As I write this it is early March – and the hot sun streams in my window, made hotter by reflections off the meltwater puddles on the street in front of my house. The first flowers of the year are coming out on the warm hillsides in the valley below.

This is not your typical Kootenay winter.  Maybe there is something to this “global warming” thing after all.

The annual Fernie Powder 8 Championships will go ahead full steam on Saturday March 13, 2010. Courtesy Resorts of the Canadian Rockies

However, though the bikes and skateboards are out in force in town and there has not been an appreciable snowfall for weeks, the high mountains are still covered in a blanket of white. In other words, the skiing is still incredible – and the annual Fernie Powder 8 Championships are going ahead full steam on Saturday March 13.

What you’ll see: On an untracked run, pairs of skiers will ski in tandem to leave as many 8s – or an unending infinity sign – as they can.  Skiers are judged on their style, synchronicity and the general appearance of their tracks. Of course, as is the case in Fernie most weekends, the Powder 8s are the catalyst for a fun weekend of skiing for some, heckling for others and partying for all.

Now all we need is some snow.

Lead photo courtesy Resorts of the Canadian Rockies

The answer is cold smoke – that white, light, powder snow that falls free all winter long across much of British Columbia, but that’s especially abundant here in the Kootenays.

Nelson's backcountry Cold Smoke Powderfest comes as Whitewater contemplates future ideas for expansion, including plans to expand into critical habitat for the south Selkirk endangered mountain caribou herd. Courtesy Whitewater

Cold smoke. Trailing behind your skis like dust on a summer logging road.

Snorkel-deep on blower days, fresh, light-as-air Kootenay powder has the elevating power to jar relationships, disrupt promising careers and turn fine upstanding citizens into disreputable ski bums. Given that one ski run in cold smoke is enough to change a life, perhaps it’s no wonder that the unrivalled lightness of skiing in the Kootenays has attracted an entire tribe of skidonists – a community where lives revolve around mountains and the need to shred.

Heads up: The good news for newbies is that the cold-smoke scene is the focus of the 4th annual Cold Smoke Powderfest, leaving tracks March 5 to 8 at Nelson’s Whitewater Resort. And with a full slate of clinics – from an Introduction to Freeheel (Telemark) to Steeps in the Backcountry and Advanced Touring Ski and Avalanche Awareness Clinics – there is something for everyone: from the polypro-clad, bearded backcountry tele-rats to the Ditrani-guilded gondola queens who’ve been eying the backcountry.

Plus: the Cold Shot Foto Face Off promises to bring some of the best ski-culture photographers together for a visual orgy of skidonism, a poker run, banked slalom, slopestyle, randonee rally and annual Cold Smoke King and Queen contests.

The good news for newbies is that the cold-smoke scene is the focus of the 4th annual Cold Smoke Powderfest, leaving tracks March 5 to 8 at Nelson’s Whitewater Resort.Courtesy Ralph Grant

Environment alert: Nelson’s backcountry fest comes as Whitewater contemplates future ideas for expansion, including plans to expand into critical habitat for the south Selkirk endangered mountain caribou herd. These critters embody the essence of wild winter backcountry mojo, and indeed help define what the Kootenays are all about. But less than 50 mountain caribou remain in the Selkirks and every kilometre of remaining habitat is critical. So if you bump into event organizers, please ask them to pass on a request to the owners to confine the resort expansion plans to already-impacted Apex Creek and to keep out of pristine Qua Creek. Part of any backcountry fest should entail protecting the backcountry. Caribou love cold smoke, too!

Lead photo courtesy Brian Sproule

Fanorama! As in, Grouse Mountain’s new “View Pod”

by Rob Howatson

The North Shore Peaks have always offered amazing vistas of Vancouver, but now Grouse Mountain Resort is putting a whole new spin on the gawk-from-above experience with the opening of “view-pod” – an enclosed observation platform located atop the Lower Mainland’s first commercially viable wind turbine.

The 65-metre-tall energy tower, dubbed The Eye of the Wind, is perched on Grouse’s highest point, 1,295 metres above sea level. Access is via the Skyride aerial tramway, the Peak chairlift and the world’s first wind-turbine crow’s-nest elevator, from which up to 36 thrill-seekers can squeeze onto the sky-high platform to appreciate the stunning view as three 37-metre-long blades sweep past the window. (The turbine’s 1.5-megawatt generator is expected to provide enough electricity to meet 25 per cent of the ski resort’s energy consumption.)

Guides are on hand to explain how the structure was built in such a lofty setting as well as how the resort intends to minimize the impact on birds and bats. 604-980-9311

Photo courtesy flickr.com/grousemountainresort

Springtime in the Fraser Valley Is blooming amazing

by Liz Bryan

Jaunt: Fraser Valley Ramble

Distance: Approx. 350 km   Fuel: 1/2 tank

Duration: Weekend

Prime Time: April

Tunes: “The Four Seasons: Spring” (Vivaldi)

This meander through the Fraser Valley capitalizes on spring in bloom – everything from dandelions and fields of daffodils and tulips to wonderful country-fresh edibles. Also, looping from Fort Langley to Hope and back, the itinerary eats up very little gas yet easily includes two days’ worth of attractions. Best experienced on a weekend – preferably that of April’s Bradner Daffodil and Flower Show, when the valley’s fields of gold are at their best.

Leg One: Fort Langley to Agassiz (approx. 170 km)

From the historic fur-trading post still standing in the village of Fort Langley (about 50 km east of Vancouver), take quiet, narrow River Road (88th Avenue) to mooch along the Fraser River to the pioneer settlement of Glen Valley. Glen Valley Regional Park stretches along the riverbank above the Two-Bit and Poplar sandbars, both popular fishing venues. Just past the picnic area, turn right (south) along Lefeuvre Road to McTavish, which leads east onto Bradner Road.

Roadtrippers arriving in Bradner on the weekend of April 9 to 11 will find the local Daffodil Festival in full swing. Thousands of the flowers have been grown on the high ground here since 1914, when English pioneer Fenwick Fatkin first planted the Dutch bulbs on his farm as an experiment. South down Bradner Road: the Village hall, which showcases the festival’s flower show (first held in 1928), with more than 400 varieties of the bloom. The adjacent schoolyard hosts a plant and flower market popular with local gardeners; a tea garden provides good homemade fare. Roadside stands sell bunches of flowers and local growers provide wholesale and retail supplies and take orders for fall home delivery of bulbs. Best flower fields: East side of Bradner Road and along Haverman Road.

North of Bradner Hall is the village’s 1911 general store and gas station (beside the railway tracks at the corner of 58th Street and Bradner Road); farther north is Jubilee Hall, where the festival’s arts and crafts show takes place. Post-festival, drive south down Bradner Road and, just before the road dips under the freeway (Hwy. 1), swing left (east) onto Downes Road and stop in at the Rossdown Farm Market for “nest-to-plate” poultry products, honey, ethnic breads and veggies (604-856-5578). Farther along is Tanglebank Country Garden and its colourful display of bedding plants. Keep east on Downes Road for about nine kilometres; it jogs north via Seldon onto Clayburn Road as it crosses Hwy. 11 and leads three kilometres to the Village of Clayburn, B.C.’s first company town.

HISTORIC CLAYBURN, CIRCA 1925 Founded in 1905 by Charles Maclure to house workers at his Clayburn Brick Works, the village has maintained its historic centre: a dozen old homes, a heritage school and church and a wonderful two-storey brick general store.

Founded in 1905 by Charles Maclure to house workers at his Clayburn Brick Works, the village has maintained its historic centre: a dozen old homes, a heritage school and church and a wonderful two-storey brick general store. Inside, the renovated building serves two purposes. On the right it houses an old-fashioned candy store and Yorkshire deli (Melton Mowbray pies, shortbread, cheeses and treacle puddings); those with a sweet tooth will be in heaven. The other half is an English tearoom with scrumptious sweets; its snow-crab soup and homemade scones are famous (open Tuesday to Saturday; check for holiday closures; 604-858-4020).

CLAYBURN: The Hummingbird Native Art Gallery, located in an old church. Many buildings here were designed by architect Samuel Maclure, whose mansions still grace elegant Vancouver and Victoria neighbourhoods. Courtesy Neil Carson

Ask at the store for a village walking tour guide. Many of the brick buildings were designed by Charles’s brother, architect Samuel Maclure, whose mansions still grace elegant Vancouver and Victoria neighbourhoods. Today in one of the five brick Foreman’s Cottages, Clayburn Comforts sells handmade soaps (in small Clayburn-brick moulds) and lotions. The back garden, with fountain-fed pools and native plants, is well worth a peek. A stroll down Wright Street reveals the old schoolhouse (now a museum), the brick church, the Hummingbird Native Art Gallery and Creekside Cats (a holiday home for pampered cats), though not much remains of the old brickworks, which moved closer to Abbotsford in 1930.

Drive east to the end of the village. Here, Old Clayburn Road leads back to Hwy. 11 and the freeway, while Straiton Road provides a more bucolic route following the Ferny Valley of Clayburn Creek to Sumas Mountain  Road. Turn right here and go south toward the freeway, then east again onto North Parallel Road to No. 3 Road. Then cross the freeway and head for the Yellow Barn for fresh fruits, vegetables, honey and more (604-852-0888). Afterward, stay east on No. 3 Road, keeping an eye open for more fields of daffodils, then turn north onto Boundary Road and cross the Vedder Canal Bridge onto Keith Wilson Road. Two blocks along, on the south end of Sumas Prairie Road, is the Great Blue Heron Nature Reserve: 130 hectares of floodplain along the Vedder River that is home to more than 200 nests of the endangered bird as well as painted turtles, eagles and other wildlife. Stop at the interpretive centre for live video activity at some nests (April is peak nesting month) and a trail guide and bird checklist. Open daily, 8 a.m. to dusk; admission by donation (604-823-6603).

From the heronry, drive north on Sumas Prairie Road to Greendale village, detouring west on South Sumas Road to visit Greendale Pottery for stoneware and crystalline porcelain, organic freezer beef and farm eggs (Thursday to Saturday; 604-823-6430). Sumas Prairie Road leads to Yale Road West and Heavenly Days Dairies’ goat cheese (just North of Yale Road at 7350 Barrow Rd.; 604-823-7241) and Anita’s Organic Grain and Flour Mill stone-ground specialty flours (weekdays only; 43615 Yale Road West; 604-823-5543).

Yale Road leads to the Lickman Road entrance to Hwy. 1 for a quick drive (about 20 km) to the Hwy. 9 interchange. Turn north, cross the Fraser River and drive into Agassiz to overnight. Good sleeps: Blackberry Lane B&B – friendly, luxurious, in a country setting with huge breakfasts and homemade pies and cookies for sale (5877 Limbert Road; 604-796-9875). Good eats: Just 10 km away in Harrison Hot Springs, at the Old Settler Pub (604-796-9722) and Crazy Fish Bistro (604-796-2280).

Leg Two: Agassiz to Vancouver via Hope (approx. 180 km

FRASER VALLEY Minter Gardens, the Fraser Valley’s counterpart to Vancouver Island’s Butchart Gardens.Courtesy Minter Gardens

After breakfast, return to Hwy. 9 and head back across the Fraser toward the freeway. At the roundabout, turn right (west) onto Yale Road East, then onto Bunker Road for a morning at Minter Gardens, the Fraser Valley’s  counterpart to the Island’s Butchart Gardens. Founded by Brian and Faye Minter in 1980, these 12 gardens are a mass of spring blooms, including daffodils and 100,000-plus tulips, and from April on are a rainbow of floral designs laced with walking paths, streams and waterfalls. Allow an hour or so to stroll around and poke through the plant and gift shop. There are two eateries: the Garden Café and the Trillium Restaurant.

After coffee and treats, return to Agassiz to follow Pioneer Way to Ashton Road, which leads to Limbert Road, heading past the pioneer graveyard to Limbert Mountain Farm. This picturesque retreat has everything:  gardens to tour, herbs and other plants for sale and homemade goodies such as herb-infused chocolate, teas and gourmet pestos. The teahouse (open weekends) serves imaginative fresh lunches (nettle frittata, green-potato soup) and cooking classes are given throughout the spring and summer (604-796-2619).

Continue west along Limbert Road to Cameron Road, then north across Hwy. 7 to McCallum Road for handmade artisan cheeses at the Farm House (604-796-8741). Next, turn north up Hardy Road onto Golf Road to the Back Porch and its many delights: 25 varieties of garlic, farmyard pets, an antiques and collectables barn,  Lynda Vaun Scobie’s pottery studio/showroom and  organic coffee roasted in a 1919 flame roaster.  (Wednesday to Sunday; 604-796-9871).

Head back to Agassiz on Hwy. 9 (about six kilometres) and drive through town to McDonald Road; follow it across the bypass toward the Fraser. In the market for fresh sweet peppers? Turn up Johnson Road to Cheam View Greenhouses’ farm stand. Another farm-gate operation is north on Tranmer Road (No. 1694): a cooler with fresh tulips for sale. The house behind is home base for Tulips of the Valley (604-796-3496). Its 16-hectare holding north on Seabird Island is a multicoloured carpet of blooms toward the end of April, when the Tulips of the Valley Festival is held (phone for exact dates). To reach the festival fields, drive north a short distance on Hwy. 7, turn left onto Seabird Island Road, then right on Chowat Road. Fresh-cut tulips and dahlia tubers are available onsite; tulip bulbs can be ordered for fall planting. Don’t miss: During the festival, Limbert Mountain Farm’s daily “Tulip Teas,” 2 to 4 p.m.

