Naval Radio Station Aldergrove: the navy's listening post in the woods

If you have driven 264 Street or 272 Street north of Aldergrove and wondered about the long stretch of trees, fences and tall masts, that is the navy. For more than 80 years this land has been a radio receiving station, quietly listening for ships at sea. Most of Langley has never been inside it.

Why the navy came to Aldergrove

In the early part of the Second World War, the navy’s Pacific coast radio ran out of the dockyard at Esquimalt on Vancouver Island. A busy naval base turned out to be a noisy place to listen for faint signals, and interference was spoiling reception. The fix was to split the job: receive in one quiet place, transmit from another.

In 1942 the navy decided to build a receiving station at Aldergrove and a transmitting station near Sumas and Matsqui, across the valley. Construction took longer than planned: the Royal Canadian Navy’s own history says the first Aldergrove buildings were not ready until more than a year after work began. Heritage radio sources put the start of service, under the call sign CKN, in late 1943. Through the rest of the war, Aldergrove carried most of the navy’s communications traffic on the Pacific coast.

HMCS Aldergrove

The station shrank after 1945 but stayed on as the navy’s communications hub for the Pacific. The Korean War brought a burst of new buildings in the early 1950s.

• June 1, 1955: commissioned as HMC Naval Radio Station Aldergrove.
• July 1, 1956: renamed HMCS Aldergrove. Land stations were commissioned like ships, which gave the sailors a badge and a cap tally of their own.
• May 1962: new bachelors’ quarters opened, according to the Alder Grove Heritage Society.
• 1967: with the unification of the Canadian Forces, it became CFS Aldergrove (Canadian Forces Station), staffed by people from all three services.

Through the Cold War the station handled ship-to-shore and air-to-ground communications on the Pacific coast, and it was upgraded again in the late 1970s. There were homes for military families as well as single quarters, a galley and a club. The Alder Grove Heritage Society points out that you can still spot “ghost driveways” along the edges of the property where those houses once stood.

Downsizing in the 1990s

New technology meant the station could be run from a distance. By the mid-1990s it was on remote control, and staff fell from more than 130 to around 20.

On March 31, 1996, CFS Aldergrove was disbanded as a stand-alone station. It carried on as Naval Radio Section Aldergrove, a detachment of CFB Esquimalt, the name chosen to honour its navy roots. Over the following decade most of the buildings were taken down, including the quarters, the galley and the water tower.

What is there now

The receiving antennas are still working, and the Department of National Defence still maintains the site. Federal project notices show beaver and flood-control work in 2022 and a project this fall to replace the foundations of antenna guy wires. Local cadets also use the site.

Much of the land is an antenna field, and much of the rest is a buffer zone that keeps electrical noise away from the receivers. That buffer is why so much of it has stayed as forest and wetland.

The land: forest, wetland and the upper Salmon River

The upper Salmon River and several of its tributaries cross the federal land, and federal project notices name a Bertrand Creek wetland on the property too. The Salmon River is one of only a handful of Canadian watersheds where the endangered Salish sucker, a small freshwater fish, still lives.

The federal recovery strategy for the endangered Oregon spotted frog lists a population at a federal site it calls “Maintenance Detachment Aldergrove”, one of only four known in Canada, and maps 620 hectares of critical habitat at Aldergrove. It describes that population as possibly close to disappearing.

On the Province’s ALR maps, the main 900-acre block sits inside the Agricultural Land Reserve. It is federal land, though, and how far provincial land rules reach onto federal property is a legal question in its own right. Our ALR explainer covers how the reserve works.

The 2026 election debate

The base became an election topic in the fall of 2026. The Langley Strong slate’s platform said it would open talks with Ottawa about the long-term future of the defence lands south of the 264 Street interchange, and look into setting aside a portion for industrial land, jobs and tax base, “designed in a way to respect the environment.”

At an all-candidates meeting at the Kinsmen Centre in Aldergrove on October 5, 2026, co-hosted by the Aldergrove Community Association and the Bertrand Creek Enhancement Society, the question got a full airing:

• Progress For Langley candidates said the 900 acres are the headwaters of the Salmon River, with forest and wetlands, and should not be filled in or developed.
• Langley Strong candidates said they had no plan to fill in the site, that wetland setbacks and provincial law would apply, and that they only wanted to know Ottawa’s intentions. Mayoral candidate Jay Lundgren said that did not mean taking the land out of the ALR.
• Mayor Eric Woodward said a developer had pitched him, about a year and a half earlier, on asking Ottawa to take the land out of the ALR, and that he had turned it down.
• Nearly every candidate said farmland should stay farmland and the ALR should be protected.

Langley Strong won the mayor’s chair and six of eight council seats on October 17, 2026. The land still belongs to the federal government, and no plan for it has been announced. Any change would start in Ottawa, and anything touching the ALR, the river or the frog habitat would bring in the Province and federal species-at-risk rules as well.

Have a say

• Township council: email [email protected], or see how to attend or speak at a council meeting.
• Federal land: the property belongs to National Defence, so your Member of Parliament is the place to ask. See Langley’s MPs.

Related

• Aldergrove: the guide
• Alder Grove Heritage Society and Telephone Museum
• A short history of Langley

Have photos or memories of HMCS Aldergrove or CFS Aldergrove you’d be happy to share? Tell us.