Twenty years of building a community that nature was always part of
In the mid-1990s, a developer named Gerhard Blenk began quietly assembling parcels of land on the Glenmore Ridge north of Knox Mountain — a process that took nearly five years and resulted in roughly 1,400 acres of largely undeveloped hillside at the city's northwest edge. Blenk's vision was unlike anything Kelowna had seen before: when he presented it to city council in 2000, the plan committed explicitly to leaving at least half of the total land area as permanently protected natural habitat — not a park bolted onto the edge of a subdivision, but nature built into the development's structural DNA from the first lot to the last. Construction began in 2003, and Wilden has been building slowly and deliberately ever since. The commitment to nature has been literal and specific: wildlife corridors are mapped and maintained throughout the community, a "turtle tunnel" was constructed under the main road to allow reptile migration to continue uninterrupted, and wetland ponds have been actively reclaimed to maintain beaver and waterfowl populations that were present before the first house was built. More than 50 kilometres of maintained trails wind through the natural areas, some connecting to the broader Knox Mountain and BX Canyon networks beyond Wilden's boundary. The community turned 20 years old in the early 2020s — young by neighbourhood standards — and is now entering its third and final development phase, with around 800 homes built and nearly 3,000 units planned in total. What Gerhard Blenk assembled piece by piece on a northwest Kelowna hillside in the late 1990s is now one of the most distinctive planned communities in the BC Interior: a neighbourhood where the deer that move through the wildlife corridors were accounted for in the planning documents before the first home was sold.
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