To complete the tour, drive east on Hwy. 7 for about 20 km to Hope, for a walk around the historic little town: don’t miss the old church and the two-dozen impressive chainsaw carvings, most of them around Memorial Park. If there’s time, drive out to Coquihalla Canyon Provincial Park (five kilometres) for a stroll through the famous Quintette Tunnels on this stretch of the historic Kettle Valley Railway route. The park is usually open by April 1 (Hope Visitor Centre, 604-466- 8325). From Hope via the freeway, Vancouver is less than two hours away.

Booked solid every weekend through spring? Plan an upper-Fraser Valley jaunt around July’s Brunch on the Farm, August’s slow-food Circle Farm Tour or celeb Chef Diaz’s cooking lessons – and discover the local cheesemaker supplying the White House. 

See also: Fraser Valley Weekender

Founded by liberated slaves and later favoured by hippies, today Salt Spring is the first Gulf Island that comes to mind when ex-Toronto power brokers think “retirement cheese making”

by Daniel Wood

As it turns out, this moment contains everything that follows. Three round mounds of goat cheese, each originally the size and shape of a flan, sit beside half-empty glasses of wine and a diminishing supply of crackers. The cheese is so soft the weight of the descending knife slices effortlessly to the cutting board. Wisteria grows above and hummingbirds zing past in the warm, early autumn air. David Wood, the cheesemaker and no relative of mine, looks out onto a flock of 100 sheep, their lugubrious faces just beyond his fenced hilltop yard.

Wood, 66, is explaining how he has found peace on Salt Spring – far from his former high-profile Toronto job – making cheese on this quiet Gulf Island. It’s a theme reiterated by his neighbour, Robert Bateman, 80, one of the world’s leading wildlife artists, who moved from Ontario to Salt Spring 25 years ago and is – on this same afternoon – sitting in his waterfront studio painting a Siberian crane. It is a theme mentioned again and again here by those who have sought a retreat from the urban hubbub to pursue their dreams. On this 185- square-kilometre island – where no road runs straight or level for 100 metres, where residents would fight the construction of a single traffic light, and where the roadside verges contain dozens of unattended stands piled high with string beans, free-range eggs, apples, dahlias and “honour boxes” for payment – time drains away in unhurried increments, cracker by cracker, glass by glass.

But First, a Little Island History

Salt Spring Island is the largest of B.C.’s southern Gulf Islands and has much to recommend it. The island’s first non-native settlers included a small group of freed slaves from the U.S. in the late 1850s and the place has maintained itself as an outpost of peace-loving, conscientious thinking ever since. It has several mountains, eight lakes, four villages (including the little hub of Ganges), scores of small farms and a year-round population today of 10,000. Driving the island’s meandering two-lane roads, lined with hedgerows of sweet pea and blackberry, the place reveals itself in subtle ways. Dozens of roadside signs, decorated with stencilled blue sheep, indicate the homes of local artisans whose studios and workshops are open to visitors. Here an organic apple farmer; there a craftsperson of wooden toys; and over there a potter . . . or a winemaker . . . or a woman selling hand-painted rubber boots. Flocks of real sheep graze in rolling pastures. Strangers wave as I pass.

At the Ganges Village Market, one of the island’s two supermarkets, a middle-aged clerk named Fifi wears an aluminium-foil peace symbol around her neck. To commemorate Woodstock, she explains, and gives me, her contemporary, my sliced picnic ham and a nostalgic “V” signal with her raised fingers as I depart the deli counter. Outside, a 32-year-old busker named Andre is strumming Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind,” a song, I inform him, I was singing before he was born. For visitors of a certain age, Salt Spring Island is – to quote Yogi Berra – déjà vu all over again. As Robert Bateman said of his first encounter with the people of Salt Spring when he moved here in 1985: “There were all these old English eccentrics and superannuated hippies. It suited me. I was a bit of both.”

Back to the Food and Wine – via Ruckle Park, L’Orenda and Salt Spring’s Celebrated Public Market 

With daypacks filled and the prospect of a morning’s exploration ahead, my companion and I drive south-eastward to the island’s premier tourist attraction: Ruckle Provincial Park – 486 hectares of forest and farmland surrounded by seven kilometres of oceanside bluffs, cobble beaches and trails. A warm west wind has the distant sailboats tacking back and forth across adjacent Swanson Channel. Kayakers in colourful little flotillas pass offshore. The ocean water is as clear as gin. I set as our goal Bear Point, a headland an hour’s hike distant. Beneath the ubiquitous Garry oaks and arbutus trees that punctuate the cliffs of this region, we spread our blanket and succumb to the view. The tide creeps in, submerging the starfish. For an hour, absolutely nothing happens. Zen is its own reward.

The Saturday market on Ganges’ Centennial Park waterfront is the best place to glimpse the island’s soul. April to October, it’s a weekly outdoor jamboree of 150 local artisans, farmers, musicians, food vendors and oddballs.

The Saturday market on Ganges’ Centennial Park waterfront is the best place to glimpse the island’s soul. April to October, it’s a weekly outdoor jamboree of 150 local artisans, farmers, musicians, food vendors and oddballs. The sidewalks surrounding the park teem with a Calcutta-density of shoppers wandering between stalls. There’s a young girl named Natalie playing “Love Me Tender” on her recorder, a basket for coins at her feet. There’s Lorraine selling heart-attack-inducing, deep-fried doughboys stuffed with fruit and whipped cream. Folk artist Bruce Schneider wears a wooden necktie and stands at a table selling his hand-propelled, half-metre-high automatons – straight out of a Rube Goldberg comic strip. I turn the crank on his wooden Private Dancer and the bikini-clad figure gyrates. His Ruth’s Nineteenth Hole figure cuts an unsteady golfer’s swing through mid-air. “I make silly things,” Schneider tells me without the least apology. “The sillier, the better.”

And here is David Wood again, beaming affably at his stall, selling his cheeses. When he’d first arrived on the island in 1990, he knew nothing about cheese making, he tells me. It took him five years to learn the intricacies of traditional European methods. Today, along with his hard sheep’s-milk cheeses, he makes 18 tonnes of creamy goat cheese and cannot keep up with demand. I buy two small, soft rounds of his exquisite efforts, one covered in pink and black peppercorns and one soaked in olive oil, and carry them through the bustling market like a pair of baby sparrows.

When David Wood first arrived on Salt Spring in 1990, he knew nothing about cheese making. It took him five years to learn the intricacies of traditional European methods.

I know, because I’ve been to every Gulf Island, that Salt Spring offers the most recreational opportunities. Its size, ease of access, population and topography ensure this. For cyclists, there are dozens of kilometres of winding back roads, many running through the island’s valleys, minimizing exhaustion. There are dozens of hiking trails, some to remote beaches and some to the island’s peaks. There are the lakes and ponds, warmed by summer’s heat, where bathers loll on offshore public rafts and men in electric-motor-propelled Zodiacs troll for bass and cutthroat trout. There are idyllic kayaking destinations – northeastward to Wallace Island Marine Park and southeastward to Princess Margaret Marine Park, both an easy two-hour paddle offshore. But I decide to let lassitude reign, signing up with Don Mellor for an afternoon’s sail. Almost two decades ago, he tells me, he quit his office job to build a sailboat and spend his life as a gypsy. It took him seven years to construct by hand his 40-foot gaff-rigged yawl. He named it L’Orenda – The Spirit.

We leave Ganges Harbour and head southeast, past the Three Sisters islands, along some of Salt Spring’s 135 km of shoreline, past Ruckle Park’s bluffs and the recently abandoned picnic site and into the open water of Captain Passage. The boat takes the wind, and I lie back in a sort of transcendent reverie, adrift without a care in the world. In the distance, approaching fast, a huge BC Ferry . . . a reminder that reveries must end, and no man is an island for long.

Get Mobilized  A circuit of the island can be made in a two-hour, 60-km whirlwind drive, but Salt Spring is a place to mosey. Whether daytripping or weekending, don’t miss:

• Ganges’ Saturday Market One of the most outstanding craft/farmers’ markets in B.C., it operates until Thanksgiving each year.

• Saltspring Island Cheese Co. Open weekends through fall and winter (250-653-2300).

• Island Escapades  Several local companies provide on-island adventure, including Island Escapades in Ganges (250-537-2553): for nature tours, kayaking day trips, guided hiking and an afternoon’s sail aboard L’Orenda. Other Ganges shops have bike rentals; every marina has boat rentals and fishing charters.

• Island Studio Tour A self-guided tour of 42 artisans’ workshops – potters, painters, quilters, etc. Pick up a studio map at the Infocentre (see below) or download a copy at http://www.saltspringstudiotour.com/

• Salt Spring Fall Fair A true country fall fair with roosters, pigs and other livestock on display/for sale, memorable home baking, crafts, rides, etc. (Held September 17 and 18 this year; plan for it next fall.)

• Annual Apple Festival Salt Spring’s long apple-growing tradition includes 350 varieties of organic pommes. This year’s event pays homage to the finest British apple, the Cox Orange Pippin, and 22 Cox crosses. October 2, Fulford Hall (250-653-2007; burtonh@saltspring.com).

Getting there BC Ferries reaches Salt Spring along several routes: from Swartz Bay on Vancouver Island to Fulford Harbour (35 minutes); from up-Island Crofton to Vesuvius Bay (20 minutes); and from Tsawwassen on the B.C. mainland to Long Harbour (two to three hours).

Island sleeps The Infocentre/Salt Spring Island Chamber of Commerce in downtown Ganges is a must-stop (250-537-5252 or 866-216-2936), with maps, artisan info, foodie tips and several large binders featuring photos and bios on the island’s excellent range of accommodations, from acclaimed inns such as Hastings House to B&Bs and secluded cabin and oceanside home rentals.

Photos courtesy Daniel Wood

As long as kayaks come with adjustable spray skirts, there will be room for culinary voyages through the Gulf  Islands

by Masa Takei

Wine bottles clank together in the boat beside me as a mountain of provisions disappears into the hatches of seven other red, orange and yellow sea kayaks. My fellow travellers fuss around their crafts, securing gear-filled dry bags and plastic bins pregnant with culinary potential. We snap together paddles, tighten life jacket straps and apply sunscreen like war paint. Meanwhile, from a seaweed-strewn log, leader James Bray surveys the activity with a benevolent smile. At eight sharp this morning, he greeted us at the Nanaimo ferry terminal with a mischievious grin. Within minutes, we were rattling across the Nanaimo River in his 15-passenger van, a hula doll wobbling manically on the dashboard, power chords of Franz Ferdinand beating out the triumphant rhythms of “Take Me Out.” Now, with the provisions almost loaded, all our party of 10 has to mull over is what lies ahead: three days of Gulf Island paddling, two nights camped luxuriously on De Courcy Island and an introduction to some of the finest cuisine that local ingredients can yield.

Thanks to Bray’s eight years’ experience as a kayaking guide, 15 years working in restaurants throughout the province and a partnership with Edible B.C., his Blue Planet kayaking weekends have attracted more than 400 devotees in the first three seasons of operation. The 35-year-old, however, is not the first to lure urban escapees to B.C.’s Gulf Islands for a taste of the good life (though he is the first to do so with kayaks and fine food). Eighty-two years ago, cult leader Brother XII and members of his Aquarian Foundation launched their boats from this very beach at Cedar-by-the-Sea, just south of Nanaimo.

What actually happened, of course, was slightly more lurid. Accounts of the cult’s seven island years are rife with references to black magic, sex slaves and “brutal” labour. I consider this local colour a cautionary tale . . . [and] remain eager to experience first-hand a nirvana where the Three Truths are active relaxation, fine wine and good food, all locally sourced. 

Born Edward Arthur Wilson, Brother XII was a British sailor turned bearded, charismatic occultist and self-proclaimed mystic who, by the early 1930s, had collected an earnest and wealthy following. The “Poultry King of Florida,” Roger Painter and Asheville, North Carolina socialite Mary Connally were just two of the hundreds who contributed their fortunes to the Brother’s vision: escape the fall of the world’s economic system and the destruction and chaos bound to follow for a self-sustaining utopia in the “wilds” of De Courcy and Valdes islands. The Brother’s compelling manifesto, The Three Truths, espoused the “unity of all life,” the “law of karma” and the “immortal soul.” What actually happened, of course, was slightly more lurid. Accounts of the cult’s seven island years are rife with references to black magic, sex slaves and “brutal” labour.

I consider this local colour a cautionary tale about putting one’s faith entirely in the hands of another. Convinced by a recent convert (a foodie friend) as to the integrity of Blue Planet adventures, I remain eager to experience first-hand a nirvana where the Three Truths are active relaxation, fine wine and good food, all locally sourced. And all I’ve had to do so far is sign the relevant papers, pack my bags and hitch a ferry.

Blue Planet guide and chef extraordinaire James Bray in his Valdez Island kitchen.

Now, I cast an evaluating eye on James Bray, the man upon whom our little convoy will depend for sustenance and direction. I search for hints of megalomania or delusions of grandeur as he good-naturedly trades banter with two of the group’s self-proclaimed Seattle soccer moms. He seems every bit as smooth as his clean-shaven pate might suggest. Black sleeveless shirt, wraparound sunglasses and studded leather belt holding up his manpris – a younger, hipper Mr. Clean assembling us on the beach for a last ritual. Standing back-to-back with a partner, we pass our paddles back and forth, from side to side, up over our heads, between our legs – movements symbolic, perhaps, of our imminent shared passage by paddle that also yield a pleasant stretching of the hamstrings, upper lats and obliques. Soon, we board our boats and push off, following Bray’s lead. Clear skies. Gentle waters. Sailboats drifting by and a light breeze that takes the edge off a mercurial noon sun. It’s an auspicious start. As we paddle and glide, I wonder if Brother XII’s ill-fated group felt this same kind of optimism.

