Wildsight’s Jumbo Wild campaign received another boost last week, in the form of a $5,000 award for first place in the fourth-annual Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) Wild Bucks competition.

Wildsight’s Jumbo Wild project beat out such high-profile competition as Ontario Nature, Clean Nova Scotia, and Alberta’s Castle-Crown Wilderness Coalition, taking 40% of the overall votes in this national online voting competition.

“At MEC, we’re inspired by wild places – places like the upper Jumbo Valley,” explains MEC’s Community Program Manager Andrew Stegemann.

“MEC Wild Bucks support our commitment to conserve ecologically and recreationally important places by giving our members the means to register their support for groups like Wildsight that are working to raise awareness of what’s at stake in Jumbo and other threatened places.”

“We are really pleased to accept this award, and very pleased to have received more votes than some really high profile, and important campaigns,” says Robyn Duncan, Wildsight’s Purcells Program Manager.

“This really shows how important the Purcell Mountains, and the Jumbo Valley in particular, are to people across the country. People really get it: now more than ever Canadians want to protect the wilderness we have, rather than developing remote valleys like Jumbo for more real estate profits, and trying to mitigate the impacts after the fact.”

Funding will go towards continuing the successful two-decade-long effort to protect critical cultural, recreational, and wildlife values in the Central Purcells from permanent real estate development.

MEC Wild Bucks was first inspired four years ago by a partnership between MEC and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. To date, the project has awarded $30,000 in bonus funding to MEC grant recipients.