, and Vancouver International Airport go without any snow at all.

Pope said that instead of snowy rescues, the North Shore team was seeing something akin to “an early spring shoulder season.”

“We are getting more of the lost hiker (calls). We get mutual aid requests for injured hikers. We use helicopter night vision for lost hikers and hoist type calls,” he said. “But it’s relatively slow as far as call volume to where we would normally be in February.”

The Tatlayoko Lake area, north of Whistler, also set a new record for the month of February with a high of 18.1 degrees on Wednesday, exceeding the old record of 17.8 degrees set in 1930.

Among the other communities breaking daily temperature records that day were Cache Creek hitting 11.2 C, beating a record set in 1967, and in Powell River where 15.2 C surpassed a record set in 1941.

But the weather system has also brought heavy rain to the northern coast, with two-day totals of 144 mm of rain in Kitimat and 132 mm at the Prince Rupert airport.

Suzanne Barclay, president of the Richmond Garden Club, said some flowers and trees are blooming earlier than expected.

In her garden, tiny-bulb irises and hyacinths, that would normally appear in March, have already started to come up. Down the street, her neighbour’s cherry tree is blooming.

“Gardeners just don’t know what to do. Do you start uncovering, taking off protective mulch from plants only to, maybe two weeks from now, have a hard freeze and then things are just that much more vulnerable and killed off?” she said.

Barclay said changes in weather can lead to a “mismatch” with the lifecycle pollinators.

“The lifecycle of the insects may not exactly follow, so things may not get pollinated. Or vice versa, you have insects come out and the flowers aren’t blooming for them,” she said.

She said early warm weather changes when trees need to be pruned, and runs the risk of new plant diseases developing if the cold isn’t around long enough to kill them off.

“Just the unpredictability of (weather) is what messes with the gardens,” she said.

The forecast calls for a return to rain by the weekend around southern and coastal B.C. and more seasonal temperatures later in the month.

Pope’s advice for people wanting to take advantage of the warm outdoors is to remember that “wilderness is not far from our doorstep.”

“There is still some winter-type hazards in the back country, such as snow patches, icy-snow patches, that can freeze over a night,” he said.

“It can get very cold, obviously, at night.”

He said people should make sure they have proper layers, adequate communication options, and tools like sturdy hiking boots and poles.

“Those kind of things will keep you safe all times of year and especially right now with the conditions we have,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 5, 2026