A chatty flotilla, we cross Stuart Channel to the promised land of Pirates Cove, less than four kilometres to the south. Just one hour’s paddle and we’re already in a different world as we round De Courcy, wind- and surf-sculpted sandstone cliffs looming – three-dimensional Rorschach tests on a grand scale. Bray plucks a purple leather starfish from above the waterline, its underbelly covered with hundreds of raspy tentacles. Shaped like snails’ eye-stalks, the undulating appendages grab carnivorously at my fingers when I pass the impromptu petting zoo along. Minutes later, we stop for awhile in a small cove. The solitude is broken only by the quacking of a wind turbine spinning over a glassy expanse of island architecture.

Bears aren’t a worry in paradise, apparently, but mice and raccoons maraud these lands. “They’ll take your makeup and wear it; steal your clothes and sell them on eBay,” warns Bray. 

With the wind at our backs, just an hour later we’re hauling the kayaks high on a driftwood-strewn shore. We stand blinking in PFDs and spray skirts like demented ballerinas arrayed in droopy, black tutus, before scattering to erect our tent utopia. Bears aren’t a worry in paradise, apparently, but mice and raccoons maraud these lands. “They’ll take your makeup and wear it; steal your clothes and sell them on eBay,” warns Bray. We hang edibles and toiletry kits along a line strung between two trees and, colony established, ease into the rhythm of this new life.

Bray, who serves only locally sourced regional cuisine, prepares Vancouver Island Cowichan Valley chicken.

Bray and his young assistant, Steve Elsbens, an affable Belgian-born chef in a broad-brimmed straw hat, are soon artfully arranging lunch on lime and sky-blue plates.  A base of organic greens with fingerling potatoes, yellow beans and vine-ripened tomatoes from East Sooke’s Ragley Farm is topped with hot smoked albacore tuna, truffled mayo, niçoise olives and red wine vinaigrette. Like the vegetables, the fish is locally sourced – from a supplier who controls everything from boat to box, ensuring quality and wild provenance. The result kicks the pants off any salad niçoise I’ve ever sampled, including in the south of France. And Bray’s hot-off-the-grill delivery bodes well for the congregation’s continued high spirits.

Wandering off to explore our domain, we discover a pirate’s chest out on the spit – a geocacher’s treasure trove of knick-knacks. “Take something, leave something. Aaaarrrr, matey,” reads the handwritten note tacked under the lid. As we crouch around, Bray tells a tale of the island’s real treasure: How Brother XII converted his followers’ funds into gold pieces and packed them in Mason jars sealed with wax, a few of which may have been left buried on the island. “Which brings us to the next activity,” chuckles Bray. “Stevie and I have shovels for you all.” There’s no talk about how we’ll split whatever we unearth.

Large French coffee presses await us the next morning. And as their gourmet brew steams open our eyelids, we survey the day’s first signs of wildlife: a heron stalks the shallows; a family of river otters scamper and slide at the water’s edge; a raccoon on the day shift ambles along the shore.

Bray reads the wind and the waves and decides not to lead us on the planned pilgrimage to nearby Valdes. (A strenuous return paddle would run counter to his doctrines of safety and relaxation.) Instead, after settling on a suitable eddy to submerge the net bag of white wine to chill for this evening, we set off in the opposite direction, due north, paddling only long enough to feel justified in beaching at the nearest sandy cove for lunch. Kayaks lashed together in the shallows, we spread out on a knoll. Some seek the shade of a cypress tree. Others gravitate toward the Garry oaks, shaped, as Bray suggests, by filmmaker Tim Burton with bark fractured like dried mud. Here, Bray entertains with an account of Brother XII’s sadistic mistress, Madame Z. Clad in thigh-high leather boots and wielding a bullwhip, she supposedly drove the cult’s disciples to work themselves ragged clearing fields for farming. If she wasn’t threatening enough, a pair of enormous Polynesians, dubbed “the wrecking crew,” quieted those prone to grumbling.

Brioche French toast topped with local blackberries – expedition fare that borders on the sublime.

Absent any such oppression, we scatter as we please. The chefs assemble West Coast clubhouse sandwiches with smoked and candied salmon, we concentrate on relaxing; and after the meal an Elysian calm falls over us all. A turkey vulture circles lazily overhead. We suck happily on Italian sweets. Couples do coupley things. We want for nothing.

Journeying back to base camp, we raft up and a sail, a tarp strung between two paddles. Perhaps the only things more gratifying than a free wind ride are those we catch surfing small waves. And so we return to our humble frontier, a successful day’s paddling under our spray skirts.

By late afternoon I’ve made serious headway into a light summer novel. My eyes drift from the page to the canopy overhead: chocolate-coloured bark shavings peeled back from the pistachio trunk of an arbutus tree, its leaves sprigs of mint, crisp against a blue sky.

Yes, I’m hungry. Well, perhaps not technically, but craving something. I crane my head toward the cooks’ domain. Bray and Elsbens are busy working the barrage of pots on a pair of double-burner Colemans. I loll back onto the sandstone shelf and find my place back on the page. I could get used to this. Bouts of idleness mixed with light exercise, punctuated by memorable meals. The day’s outing a happy memory, I spend what’s left of the afternoon largely horizontal.

The evening meal showcases braised red cabbage and a pasture-raised chicken-leg confit with mustard balsamic jam. Our adulation is unbounded. “I’d rub it on my bare arms and lick it off,” sighs Debbie, a recently retired tech exec. Sea asparagus, harvested within sight, blanched and pan-fried in butter garnishes every plate. We wash it all down with 2005 Averill Creek Pinot Gris. Darkness falls and the tide rises, amplifying the sound of lapping waves.

What did St. Paul say? “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” Sun-baked, salt-skinned and pleasantly tired, I sip my Cherry Point blackberry port and savour another slice of Comox Camembert. Should the world come to an end tomorrow, it’s agreed, we are content to have placed our faith in James Bray. Unlike Brother XII, who along with Madame Z absconded with an ill-gotten fortune, he has not led us astray.

Get Mobilized

>>For the chance to win an Edible B.C. Foodie Tour (winner to be announced March 15, 2010)

 >> Edible B.C./ Blue Planet Kayaking Adventures gourmet kayaking weekends (604-812-9660 and 1-866-595-7865). Difficulty: moderate. 

>>Other Edible B.C. excursions include test-driving a new Audi to food and wine destinations in the Okanagan and on Vancouver Island and working alongside a high-end restaurant chef for the day (includes shopping for ingredients on Granville Island and preparing a multi-course meal in a restaurant kitchen). 

>>Background reading: Madame Zee: A Novel, by Pearl Luke (Perennial Canada, 2007; $19.95); Brother XII: The Strange Odyssey of a 20th-Century Prophet and His Quest for a New World, by John Oliphant (Twelfth House Press, 2006; $24.95). 

See also: Edible B.C. Contest.

Photos courtesy Edible B.C.

by Andrew Findlay

Somewhere in the primordial recesses of a skier’s mind is the memory of a ramshackle operation where the lifts barely limp from one day to the next. There are no double de-caf lattes whipped up by young baristas with Australian accents; instead, hearty bowls of chile con carne are served by a swarthy woman in a white apron who looks like she fells old-growth Douglas firs in her spare time. In other words: this place hasn’t been branded into some generic, four-season destination of over-inflated real estate with slick high-speed lifts whisking skiers to the top of runs as manicured as pressed corduroy slacks. And believe it or not, it exists.

Whenever I need to ground myself with the soul of skiing, I head north 120 km Campbell River to Mount Cain – tucked into the rugged folds of Vancouver Island. Run by a non-profit society, Cain has a total complement of one glove-shredding rope tow and two T-bars. And it’s here at 10 a.m. one morning this week that I stand with my cohorts: Guy, a pilot, and Jan, a local mountain guide, at the “golf clubs ” – a knob of rock that’s a short bootpack above the top T-bar. Snow ghost trees are laden with fresh snow. Below us, the west bowl is a tantalizing sight, unblemished by a single track. Soon familiar faces join us: Tod, Song and a few other bushy-bearded folks with duct tape holding their gloves together, skiing enthusiasts I meet only when I go to Cain.  One by one we drop into a narrow chute funneling into the bowl. Calf-deep snow curls from ski tips, frosting our faces. And together we relish in the shared euphoria of a ski hill that is too far from anywhere to be of interest to real estate speculators. This is where the soul of skiing still dwells.

by Dave Quinn

Kicking Horse Resort's big-mountain triathlon: Wrangle the Chute, February 6 and 7.

Not only do competitors have to style their way down some of Kicking Horse’s extreme, leg-burning chutes, they then face a massive terrain park where the sky is literally the limit for spins and tricks. After that, competitors gear up for the final and most gruelling challenge of this big-mountain triathlon – the bucking bronco. And you can be sure that at a resort with a name like Kicking Horse, this is no easy ride.

To view the huckin’ and buckin’ action in person, get yerself to Heaven’s Door Yurt in Crystal Bowl at high noon on February 6 and 7. And if all that skiin’ and bronc’ ridin’, live DJ’s and western-style bar-b-q don’t tucker you out and fill you up, you can always hit the Texas Hold’em poker contest at the Day Lodge, starting at 6 p.m. 

Yippee Kai-yai-yay!

Photos courtesy Andrew Wheelhouse Photos: moonrakerphotography.com

While most Kootenay golf courses lie dormant and silent under winter’s white blanket, Kimberley’s Bootleg Gap will howl to life on February 20 and 21 with B.C.’s second annual Bootleg Sled Dog Races

I'll be blogging from the races and reporting back on how much money gets raised; so shoot me a line about your own highlights/racing stories and we'll get the word out. –Dave

by Dave Quinn

Last year’s Bootleg Sled Dog Races were a huge hit for racers and spectators alike. Snow flew, tongues lolled, competitors and the crowd hooted, hollered and barked for joy. And best of all, more than $18,000 was raised for the East Kootenay Friends of Children Fund, which helps offset travel costs for families of children who need to travel for specialized medical treatment.

Noticeably absent from this year’s February event, however, will be the canines from local Adrenaline Dog Sled Tours – they’ll be at the Olympics on an important and covert mission, delivering “as-yet-unspecified” performers to the outdoor stages in Whistler (while showcasing B.C. tourism for Olympic spectators from around the world, of course). But even without the celebrated Adrenaline racers, the event remains a fabulous chance to experience one of the most unique winter sports attractions in B.C., with high-speed, family oriented competition, a glorious setting at the foot of the Purcell Mountains in the expansive Kootenay Valley – and all for a good cause, to boot.

So harness up the team and mush your way to Bootleg Gap Golf Course in Kimberley – for one of the most memorable winter events of the year. See you there! 

>>I’ll be blogging from the races and reporting back on how much money gets raised; so shoot me a line about your own highlights/racing stories and we’ll get the word out

Photos: courtesy Bootleg Sled Dog Races

As the entire Lower Mainland rumbles and hums with Olympic anticipation, my home town of Kimberley feels a long way off from all the hype and excitement of the world’s greatest winter sports extravaganza. Some 907 kilometres away, in fact.

courtesy Bruce Kirkby

This daunting distance from the Kimberley Nordic Trails to the Olympic Nordic Ski venue in the Callaghan Valley isn’t fazing a group of young Kimberley athletes, however. The cross-country skiers of the local Jackrabbits Track Attack Program are getting into the Olympic spirit by skiing 907 km on Kimberley’s world-class Nordic trail system. Aged nine to 12, the skiers have divided the daunting distance into 180-km sections and are charting their journey one kilometre at a time on the Kimberley Nordic Club’s warming-hut wall.

While they may not be front and centre as Olympic athletes from around the world cross the finish line at the Callaghan Valley Nordic events, these young athletes from the B.C. Interior embody the essence of the Olympic spirit, and are willing to ski nearly 1,000 km to celebrate it, one kick and glide at a time.

The lower mainland is caught up in medal fever. While the rest of us from “beyond Hope”, may not feel the impacts of the games directly, most of us feel strongly, one way or the other, about the Olympics. What are athletes/sports fans/artists in your community doing to celebrate the Olympics? Send me a tweet @KootenayDave to let me know.

Lead photo courtesy Bruce Kirkby.

Heritage Vancouver has a knack for hosting weird events in wonderful locations. Or perhaps they are wonderful events in weird locations. All I know is that I always come away from their functions feeling giddy, having learned some new secret that helps me better understand the city, having accessed some place that few people get to visit now and having met people who know about Vancouver’s past because they were actually there.

Such was the case last Wednesday with one of the non-profit’s most popular fundraisers: An Evening at the Penthouse. (The event sold out so quickly that Heritage Vancouver has scheduled a don’t miss follow-up for January 27.)

A Brief History of The Penthouse Nightclub

The Penthouse Night Club was founded in 1947 by the Filippone brothers, Joe, Ross, Mickey and Jimmy. It quickly grew to become one of the city’s hottest supper clubs, attracting headliners such as Sammy Davis Jr, Nat King Cole and The Mills Brothers. Today the business is a strip club run by Ross’s son, Danny. And the 47-year-old impresario, looking down-to-earth chic in blue jeans and untucked dress shirt, seemed genuinely happy to host a crowd that was there more for the built heritage than the built hotties.

He gave us an extensive tour of the establishment, starting right out front on the sidewalk at 1019 Seymour near Nelson. Anyone who has been downtown at night has seen this pink-neon-trimmed, three-storey building with the red flashing arrow on its marquee, beaconing partiers to enter the chrome-quilted doors under the smiling visage of two show girl cut-outs affixed to the pansy-purple façade. But Danny wanted us to note the old house engulfed in the shadows next door. 1033 Seymour was purchased by Danny’s grandfather in 1932, and one of the last remaining single-family, detached homes in the neighbourhood, though “single-family” might be a bit of a misnomer. The narrow abode stretches back 120 feet, far enough to accommodate eight bedrooms and three kitchens.

It was in this house, in 1983, that Danny’s uncle Joe was shot and killed by a 25-year-old unemployed plumber from Ontario. The gunman was after the contents of Joe’s home office safe and he made off with $1,200 before being arrested at Hastings Park Racetrack a few days later. But Danny prefers to dwell on the good memories he has of 1033 Seymour. Such as launching Halloween fireworks from the property’s deeply sequestered courtyard and watching the police circle the block in a futile attempt to locate the source. Or discovering a hole in one of the home’s walls, reaching in and pulling out a small chest containing a stack of autographed celebrity photos — a who’s who of Penthouse visitors. To see the 8×10 glossies and hear the stories they represent, we follow our guide back into the iconic club.

___________________________________________________

We tour abandoned rooms, such as the small

lounge with a baby grand that once serviced the ivory ticklers

of jazzlegend Duke Ellington.

_____________________________________________

Danny leads us up to the building’s second and third floors, areas normally closed to the public. We tour abandoned rooms, such as a small lounge space with a baby grand piano that once serviced the ivory ticklers of jazz legend Duke Ellington. Down a hall and through another doorway, we encounter a derelict charbroiler in a room once called the Steak Loft. Customers chose their own cuts of meat, which were cooked and served on wooden platters. “This was,” Danny says proudly, “before Hy’s carved their space in the steak market.” (The club also claims to be the first in Vancouver to offer pizza by the slice.)

In the Green Room, named for its gaudy, green wallpaper, a small button on the wall is labeled Beverage Bell. VIPs such as Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn and heavyweight champ Max Baer would have used it to summon drinks.

And there was another buzzer system at work in the club. Prior to the Penthouse landing a liquor license in the mid-50s, Uncle Joe employed spotters on the roof to watch for police raids. If they saw cops approaching the entrance, they rang to alert wait staff, who in turn instructed patrons to hide their bottles under the tables. The police conducted deliberately feeble searches, perhaps because they were on the take or perhaps because, as drinkers themselves, they didn’t want to enforce B.C.’s bizarre liquor laws too heartily. When the authorities left, the festivities resumed – as they did for us on Wednesday night, when Danny led us back down into the functioning portion of the Penthouse, the Gold Room.

Tales of Oscar Peterson and Other Penthouse Regulars

The original red-and-gold curtain still backdrops the stage, but a 2001 facelift has contributed an impressive, glowing bar to one side of the room and a surprisingly understated glittery paint to the walls.

While Heritage Vancouver supporters queue for an Indian buffet arranged on the club’s pool table and redeem their martini vouchers, I table hop in search of stories. A diverse crowd is in attendance. The history buffs range from seniors who have come to reminisce about Vancouver’s night club glory years to young hipsters eager to learn about Rat Pack-era fashion trends. At a plush booth overlooking the stage, I encounter choreographer and B.C. Entertainment Hall of Fame inductee Jack Card. The soft- spoken, impeccably mannered gentleman stands to inspect a row of three photos along a wall. He then returns and announces quietly, “I worked with them all.”  The images are of singers Johnnie Ray, Harry Belafonte and Louis Armstrong. I nearly choke on my naan bread.

________________________________________________________

B.C. Entertainment Hall of Fame-inductee Jack Card inspects

a row of photos:  of singers Johnnie Ray, Harry Belafonte and Louis

Armstrong. “I worked with them all.”  he says, quietly.

________________________________________________________

Next up on the agenda, Helga Pakasaar, curator of North Van’s Presentation House Gallery, hosts a slide show exploring imagery from Vancouver’s nightclub golden years: the 1940s to 1960s. There are photos of feather-and-sequined burlesque dancers, of tux- and gown-attired guests in the snazzy Palomar Supper Club (which once stood at Burrard and Georgia) and, somewhat inexplicably, a portrait of a young Terry David Mulligan looking like a beatnik about to embrace full-on hippiedom. It’s an informal talk, periodically augmented by additional info from Danny, who had taken up a post near the bar. “God handed out cigars the day I was born,” shouts the club owner. He was referring to the comedian George Burns who played the title role in the 1977 film Oh, God! Burns was doing stand-up at the Penthouse the day Ross Filippone’s son arrived and, to celebrate, the Oscar winner passed round his signature stogies.

I relocate to another booth and meet Joanne Randle, who has brought her 81-year-old mother, Edna, to reminisce about the Penthouse’s early days as an after-hours hotbed of jazz super-jams. (Edna was one of the original six members of the New Jazz Society) has a sharp memory and recalls witnessing Canada’s two premiere jazz pianists, Oscar Peterson and Chris Gage go head to head for harmonic supremacy in the club circa 1950. A “carving session” she calls it.

________________________________________________

Today, of course, late night jazz sessions are a thing of the

past, So too are the Vegas showgirl-style dancers, who were

replaced by total-nudity exotic dancing in the 1970s.

_________________________________________________

Today, of course, late night jazz sessions are a thing of the past at The Penthouse. So too are the Vegas showgirl style dancers, who were replaced by total-nudity exotic dancing in the 1970s. Also in that decade, the Penthouse was charged with conspiracy to live off the avails of prostitution, and  the club shut down for four years as the case dragged through the courts. But in the end, the Filippone brothers were able to fend off the accusations and the Penthouse re-opened. (Read coverage of this famous court case at the Penthouse website.)

Danny introduces the special entertainment of the evening: a scantily clad woman wearing Minnie Mouse ears who struts and writhes around a brass pole to the tune of “Hey, Mickey.” She has a walnut-size crystal lodged in her navel. I wonder what the strip club etiquette is should the gem stone pop out and roll across the stage into my drink? No worries. The rock holds.

________________________________________________

The Penthouse earns additional revenues as a film

location – for movie and TV shoots such as CBC’s Intelligence

and the upcoming Halle Berry flick Frankie and Alice.

______________________________________________

In a quieter corner, at the back of the room, I ask Danny about the Penthouse’s future. Giant condo towers are sprouting up all along Seymour. The land the club occupies must be valued in the double-digit millions, and the family has received offers. But Danny says, “As long as we’re making money, we’ll continue to operate.” (The business earns additional revenue by renting the building for film and TV shoots such as CBC’s Intelligence and the upcoming Halle Berry flick Frankie and Alice.)

A few hours later, I step out onto Seymour Street into the brisk, cold air. Eight-seven-year-old freelance writer Rudy Carlson, who has come alone all the way from North Vancouver to attend the event, is making his way slowly to the bus stop. I walk with him and he tells me his own Penthouse memory.

“I brought my father-in-law here in the ’60s when it was still a bottle club. We forgot to bring our own liquor so we gave $20 to a working girl in the room and she said she would head out to find us some booze. It was a wintry night like this one so my father-in-law, being a trusting guy from the Prairies, lent her his jacket. It was only after she was gone that he realized he had also given her his wallet – it was in is coat pocket and loaded with cash. There was a long, awkward wait, and she finally came back with the whiskey, the jacket and the wallet, intact. She was the hooker with the heart of gold,”says Carlson, “from the heart of the Gold Room.”

>>Do you have any glorious or notorious memories of the Penthouse in its pre-stripper days?

>>Do you think this building should be preserved as a prime example of Vancouver’s entertainment history?

Let us know.

Do you have any glorious or notorious memories of the Penthouse in its pre-stripper days or otherwise? Do you think this building should be preserved as a prime example of Vancouver’s entertainment history?

Lead photo courtesy Heritage Vancouver Society.

Nestled between the Monashee and Selkirk mountains, Revelstoke was once known as the capital of Canada’s Alps – so it comes as no surprise that its Revelstoke Mountain Resort was selected to host of one of the world’s most popular skiing events. The Canadian Freeskiing Championships is a new addition to Subaru’s Freeskiing World Tour – the longest-running Big Mountain freeskiing tour in the history of the sport and one that attracts the sport’s top athletes on a global circuit that includes stops in Chile, Colorado and California. Revelstoke’s 200,000-hectare mountain playground should satisfy even the most veteran skiers, however, while the site showcases Canada’s glorious outdoors – just in time for February’s Olympic games. 1-866-373-4754

VICTORIA January 7-23, 2010 – History Boys

History, sex and anarchy – welcome to grammar school. Courtesy Langham Court Theatre

History, sex and anarchy – welcome to grammar school. Alan Bennett’s witty British comedy History Boys follows a class of too-smart-for-their-britches schoolboys as they prepare for university entrance exams. Taught by professors who hold opposing views on the purpose of education, the students learn to challenge the very nature of their schooling. Bennett’s provocative play comes to life at Victoria’s Langham Court Theatre, January 7 through 23. Tickets: $18. 250-384-2142.

KELOWNA January 9, 2010 – “Elvis Generations”

Slap on your sideburns and squeeze into your jumpsuit: the King of Rock ‘n Roll is reborn at Kelowna’s Creekside Theatre. “Elvis Generations” – a stage spectacle celebrating the legendary crooner’s 75th birthday – features three nationally competitive Elvis tribute artists. The award-winning doubles will perform favourites from throughout the singer’s career; a tribute deemed so authentic that fans will wonder if Elvis has really left the building after all. Tickets: $22. 250-766-5669.

108 MILE HOUSE January 8-10, 2010 – Cariboo Challenge Sled Dog Race

courtesy Cariboo Challenge Sled Dog Society

Dog sledding enthusiasts unite!  This year’s Cariboo Challenge Sled Dog Race has been rerouted to incorporate 108 and Sepa lakes into the racing circuit, allowing additional room for spectators and creating more challenging trails. Also featured at the family friendly event: face painting, auctions, a 100-metre mini-dash for the kids and a celebratory bonfire. The nearby Hills Health Ranch, one of the province’s top backcountry spa-vacation resorts, provides accommodation for participants and also hosts a Racers’ Ball. Details: 250-791-5225, ext 225.

KAMLOOPS January 16-24, 2010 – Sun Peaks Resort Winter Wine Festival

What’s better than swilling the best of Okanagan’s vineyard bounty? Easy: imbibing said vintages at B.C.’s Sun Peaks Resort, named by Conde Nast Traveller as Canada’s second-best ski resort. And starting January 16, Kamloops’s alpine village hosts the 12th annual Winter Wine Festival, where both amateur and seasoned vino enthusiasts converge for a week of pairings, tastings and colloquiums. Bonus: after gorging on regional cuisine, attending savoury seminars (check out Cadbury Chocolate & Heavenly Wine’s sweet treats) and taking part in the winter wine brunch, visitors can work it all off with an afternoon of the region’s top snowboarding and skiing. Ticket info: 1-877-212-7107

VANCOUVER January 22 – February 28, 2010 – LunarFest

Vancouver’s 2010 Olympic Games are also an opportunity for Canada to share its cultural diversity with the world – and what better way to kick off the festivities than with a city-wide Lunar New Year’s celebration. Part of the Cultural Olympiad programming, the free public event includes the re-creation of Granville Street as a schoolchildren-created Lantern Forest; artists from Korea and other Asian countries performing acrobatics and dance; a First Nations tableau of lanterns showcasing indigenous designs and an event wrap-up lantern procession led by Public Dreams. See website for information.

Canada’s first theatre made entirely of snow and ice hosts the Only Animal's premiere of NiX. Photo courtesy Trudy Lee/The Only Animal

VICTORIA January 22, 2010 – NiX

Created for the Olympic Games’ Cultural Olympiad, this frozen winter wonderland – Canada’s first theatre made entirely of snow and ice  – will host theatre troupe The Only Animal’s premiere of NiX, a unique love story that promises to thaw audience hearts. Staged on the shores of Whistler’s Logan Lake, the show follows the adventures of two survivors and an arsonist as they face an ice age that threatens the end of the world, with fireworks, dying snowmen and explosive fire. Ticket info: 1-800-838-3006

INTERNATIONAL: SHETLAND ISLANDS January 26, 2010 – Up Helly Aa Festival

On the last Tuesday in January, the townsfolk of Lerwick, Shetland Islands (off the coast of Scotland), dress in their Viking best and converge in the town square to celebrate their Norse heritage. Holding flaming torches and surrounded by as many as five thousand spectators, male villagers march toward the town’s replica Viking Longship, which builders spend more than four months creating just for the occasion. The boat is set aflame, mimicking the ancient Viking tradition of offering a burning ship to the Sun God. And after the audience watches it sink into the sea, the revelry can begin: a melee of dance, drink and feasts that lasts well into the wee hours. Consider it a Viking-style Mardi Gras. Contact: Shetland Tourism, +44 (0) 1595 693434.

Over the past few years, B.C.’s Flathead valley has slowly but surely risen to the top of the controversial list of “Canada’s Most Threatened Valleys” (Kimberley photographer Patrice Halley and I covered the Flathead for the summer 2007 issue of Westworld). The Flathead is home to the highest diversity of carnivores in North America, some of the purest water on the planet, the highest density of grizzlies in inland North America and the most diverse mixture of plant communities in the Rocky Mountains.

The Flathead is home to the highest diversity of carnivores in North America, some of the purest water on the planet, the highest density of grizzlies in inland North America and the most diverse mixture of plant communities in the Rocky Mountains.

All this seems at odds with open-pit coal mining, coal bed methane development and gold-mine proposals in B.C.’s portion of the Flathead – some places are just too special for the heavy hand of heavy industry. Which is why for 10 days this July, photographers and filmmakers with the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP) conducted a Rapid Assessment Visual Expedition (RAVE) into the Flathead Valley to document its landscape and wildlife, and to help distill a vision of hope for a solution to protect it. This proposal includes National Park status for a third of the valley and a wildlife management plan for the entire region.

With 60 “fellows,” including the likes of Wade Davis, Art Wolfe, Frans Lanting and Flip Nicklin, the ILCP represents some of the most accomplished, well-recognized names in photography. And when these pros turn their lenses to an issue, that issue is certain to garner a lot of attention – both for the insightful and poignant images ILCP photographers capture but also for the compelling stories their photos reveal.

The gala opening of the ILCP Flathead RAVE photography exhibit was held New Year’s Eve at the Fernie Arts Station, with the exhibit moving on to Cranbrook on February 4^th at the Key City Theatre, then to Kimberley on February 25^th at Centre 64. The marquee evening in Cranbrook will feature presentations by local photographer and mountaineer Pat Morrow, ILCP photographer Garth Lenz, and Spirit Bear phenom Simon Jackson. These local showings will be followed by RAVE exhibitions at galleries both in the region and abroad, showcasing one of B.C.’s critically threatened landscapes to as large an audience as possible.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Since 1911,when Waterton Park’s first superintendent John ‘Kootenai’ Brown called for it’s protection, conservationists have working to gain protection for southeastern British Columbia’s Flathead Valley. Following Parks Canada’s identification of the Flathead as an area of interest for a new park, Flathead National Park has been inching its way closer to reality. Do you think that National Park status is a good solution to this century-old debate, or perhaps you’d prefer to see a Provincial Park, a simple Wildlife Management Area, or no protection at all?  Tweet me at @KootenayDave to let me know what you think!

Related reading: Northern B.C.: The Last Wild River; Flathead on the Mind

Also, visit your local MEC store to check out the in-store display highlighting the Flathead Valley and the need to protect it.

Photos: Garth Lenz

courtesy Whitewater Ski Resort

Nelson’s Whitewater Ski Resort (WH2O) is one of the last of a dying breed. Purely and simply, WH2O is a ski hill. Period. No on-hill accommodation facelifts. No lifestyle-oriented real estate tummy tucks. No Rundle-rock and timber frame implants. Just one valley, two lifts and enough snow to choke a mountain caribou – 140 cm at the time of writing. Not bad for November 23.

At the other of the rugged Selkirk Mountains and the ski resort spectrum lies an altogether different beast, the much-touted Revelstoke Mountain Resort (RMR). Rescued from receivership last year, the new development  boasts 1,700-plus metres’ elevation – the highest lift-serviced vertical in North America – and, at full capacity, zips skiers all over the mountain on 20 different lifts while allotting skiers their choice of 5,000 beds to sleep off all that vertical. If that’s not enough, with its cat skiing and heli-ski partners, RMR also offers 200,000-plus hectares of terrain to choose from. Different slopes for different wallets.

The only things these two vastly different resorts share are the sick skiing of the Selkirk Mountains and an opening date: Saturday, November 28. These are the first Kootenay hills to fire up the lifts this season.

So take your pick: bigger-better-higher-faster at the ‘Stoke, or the very chill, very real aura of Nelson’s Whitewater (don’t forget its Fresh Tracks Café – for some of the best lodge food on the planet). Winter is here. See you on the boards this weekend – bring your snorkel!

Lead image courtesy Whitewater Ski Resort

In hindsight, a sudden, low “whumph” should have been my first warning that I was about to be buried in an avalanche. Yet all I really remember is arcing my skis toward safe terrain in the trees – as, instead of slowing, I, and the entire snowslope around me accelerated – over the lip toward the steep terrain and trees below.

No way . . . 

Yep. Avalanche.

Get to the trees on the right. No – moving too fast! Trees at this speed mean a broken femur or worse. Avoid the trees!  Get left – away from the trees! Dig in! Slow down!

Snap! One ski releases. Head over heels. Again, and again.

Boot heels, fingers, elbows scrabbling into hard surface below. Got to slow down! Light. Dark. Mouth full of snow. Gasp . . . breath of air.

Fight! Dig in! I am not going to die in an avalanche.

Finally slowing.

Sudden stop.

Silence.

I laugh. Scream. Bawl. All that adrenaline has to go somewhere. I’m OK –minus a ski, poles, goggles and hat, but OK.

After nearly 20 years of skiing, including more than a decade teaching avalanche awareness courses, the mountains sent me a warning, a shot over the bow. But I was lucky – I skied away from it.

But last year, 26 people in Canada alone were not so lucky, including an unprecedented 19 snowmobilers who lost their lives to avalanches.

But the good news –

This weekend in Fernie, anyone can learn how to safely experience the backcountry – on skis, snowshoe or a sled – at the Canadian Avalanche Centre and Columbia Brewery’s (of Kokanee Beer fame) annual public Backcountry Avalanche Workshop. 

• When: Saturday, November 21
• Where: The Arts Station, downtown Fernie
• Coordinates: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
• Cost: $20 registration fee, payable at the doo
• For more info on this and other backcountry avalanche awareness aorkshops throughout the province:  http://www.avalanche.ca/cac/events/backcountry-avalanche-workshops

I’ll see you there, in the mountains – and, most important, at the bar for a Kokanee at the end of another safe backcountry day.

Photos: Dave Quinn

For the past 11 Remembrance Days, retired pilot and vintage aircraft restorer Neil Davidson has been paying homage to Canada’s war veterans in his own way. On the 11th day of the 11th month, at precisely 11 a.m., Neil buzzes the crowd at Kimberley’s cenotaph in his completely refurbished 1940 Tiger Moth biplane.

Growing up in the lap of the Purcell and Rocky mountains in Cranbrook and in the company of exceptional people like Neil, I always had some sense that this part of the world was somehow unique and special. Over the years this vague idea has cemented into a very real awareness that the essence of the Kootenay region runs deeper than our world-class golf and ski resorts, and our postcard-worthy vistas.

___________________________________________________________
The Andean towers and icecaps of Patagonia arguably match
the Kootenays’ for sheer visual inspiration, but Patagonia’s native
wildlife was long ago displaced by the introduction of non-
native fish in its streams and by sheep and cattle across its landscape
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I have yet to find a region as rich with the seemingly incongruous values of intact wilderness and creature comforts, wealth and freedom, frontierism and safety. The jungles of Colombia emanate an unrivalled sense of vibrancy and mystique, but you sure as heck don’t want to be caught on a backroad at night in the country with the highest number of kidnappings per capita in the world. The Andean towers and icecaps of Patagonia arguably match the Kootenays’ for sheer visual inspiration, but Patagonia’s native wildlife was long ago displaced by the introduction of non-native fish in its streams and by sheep and cattle across its landscape. The Himalayas boast some of the most jaw-dropping mountainscapes on the planet, along with an inspiring history and culture, but nearly every square inch of that vast region has been modified in some way by humanity, and desertification and human health issues are rampant.

The Kootenays truly have it all: the freedom to explore, express and inspire as you will, and as much or as little adventure as one cares to search out, all with a glass of wine and a warm bed at the end of the day.

Wherever you are, this week in particular gives us cause to pause and thank those who worked hard and sacrificed all this, even their lives when needed, to allow us to continue to enjoy it. If you happen to be near Kimberley this Wednesday morning at 11 o’clock, look up and enjoy a piece of history floating through pure mountain air, over some of the wildest landscape in the world, and be thankful.

Note: Dave Quinn will be posting weekly from the Kootenays starting the week of November 11, 2009

For more aviation tales: Skydiving Newbie

Lead photo courtesy Brian Clarkson (cranbrookphoto.com)

by Kerry Banks

From 1921 to 1945, Jericho Beach was home to the Pacific Coast Station of the RCAF, and a concrete wharf was built as part of its seaplane base. The structure’s perimeter was later enhanced during the 1976 Habitat Forum, using the original 1938 railings from the Lions Gate Bridge.

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“But many complained that the wharf

had become an eyesore, and in July 2008,

 the Parks Board voted to demolish all

but the most eastern section of the structure

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But many complained that the wharf had become an eyesore, and in July 2008, after a public consultation process, the Parks Board voted to demolish all but the most eastern section of the 0.6-hectare structure, which would be repaired to create a viewpoint overlooking the harbour. Interpretive signs would outline the wartime history of the dock and its postwar evolution, while the remaining area would be restored to a natural beach. However, since 2008, a new Parks Board has been elected, and a group of citizens – who want the wharf repaired and made available for public events – have mounted a fresh campaign to save the relic. As a result, a second consultation is being held this fall to decide the Jericho landmark’s fate.

What’s your view? Should this B.C. landmark be saved?

savejerichobeach.ca; kendalkendrick.com

Painting by Kendal Kendrick

For the top-ranked O'Neill Coldwater Classic tour, surfers must perform radical, controlled manoeuvres in the critical section of each wave – with speed, power and flow – to maximize their scores.

All this past week, Tofino’s rugged shores have been invaded by more than 120 international surfers on this fourth stop of the 2009 O’Neill Coldwater Classic tour. It’s the first time a professional surfing competition has been staged on Canadian soil, and the locals are stoked, not only because Tofino surfer Peter Devries has unexpectedly made it through to the event’s quarterfinals, but because it proclaims to the world that the tiny outpost is the surfing capital of Canada.

If you haven’t visited Tofino in a while, you may be surprised to see what a hold surfing has on this West Coast town, and how the sport has become an important plank in the local economy. In fact, the place resembles Waimea in Hawaii, with surf shops and burrito joints scattered everywhere. Of course, Tofino doesn’t have the breed of monster waves that regularly hammer the north coast of Oahu, but they are definitely big and narly enough to have earned the town a berth on this year’s tour, with $140,000 in prize money up for grabs.

For each wave ridden, surfers are scored on a scale from 0.1 to 10.0, broken into one-tenth increments.

“The Cold Water Classic event in Tofino is the one all the surfers on the tour have been talking about,” says O’Neill global event manager Bernhard Ritzer. “It represents all that we have set out to achieve with the O’Neill Coldwater Classic Series, which is about providing a unique and challenging experience for the world’s best surfers by pushing the boundaries and exploring new remote and spectacular locations.”

The prestigious cold-water surfing series, which concludes early this November in Santa Cruz, California, made stops earlier this fall in the inhospitable waters of northern Tasmania, northern Scotland and the western cape of South Africa, but the conditions in Tofino might be the most formidable of all. Unpredictable waves, bone-chilling winds and pelting rain make its surf a strenuous physical test. Simply paddling out to the waves while encased in thick neoprene requires strength and stamina. And then too there are the bears, whose presence inspires a mixture of fear and fascination amongst the series’ organizers and surfers, who have trekking to a nearby salmon hatchery to watch the beasts feed.

It’s certainly not the sort of conditions most of these world-class athletes are accustomed to. In fact, it’s only within the last few years that the technology of wet suits has improved to the point where boarders can survive the elements and still surf competitively in them. Even so, the surfers’ feet were bare for Tuesday’s competition, and with the sun shining, most were not wearing anything on their heads while doing battle with the raging froth at Chesterman Beach.

In the Coldwater Classic format, athletes compete against one another in 25-minute heats. In the early going there are four boarders in each heat, but as the field is whittled down it becomes three, then finally gets down to head-to-head match-ups. Surfers can ride as many waves as they want in their allotted 25 minutes, but only their top two scores count. The judges, who sit in a covered wooden booth on the beach, rate the boarders on their creativity, technique and daring, on how many manoeuvres they complete and the speed, control and power they exhibit in the most critical section of the wave.

When he's not competing, Australian surfer Shannon Brown lives in Tofino, where he teaches at the Westside Surf School.

One of the keys to achieving a high score is picking a solid wave, so there is often a fair bit of time in a heat when nothing much is happening. That’s where announcer Dom Domic comes in, filling the dead air with updates on the surfers’ times and standings (which the surfers need to know as well), counting down the remaining minutes and offering commentary on the competitors and the surroundings. When the surfers get up on a wave, Domic, also president of the B.C. Surfing Association, describes the action using a vocabulary that is awash with surf  jargon – backside air, lip bashes, hacks, acid drops, fakeys and fat closeouts. And when a rider takes a tumble, he doesn’t fall but “comes unstuck.” The other unusual thing about Domic’s delivery is that he does it with a hand-held mike the front seat of a truck parked surf-side.

In fact, as I stare out my bedroom window right now, I can hear Domic’s throaty voice rising in excitement. Something big must be happening outside. I guess it’s time to suit up and jog down to the beach to see what’s causing the commotion. Let’s hope a bear hasn’t eaten one of the surfers.

Postscript: The waves broke perfectly for Tofino and local Peter Devries, who defeated Australian Jay Thompson on Saturday (October 31) to become the first Canadian to win a professional surfing event. Half of the town showed up to watch the final. Die-hards were also talking about the ‘out-of-bound’ surfing just north of Tofino. Local surfing enthusiast Brady Clarke puts that scene in perspective with Vancouver Island: Surfing the Wild Side

Got your own surf story? Or your own sweet spot – on the coast or elsewhere? Drop me a line.

Announcers describe the action using a vocabulary that is awash with surf jargon – backside air, lip bashes, hacks, acid drops, fakeys and fat closeouts. And when riders take a tumble, they don’t fall but “come unstuck.”

Critical Reading: The Driftwood Coast: Surfing Vancouver Island by Brady Clarke.

Surf Schools:

• Tofino’s Pacific Surf School Lessons, rentals, camps for all ages and skill livels, 250-725-215

• Tofino Surf School Comprehensive tutorials, from fundamentals to wave-pattern interpretation, reading tides and “surf etiquette.” 250-725-2711

• Surf Sister Founded by Canadian women’s surfing champ Jenny Stewart. 250-725-4456
• West Side Surf School Personalized coaching by superstar Sepp Bruhwiler. 250-725-2404

Photographs: Kerry Banks

by Liz Bryan

Leg One: Victoria to Port Renfrew (107 km)

Head out of Victoria onto Hwy. 1, then west toward Colwood and the start of Hwy. 14. Known as the West Coast Road from Sooke, north, Hwy. 14 is one of the oldest byways in B.C., the first trail to connect Victoria’s fort of 1843 with the pioneer settlements that sprang up along the Pacific coast to Sooke. At the first major traffic light, turn south (left) onto Ocean Boulevard and follow the signs to Fort Rodd Hill, built in 1895 to guard the naval station at Esquimalt. Now a historic park, the fort’s old buildings and gun emplacements are still intact on a wondrous rocky headland, complete with gnarled Garry oaks, arbutus trees, wildflowers and a herd of black-tailed deer. Below is a second historic site: Fisgard Lighthouse, built in 1860 and now housing a museum dedicated to charting the shipwrecks along the West Coast’s Graveyard of the Pacific and the intricacies of the Fresnel lens.

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Jaunt: Victoria to Port Renfrew Circle Tour
Distance: Approx. 250 km
Fuel: 1 tank
Duration: Two days
Prime Time: March or April
Tunes: The Bills, Let ’Em Run (Borealis Records); Vivaldi, Four Seasons (Spring)

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Continue past the fort along a winding forest road to a humpback bridge and the Coburg Peninsula, a narrow spit of land between the beach and Esquimalt Lagoon (a favourite spot for birdwatchers). Royal Roads University lies across the lagoon. At the end of the spit, turn north (right) along Lagoon Road to Metchosin Road, which curves high above the shore. A side road leads to Albert Head and Witty’s Lagoon, with beachside parks, sandy cliffs, rainforest trails and, again, good birding. As the community of Metchosin nears, keep an eye out for ’Chosin Pottery, Galloping Goose Sausage Makers and St. Mary’s Church, its graveyard shaded by giant mossy oaks and bright with dancing white fawn lilies and pink shooting stars. The church is known locally as St. Mary of the Lilies.

The settlement of Shirley is marked by its 1937 community hall (with any luck there will be a craft sale in progress) and, just beyond the hall, a narrow forest road that leads to red-and-white Sheringham Point Lighthouse (1912), a prime West Coast photo postcard. The forest trail down to the shore is currently a little rough. The lighthouse itself sits behind a wire mesh fence, but improvements are planned to keep the lighthouse and grounds accessible.

Turn right (north) along Happy Valley Road, then Kangaroo Road, to get back onto Hwy. 14. West lies Milne’s Landing, where the general store keeps alive a tradition begun by settler Edward Milne, who started an emporium here more than 100 years ago. Turn inland for a visit to Sooke Potholes Regional Park, a popular swimming spot with rocks sculpted into pools by the Sooke River. The town of Sooke, across the river, has a fine little museum. Adjacent Moss Cottage dates from the 1860s. Walk down to the harbour on Maple Avenue to check out the fishboats and, if it’s coffee time, the Little Vienna Bakery, Serious Coffee (Victoria’s own version of Starbucks) or Mom’s Café, a local institution (though it’s under new management). Sooke is also known to gastronomes around the world for the incredible edibles at Sooke Harbour House. It’s well worth a drive down Whiffen Spit Road just to see the place (and maybe make advance plans for dinner?) and to stroll on the spit at the entrance to Sooke Inlet. West of Sooke, the highway continues along the shore, with several oceanfront B&Bs along the route. The settlement of Shirley is marked by its 1937 community hall (with any luck there will be a craft sale in progress) and, just beyond the hall, a narrow forest road that leads to red-and-white Sheringham Point Lighthouse (1912), a prime West Coast photo postcard. The forest trail down to the shore is currently a little rough. The lighthouse itself sits behind a wire mesh fence, but improvements are planned to keep the lighthouse and grounds accessible.

French Beach is one of the few along here with automobile access. It also has campsites and picnic tables and is a good spot for whale-watching. About four km beyond, Point No Point is a popular resort with teahouse, dining room and cabins on the tip of the windswept promontory of the same name, so called because it was invisible to surveyors from certain angles. The next beach along is Sandcut, reached by a 10-minute trail through steep woods but well worth the effort: A waterfall splashes over a sandstone lip into a freshwater pool (in summer, a perfect shower to wash off salt and sand). The small community of Jordan River is a surfing mecca; north of the sheltering Olympic Peninsula, the waves roll in unobstructed from across the Pacific. Good eats: Breakers Restaurant for clam chowder and sea views. North from Jordan River, the West Coast Road veers away from the shore, narrow and winding and hemmed in with rainforest. Trails lead down to well-marked beaches such as China and Sombrio, both good for picnics and linked, from China Beach to Port Renfrew, by the 47-km Juan de Fuca Trail. Not as rugged or isolated as the famous West Coast Trail, the Juan de Fuca is more accessible for day hikes.

Port Renfrew is an old logging/fishing community at the mouth of Port San Juan, where the San Juan and Gordon rivers flow into the sea. There is a cluster of small homes here, plus a general store, smattering of eateries and lots of history. Beside the wharf sits the newest incarnation of the Port Renfrew Hotel (the original landmark structure was formerly a loggers’ bunkhouse, barged across the strait in 1927), serving decent grub alongside its spiffy new waterfront accommodations. The local church is a reincarnation, too. Built originally in Somenos, near Duncan, in 1875, it was dismantled and trucked to Port Renfrew in 1970; its bell came from the HMCS Swansea, a navy frigate scrapped in 1967. Near the mouth of the bay is one of nature’s marvels: the tidal pools of Botanical Beach. Here the sea has etched deep holes into the sandstone and at low tide the pools are nature’s fish tanks, teeming with tidal life – a marine marvel that brings in almost as many tourists as the West Coast Trail. To reach the beach  (a pleasant 20-minute walk), drive past the trail infocentre and veer left, following the signs to the parking lot. The hotel provides details on tides and the best places to watch the sunset. For another short hike, ask for directions to the legendary Red Creek Fir (73.8 metres high, 12.5 metres in circumference), along the San Juan River. Good eats & sleeps: Port Renfrew Hotel and Resort, on the wharf (250-647-5541); Soule Creek Lodge (1-866-277-6853), up (and we do mean up) Powder Main Road on the top of a ridge, with superb views and an inventive seafood menu with produce grown on-site. (Roadtrippers can overnight in the lodge or a cozy yurt.)

Leg Two: Port Renfrew to Victoria (Approx. 140 km)

It’s feasible now to drive an ordinary passenger car from Port Renfrew along logging roads to Cowichan Lake, as the 52 km of unpaved road (Harris Creek Main) is well graded, though still used by logging trucks. (As it has no services, the road is not recommended for night driving, however.) Take it slowly and enjoy an intimate look at the rainforest and B.C.’s logging industry in all its stages, from clear-cuts to replantings of several vintages. There are two excellent forestry campsites along the way, at Fairy and Lizard Lakes (for good swimming, fishing and nature trails), plus several one-way wooden bridges over creeks – some of them more like roaring canyons. Stop to see the enormous Harris Creek Spruce, approached over a small footbridge. While in the woods, look down and enjoy the forest floor, all mossy green with salal and ferns and woodland flowers, including bunchberry and trilliums. Back en route, the road branches several times but the way is well posted (as it should be; the provincial government is promoting this as a circle route) until it reaches Cowichan Lake at the community of Mesachie Lake. Enlightened mill owners planted some 200 trees of 33 different varieties from around the world here back in the 1940s. These heritage trees give this tiny place an endearing charm.

Cowichan Lake (which enjoys the warmest average summer temperatures in Canada) is 30 km long, with a road circling it, though only the eastern ends are paved. Watch for Cowichan’s mythical lake monster, Stin Qua. Honeymoon Bay, a few kilometres west of Mesachie Lake, is worth a detour for its wildflower reserve, which protects, among other plants, a large stand of pink fawn lilies. Good eats: The Honeypot Pub & Restaurant. If not detouring, turn east (right) to Lake Cowichan. If timed right, the town’s April daffodil festival – known as Delightfully Daffy Daze – is a must-stop, with its antique show and flea market; or walk along the Cowichan River and visit the Kaatza Station Museum for a glimpse of the island’s mining and logging days.

It’s only 30 km from Lake Cowichan to Duncan and Hwy. 1, the return route to Victoria. In Duncan: 40 totems, a farmer’s market, funky new shops and the Quw’utsun Cultural Centre’s native carvers in action. The pastoral Cowichan Valley is internationally known as a foodie haven, with several wineries, a cheesemaker, stands selling fresh produce of all kinds and farms where alpacas, emu and even water buffalo strut their stuff. Drive back to Victoria via the scenic Malahat – a 45-minute drive if driven without breaks. Or, take the ferry at Mill Bay across Saanich Inlet to Brentwood Bay, and spend the last of the day at Butchart Gardens (reserve ahead for dinner or high tea: 250-652-8222).

Lead image courtesy Sooke Region Museum

by Masa Takei 

We’re going fishing, as simple and primal a thing as that. We’re also on a National Geographic-worthy outing, a scientific mission for conservation, a veritable journey back in time. It’s a prehistoric creature that we seek – a living dinosaur, but one faced with imminent extinction.

The Fraser River's sturgeon population ’s is the largest truly wild stock of this species left in the world. Even so, the Fraser River Sturgeon Conservation Society estimates the latter’s numbers have plunged by 25 per cent.

Casting lines from the dock at B.C.’s Harrison Lake, our guide fires up the engine on our seven-metre aluminum jet boat and sets course for the mouth of the Harrison River, just 110 km east of Vancouver. A few raindrops spatter the windshield from low, heavy clouds; tendrils of mist drape the flanks of the surrounding Coast Mountains. “A month ago we’d be able to fish right here,” says 39-year-old Tony Nootebos, who has guided on these waters for the past 14 years. But this late fall afternoon, we don’t even slow our pace as we reach the river mouth and head inland.

The beast we are in search of, the white sturgeon, is North America’s largest freshwater fish. (The biggest caught to date was more than six metres long and weighed 600-plus kilos – about the length and payload capacity of a Ford F-150 pickup.) It’s a species that has plied these waters for more than 60 million years, virtually unchanged. Something that has withstood Darwinian forces throughout the millennia would suggest a robustness of design. Yet within the last century, the sturgeon’s numbers have dropped toward extirpation, mainly due to habitat degradation and overfishing. In 1897, almost a half-million kilograms of sturgeon were pulled from the Fraser River in a single year by the 160 gillnetters licensed to do so. By the mid-1900s, the numbers of these inland-water leviathans had dropped so precipitously that only two local commercial fishing licenses remained active. Given a decades-long maturation period, the remaining sturgeon stock has slim hope of fully recovering.

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The old black-and-white photo makes it easy to believe

 creatures of such size existed only in another era. Just four

years ago, though, another group of fishermen caught a

specimen measuring 3.3 metres in the Fraser near Mission,

where it took four men six-and-a-half hours to land the goliath.

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One 1920s shot in the B.C. archives shows 30 men in tweed suits and waistcoats, posing on a dock with a sturgeon laid across packing crates. If the crates were standard issue, then the sturgeon was some four-and-a-half metres long. The old black-and-white photo makes it easy to believe creatures of such size existed only in another era. Just four years ago, though, another group of fishermen caught a specimen measuring 3.3 metres in the Fraser near Mission, where it took four men six-and-a-half hours to land the goliath. A colour photo subsequently ran in the local newspaper, a classic grip-and-grin shot of 10 fishermen standing in a river to support one fish on the surface.

We motor the length of the Harrison River, our wake in the dark jade waters lingering behind us like an airliner’s contrail. A seal colony lounging atop a log boom eyes us as we speed past. Nootebos points to hundreds of dots in the distance: bald eagles fishing on the river ahead. The photographer in our group throws off his fleece and readies his gear. The only other passenger, a woman from Montreal sheathed in a stylish corduroy coat, designer jeans and gumboots, fishes in her handbag for her point-and-shoot.

My pole arcs, pulled down like a divining rod to the motherlode. Line peels out of the reel with a frantic zzz-z-zzzzz. I haul up and reel in, jolted with adrenaline as I get a feel for the size and strength of the creature I’m now attached to.

Concentrations of North America’s last white sturgeon exist in rivers located primarily on the west coast. The Columbia and Snake rivers in the U.S. and the Fraser and Harrison in B.C. are the last sport fisheries; the Fraser’s is the largest truly wild stock of sturgeon left in the world. Even so, the Fraser River Sturgeon Conservation Society estimates the latter’s numbers have plunged by 25 per cent, from somewhere around 62,000 in 2003 to about 47,000 in 2006. The most disturbing statistic, however, is that the greatest drop is among juveniles, suggesting that the population is failing to renew itself.

Today, sturgeon fishing on the Fraser is strictly catch-and-release, while commercial guiding services play a significant role in both stewardship and a tagging program that gathers population stats. “The sport fishery is the eyes and ears on the river,” says Nootebos – and it’s a well-motivated crowd, given that commerce and conservation are inextricably linked. With 90 guides in the area, the industry contributes an estimated $20 million to the B.C. economy.

Arriving at the wide, muddy Fraser, Nootebos finds the spot he’s looking for, kills the engine and lets the boat drift while he produces a plastic bucket of fluorescent-orange salmon roe encased in a nylon stocking. Taking a barbless fish hook the size of his thumb, he nips the top of a sac and, swivelling crane-like with the 2.5-metre fishing rod, casts the bait bomb out across the surface of the river. I picture the orange orb settling on the riverbed, a beacon in the murk. But it is the roe’s sweetish scent and taste that will lure the sturgeon, which has poor eyesight and relies on a keen sense of smell and taste to feed.

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Reports claim a half-bushel of onions,

a can of beans and a house cat found in the

stomachs of sturgeon catch.

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It was a Canadian researcher who discovered that sturgeon have taste buds outside their mouths (sensitive barbels – four catfish-like whiskers that project from the snout – are used to probe the river bottom for food). The gentle creature is, in fact, a toothless scavenger that spends its days sucking up relatively small protein packets – as Nootebos puts it, like “hoovers vacuuming the bottom.” Lamprey eels, eulachon, ditch eels, crayfish and dead salmon parts are regular fare. Just about anything is inhaled, though. Reports claim a half-bushel of onions, a can of beans and a house cat found in the stomachs of sturgeon catch.

Nootebos baits two more hooks and mounts three rods in holders at the back of the boat. Each of us is assigned our own entry in this lottery. And so it begins.

Our lines out, we wait. The day’s drizzle lends an air of solemnity. We monitor the tips of our respective rods expectantly. But as the minutes pass, our short attention spans are sadly apparent when Nootebos points to two rods now quivering with the nibblings of beasts below. There’s a moment of indecisive panic before two of us leap to pull rods from holders, then lean back to set the hooks: throwing the heavy rods back hard as coached, striving for purchase in the hard, cartilaginous mouths beneath us.

My pole arcs, pulled down like a divining rod to the motherlode. Line peels out of the reel with a frantic zzz-z-zzzzz. Next to me, Montreal also has a battle on her hands. Nootebos takes in the other line, then restarts the boat to orient it favourably for the work ahead. I haul up and reel in, jolted with adrenaline as I get a feel for the size and strength of the creature I’m now attached to. A few metres of line are gained, then the fish is off; nothing to do but let it run. Suddenly, a shudder, then . . . nothing. I reel in slack, hoping it’s just that the sturgeon is swimming straight for us. The hook comes back to the boat bare.

The sturgeon has no teeth, but I pause before grabbing its lower lip – a good 15 centimetres wide – with both hands. It feels rubbery but solid, and, with a leg either side, I embrace this living log. It appears calmed by the unfamiliar experience of floating upside down.

Meanwhile, Montreal is huffing and puffing. She’s hooked onto something big. Nootebos straps a fighting belt around her waist, a white-plastic affair with a cup to brace the butt of the rod. Stylish turquoise-leather gloves strain as she struggles with a force many times heavier than she. The fight draws out. Nootebos, a sheepish look on his face, leans in to support the rod, one hand beneath its centre point like he’s doing a bicep curl. Montreal’s exclamations are no longer self-conscious theatrics. She lets out childbirth-worthy groans.

The photographer and I guffaw like a couple of knuckleheads. Nootebos takes the rod from Montreal and passes it to me; 15 minutes later, I’m eating crow. A lactic burn sears through my arms as I calculate the cost of replacing the thousand-dollar rod and reel about to slip overboard. The photographer steps in and puts in his time. Soon, he too is looking for takers.

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Nootebos grabs the pole, clamps his thumb down on the

spool of the reel and cranks up hard on the rod, taking in line

by the armload. A massive flash of white suddenly churns

the water alongside, bigger than anything we’d imagined. 

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The second pass around, we hit upon an ingenious way to double-team the beast: facing each other, one with the rod in both hands, the other propping it up on one shoulder. Embarrassed though he might be for us, Nootebos runs for his camera. Yet despite our chicanery, the fish seems nowhere near as tired as us. Nootebos grabs the pole, clamps his thumb down on the spool of the reel and cranks up hard on the rod, taking in line by the armload. A massive flash of white suddenly churns the water alongside, bigger than anything we’d imagined. Reinvigorated, we resume the fight, alternately reeling in line and letting the fish run. Finally, we bring it up from the deep.

_____________________________

Its snout out of the water,

the sturgeon regards us with a tiny,

baleful, blue-grey eye. 

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Its snout out of the water, the sturgeon regards us with a tiny, baleful, blue-grey eye. We’ve been wrestling with the fish for more than an hour and have drifted almost three km downriver. I strip off my down jacket and stuff myself into waders. By the time I get overboard, Nootebos has removed the hook and is holding the colossus by the mouth, belly up in knee-deep waters. I take over while he jumps back aboard for a measuring tape. The sturgeon has no teeth, but I pause before grabbing its lower lip – a good 15 centimetres wide – with both hands. It feels rubbery but solid, and, with a leg either side, I embrace this living log. It appears calmed by the unfamiliar experience of floating upside down. We measure from snout to tail fork (252 cm), then the girth (102 cm). Nootebos’s guess is 140 to 180 kg – less than half the weight of the monster caught four years ago but still the heft of a Shetland pony.

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Nootebos returns with a Sharpie-sized syringe

loaded with an electronic tag. Sliding the tip of the

 needle into the skin behind the sturgeon’s

head, he depresses the plunger.

__________________________________________

Producing a Trekkie-looking, paddle-headed device, Nootebos flips the sturgeon upright and scans behind its head: an untagged virgin. Again, he leaves me holding the fish’s maw. I study the mottled purple, pink and grey back, marked by a line of white ridges. These must be the scutes – armoured plates girding its flanks. A sudden squirming. I clamp tighter with both shins. Nootebos returns with a Sharpie-sized syringe loaded with an electronic tag. Sliding the tip of the needle into the skin behind the sturgeon’s head, he depresses the plunger, then checks with the reader that the tag is operational. Our work is done.

Then it comes, the obligatory grip-and-grin. Nootebos and I kneel in the water to support a creature that weighs more than both of us put together. Montreal looks on, smiling, from the boat. We grip, we grin, as the photographer captures the image for posterity, then release our connection to a primeval time. With a flip of the tail, it glides back into the Fraser’s murky depths.

sturgeon generals

• B.C. Sportfishing Group offers eight-hour guided fishing daytrips for four people at $796, four-hour trips for $518. Everything (including waders and fishing gear) is included; guests need only dress for the weather. With 22 boats, BCSFG can accommodate up to 88 guests at one time – year-round (peak season is April to November). 1-877-796-3345

Photos courtesy Darryl Leniuk

by Sonu Purhar

The morning of the jump, I’m peering through the windshield at scudding storm clouds, wondering if I’ll be devastated – or relieved – if we have to cancel, though there’s plenty of time to mull over both possibilities as we navigate the seemingly endless hectares of the Fraser Valley’s rural heart. Two weeks ago, I resolved to start my own “bucket list” – now-or-never goals to accomplish before kicking the bucket, so to speak – à la Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman’s 2007 film of the same name. Swan-diving from a plane seemed a good place to start. But after persuading a friend to accompany me and booking with Skydive Vancouver, all I can see clearly now are clusters of moody cows.

We’re greeted at Skydive’s Abbotsford office by instructor Gerald Harper, a leather-skinned Aussie with an impressive 14,000-plus jump record and several New Zealand and Canadian skydiving championships. With 32 years in the jump business, he assures us, Skydive’s safety record is equally impressive.

___________________________

What Harper doesn’t reveal, however,

is that two to three skydivers die each

year in Canada.

___________________________

The preliminaries taken care of, he then ushers us into a barn-like hangar hung with world flags and daunting equipment, where, as if signing on for a suicide mission, I shakily scrawl my name across a death waiver.

Just weeks ago, the now-vacant skies droned with the military and civilian aircraft of Abbotsford’s annual July air show, performing aerobatics alongside the 100-plus skydivers who jump daily in summer. The sport isn’t exactly booming, but in 2007 more than 40,000 first-timers took the plunge in B.C., some as old as 85 – no doubt crossing items off their own bucket lists. Today there’s only one other newbie, and once she’s down we’re up.

My friend Carla and I trek to the middle of the field on which we’ll soon be landing and eagerly scan the skies. A plane shoots out of the clouds; minutes later, something drops and falls like a brick before an enormous pink parachute unfurls and the snapping wind weaves our predecessor through the clouds like an erratic Mary Poppins. We’re enthralled, rooted to the spot. But Harper hauls us back to the hangar for “training”: a two-minute demo of awkward poses practised belly-down on a battered wooden vaulting horse, followed by “suiting up” in bubblegum-pink overalls – tighter than a disco jumpsuit – with matching cap and goggles. Within the hour, Harper and fellow staffer – and son – Jess, a gold-medal-winning New Zealand skydiver, are herding us across the sodden grass to a rickety-looking Cessna. I squeeze into the cramped hull; the others crowd round like stacks of cargo as the plane taxis for takeoff.

First jumps are always completed in tandem with an instructor, but I’m still caught off-guard when, after just 14 minutes of flying, Harper clips the front straps of his jumpsuit to those on my back. There’s no time to dwell on this abrupt intimacy, however. My new free-fall mate manoeuvres me to the ratty curtain that serves as a makeshift door and pushes it aside. I freeze: cold wind whips my face as I gape at endless kilometres of slate-grey sky. Far in the distance, the earth stretches like a strip of carpet.

Arms crossed tightly over my chest, I crouch on my knees, ankles crossed, as if in rapturous prayer (which maybe I should be). Sprawled 12,000 feet below, Abbotsford’s agricultural expanse appears hazily through accumulating clouds, the airfield just another postage-stamp speck in a checkerboard of green. A screaming wind fills the tiny Cessna, echoing my jumbled thoughts, one more frantic than the rest: Am I really going to jump? For one infinite moment, I hang suspended over the door jamb, staring into a vast gulf of cloud; then we plunge down.

Earth and sky fuse. I’m jerked in 10 different directions, free-falling at 200 kilometres an hour. Air floods my lungs, the wind a giant boot crushing my face. Just before I can panic about death by suffocation: a body-wrenching jolt as the parachute abruptly snaps taut – and suddenly we’re drifting peacefully, the dazzling metropolis of Vancouver sprawled wondrously before us. Harper spins us in a slow circle, pointing out the sights: the white dome of B.C. Place, Vancouver Island’s bumpy ridges and, far in the distance, the hulking mass of Washington’s Mount Baker.

Giddy with exhilaration, I mentally scratch “skydiving” off the list. Next up: bungee jumping!

TAKE ACTION

• Skydive Vancouver: Tandem and advanced skydiving; also offers solo courses for those ready to go it alone. $272. Abbotsford, B.C.; 1-888-738-5867
• Pacific Skydivers: Perfect for newbies (half-hour of ground preparation). $239. Pitt Meadows, B.C.; 604-465-7311
• Whistler Skydiving: Soar over snow-covered peaks. $270. Pemberton/Whistler, B.C.; 604-698-7120
• Victoria Skydiving Adventures Inc.: Bonus: ask about the Exhibition Jumps, which raise money for local charities. $375. Victoria, B.C.; 250-655-4434

Lead image courtesy Sonu Purhar

by  Masa Takei

courtesy Kreg Alde

This must be where the Model T took a tumble. Slopes drop precipitously from either side of the metre-wide ridge beneath my boots. Up ahead, a game trail snakes through a field of chest-high devil’s club and between Jack pine an arm’s-span apart. We’re 56 kilometres into a 63-km hike through the northern Rockies, and two of the guides, Josef Villiger and son René, have stopped to screw in a marker a couple of hundred metres back. I dump my 25-kilo pack and wipe a trickle of sweat with a mud-splashed sleeve. Photographer Taylor Kennedy inspects a trail blaze: a hand-size strip of bark hewn from a Douglas fir, the puckered edges around white flesh long healed. Our third guide, Toni Schuler, of Switzerland, points to a matching blaze on the tree’s opposite side.

It is the sixth day of this week-long trek. By the same time tomorrow the five of us will have reached Hobi’s, a trapper’s cabin on the Herrick River and the end of our journey. We’ve traversed boreal forests, waded rivers, climbed high into sub-alpine meadows then up alpine peaks, and are now alternately slogging through lowland bogs and scrambling across prickly, densely vegetated slopes. Since the expedition started, we’ve met not one other human soul; the only tracks we’ve found have been those of moose, elk, bear and the odd wolf.

But time and again, we’ve all uttered the words, “How the heck did they get the car through here?” For despite the distracting beauty that surrounds us, hovering at the periphery of our consciousness are the hardy men and women who first forged a road through this punishing terrain. Seventy years before us, in the depths of the Great Depression, they came: pushing, pulling, sometimes even carrying, a 1927 Model-T Ford.

The most northerly agricultural tract in Canada, B.C.’s Peace River Country is a 365,000-square-km swath that straddles the B.C.-Alberta border, from Grande Cache in the south to the Yukon and Northwest Territories in the north. Roughly the size of Germany, it has less than half a per cent of that country’s population. The problem with developing the Peace Country through the early 1900s was not a shortage of farmers and ranchers, however, but the exorbitant cost of transporting goods to Vancouver ports. So with the federal government slow to make good on promises of a railway, the pioneers of the Peace took matters into their own hands.

courtesy Kreg Alde

At the fore of this movement: 67-year-old Alex Monkman, a Metis raised in Manitoba and lured west by the gold rush of 1898 who eventually settled here to farm, hunt, trap and trade furs. In fact, it was during a trapping expedition in 1922 that he came across what was thought to be the lowest pass through the Rockies north of Missoula, Montana – a pass First Nations had been using for at least 300 years. Though it would be 1936 before he and a partner launched the Monkman Pass Highway Association and a three-year campaign to cut a 211-km trail from Rio Grande, Alberta, to the railway station at Hansard, B.C. For if no railway was forthcoming, Monkman reasoned, then why not a highway? “If we could cut our way in, we could cut our way out,” he proclaimed. Show that a shortcut through the Rockies was possible, and the government would surely be obliged to build a road. And to egg on the Ottawa bureaucrats: dedicated crews of farmers, ranchers and townsfolk would drag a “Pathfinder” Model T over the mountains, then drive it down the main street in Prince George with a symbolic bag of grain to demonstrate the viability and importance of a highway to farmers in the Peace.

It was a venture that, ultimately, would prove unsuccessful. World War II broke out, men were needed elsewhere, and Monkman’s vision faded into obscurity. But then four years ago, 30-year-old environmental management consultant Kreg Alde embarked on his own wilderness odyssey with a cadre of modern-day volunteer Peace Country pioneers, some of whom took weeks away from work and families to reclaim Monkman’s trail from years of overgrowth. The soft-spoken father of two simply felt, pioneer-style, “that someone should and so why not me?” After all, three generations of Aldes had already left blood, sweat and tears on this land. Kreg’s father, Wayne, an avid outdoorsman, had traced Monkman’s trail in 1977 and hiked it again with Kreg in 2000. The following year, Kreg’s grandfather died in a plane crash on nearby Ice Mountain while flying in to pick up Wayne from a hike through the next pass over. Yet this time, the goal behind the trail would not be a causeway for commerce, but a call to adventure and the chance to build something lasting that would benefit generations to come. At the same time, it would preserve the spirit of those who first cherished such a vision. And three years and 1,900 volunteer hours later, on July 17, 2008, Kreg Alde stood with tears in his eyes at the trail’s grand opening.

But would the people come? A trail unused is one quickly reclaimed by nature. So Alde embarked on yet another campaign of inspiration. Instead of a Model T, three Swiss guides from northern Alberta would convey a photographer and a journalist over the Monkman Trail – in hopes we would compare it favourably to such venerable classics as the Chilkoot and West Coast trails. It was an easy sell. As one, already smitten,  journalist wrote in 1937 of the area’s highlights: Kinuseo Falls is “50 feet higher than Niagara . . . one of the marvels of the Canadian Rockies”;  Monkman Lake is “so similar to Lake Louise . . . that it needs only the poppies and the chateau to be its twin….Yet how many have known these gifts of God, let alone seen them?” Sign me up, Alde, we all emailed back. And so it was, on a warm morning in late summer we found ourselves rumbling out of Tumbler Ridge in Alde’s one-tonne pickup for the drive to the start of the Monkman Pass Memorial Trail. Just a half-hour later, I was standing with Kennedy, gaping at Kinuseo Falls where it plunged past vast swirls of limestone into a pool rimmed with logs polished as smooth and round as baby carrots. How is it we’d never heard of this place?

Day two brought the Cascades: 10 waterfalls suspended above a three-kilometre-long section of Monkman Creek, four of them bearing the names of the original trailblazers: Brooks, Moore, Monkman and McGinnis. At Monkman Lake, we hovered over Schuler’s shoulder as he painted a perfect watercolour of the icefield-cloaked mountains reflected in the vast, clear lake, the plaintive call of a loon echoing through the gathering dusk. On the third day, after a long climb up to the Tarns to meadows filled with wildflowers (purple monk’s hoods, yellow arnicas, red columbines) and a 2,275-metre scramble up Paxton Peak for views of mountains beyond more mountains, including the pyramid of Mt. Robson, we camped by Hugh Lake (named after Alde’s grandfather) on the Continental Divide. By day four,  we’d descended from alpine nirvana to where the vegetation again thickened, the trail became rougher and we squelched deep into muck that threatened to spill over our boot tops. “You’ve got to know Wayne and Kreg. They just walk through everything. Brush, water, anything,” Schuler offered by way of explanation as we ploughed a direct line through bog until dusk.

Two days later, our feet have succumbed to blisters, our packs cling to our backs like morbidly obese monkeys and our knees groan loud complaints. In a perverse way we’re having great fun, particularly when reminded of those who bore a significantly heavier load up these slopes.

courtesy Kreg Alde

Peering down at where the Model T tumbled all those years ago, I try to imagine the men’s exhaustion and panic that day. “We had nearly reached the top when, on one of the shifts, the car jumped its restraining blocks and went careening down the hill. [Then] – just as it was broadside – [it] landed in a clump of tag alder. Its weight and speed caused the trees to bend and, for a moment, we thought the car had stopped. Then, like a springboard, the trees recoiled and flipped the car up and over. It rolled sideways to the bottom.” The steering wheel, spoked wheels and windshield were smashed. No wonder the Model T was little more than a battered skeleton by trail’s end.

Taking swigs of water, the five of us again plunge onward and downward – until breaking out of the brush we come to the Fontoniko River where it meets the drainage from Ice Mountain, the last river crossing of the day. Flapjack, our second-to-last camp, is just 20 metres away across the river, and boots, socks, shirts, pants – all come off. This is the perfect opportunity to get in a cold wash while there’s still daylight to dry us. Once across, we find a steel fire ring and dry firewood (as with the other camps Kreg has established en route), where Josef and René wrestle with the heli-dropped 170-litre bear-proof barrel containing our extra camp equipment and food stash. The rest of us slash ferns, level brush for the tents and build a fire. And as the tents go up, so does a perimeter of twin strands of cord strung between graphite rods – an electric bear fence, developed in Alaska, to keep curious grizzlies out while we sleep. The bear spray, bear bangers, air horn and, our defence of last resort, a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, will be kept inside our tents for the night. Meanwhile, Josef, 59, climbs eight metres up a dense fir, sawing away branches with one hand as he goes and winding a length of recycled airplane control wire with a pulley around the trunk. He does the same in a neighbouring tree to create our bear-safe food cache.

The fragrance of wood smoke is soon mingled with more savoury aromas. Tonight: a hearty stew with buns baked by Josef’s wife. A cast-iron pan over the flames makes for perfect bannock, eaten with butter and jam. And judging from Monkman’s journal accounts, what we’re eating is of far superior quality to what the original trail builders could expect after weeks of being “wet to the neck every night”: bannock “so hard [the men] heaved [it] into the bushes”; going without meat for 10 days before killing a grizzly for a stew with dried beans –

“slim and poor fare for hard-working men

doing heavy clearing.”

What hasn’t changed, though, is the region’s abundance of berries – huckleberries, raspberries, Saskatoons, blueberries. Each day we have scooped these up on the fly, barely slowing our pace. And the next morning Schuler again returns after a quick foray with a mug full of blueberries, for flapjacks browned in a skillet over the open fire. We’ll need the energy. In this section of the trail, the vegetation has grown primordial: skunk cabbage fronds the size of welcome mats and devil’s club of such proportions the plants are spiny caricatures of themselves. Thorns find their way through pants and into hands. Schuler swings his Shweizer Gertel, a cross between a machete and a scythe, to clear a way through the overgrowth. The trail becomes less defined until it’s just a suggestion. “Yoy, yoy, yoy,” intones Josef in his Swiss, singsong lilt, “Flapjack to here, needs a crew for a month.” Then we’re fanning out, searching for the next strip of pink flagging that marks the trail.

A couple of kilometres on is the hike’s final river crossing: a 50-metre-span with a strong current. Alde had been marooned here three times by high water in what’s now dubbed “Misery Creek.” Today though, a two-person cable car ensures safe passage. The aluminum-and-wood car runs along a thick cable – an elegant design constructed by Josef, likely vetted by civil-engineer René, then tested over a creek on Schuler’s cattle ranch. The tools we’ve humped in are needed to give it a few more tweaks.

Overhead, an ominous sky threatens. Josef immediately sets about hammering 30-centimetre spikes into the base of the cable car’s timber platforms. Thunder growls in the distance. Josef hammers more frantically. All of us then assemble at the cable moorings and, under Josef’s direction, attach the cable wrench to take up a few centimetres of slack. As the rumbling comes perceptibly closer, we scramble to get ourselves, and our packs, across the river.

No sooner are we on the other side, underneath a tarp nailed to the opposite platform, than a deep, rolling boom descends, punctuated with cymbal crashes, followed by a flashbulb-pop of lightning. A rain, of downright biblical proportions, hammers down. We huddle and eat a lunch of German sausage and home-baked buns.

We tramp the last couple of kilometres in a downpour, soaked but jubilant – our hike out a far cry from the “hell” the original trail builders experienced – “working with that car for the last eight miles in nearly two feet of snow with unfrozen bog holes beneath.” Instead, we are soon sitting under tarps with a bottle of Louis Latour 2005 Chardonnay, a souvenir from the last barrel-cache, with plenty of time to relax and explore before the riverboat ride out in the morning. Monkman, on the other hand, arrived here a day too late for his crew’s prescheduled pickup. The boat left with a load of sick men, then was stopped by slush ice on its return trip to ferry out the Model T. After struggling 200 km through the bush over three years, the crew were forced to quit just 85 km short of getting the Pathfinder to Hansard and still needed to get themselves and their horses out over the remaining rough terrain. The Model T was left to rust at Hobi’s until its rescue many years later, when it was restored for the Pioneer Museum in Grande Prairie, Alberta. Finally, in 1960, the wilderness encompassing much of the trail was proclaimed a provincial park – a designation that ensures no cars will ever be driven through, or again tumble down, the pass. Still, though Monkman’s dream of a shortcut to the coast may have died in its tracks, Kreg Alde and his modern-day adventures have preserved its vision.

• ECO FOOTPRINT Low impact. (Note: the ecologically sensitive alpine meadows of the Tarns region are reachable only on foot; helicopter tours are prohibited.)
• GUIDED BY NATURE Kreg Alde and his knowledgeable guides take care of logistics. monkmanexpeditions.com
• GEAR Expedition pack; sandals for river crossings; well-fitting/broken-in hiking boots.
• ADDITIONAL INTEL Tumbler Ridge is well known for its dinosaur “footprints” and skeletal remains.
• GETTING INVOLVED The Wolverine Nordic & Mountain Society managed trail construction; funds are always appreciated at pris.bc.ca/wnms. As for the Peace Country, it has largely succumbed to development, save for the wilderness oasis that is Monkman Provincial Park. But a far larger area still threatened by resource extraction, the Muskwa-Kechika Management Area, lies directly northeast.
• CRITICAL READING People of the Pass, by Madelon Flint Truax and Beth Flint Sheehan – a comprehensive account of Monkman’s highway efforts. (Beaverlodge & District Historical Association, 1988). Exploring Tumbler Ridge, Charles Helm (Tumbler Ridge News, 2008).

by Brady Clarke

I turn on the boat’s VHF radio and tune in to the latest marine forecast. Last night the buoys were showing a significant, long-period swell, with the winds predicted to blow offshore at our “secret” reef break up the B.C. coast. But things change fast out on the Pacific northwest of Tofino, with big tides, unpredictable wind shifts and quick swell changes. The first few hours beyond the sandbars, kelp beds and rocks littering the inner waters of Clayoquot Sound are in sheltered seas, but the last third of our trek is an exposed, open-ocean sprint up an isolated stretch of coastline. Fortunately the forecast still looks good.

courtesy Kerry Banks

We weave around the commercial crab traps spread over every sandbar in the sound, before slipping between a barely submerged rock on the portside and two feet of water over a sandbar on the starboard. There’s just enough room to squeeze through, but I have to trust the landmarks to navigate rather than the GPS that can be up to three metres off. Even after hundreds of passes through this shortcut, I still hold my breath at the crucial moment.

“I wouldn’t be the first, or the last, to hit this unnamed rock that has claimed more propellers than I care to count.”

Rounding the point, we’re then met head on with gale force winds. It’s going to be a rough ride from here on. Still, we’re happy: the wind is directly offshore at the reef break we’re heading to. We cut the engine to put on the cruiser suits that serve as life preservers and element protectors, then slog into the one-metre chop with a rolling swell underneath.

The boat-in route isn’t the only option when surfing this coast, but other than being dropped off by seaplane, camping and waiting for the weather to be clear enough for a pickup, it’s the only way to access the quality surf up-island. Unlike the user-friendly beach breaks off Tofino, however, surfing these wilderness waves can have serious consequences. One mistake could be our last. The combination of isolation, wild Pacific weather and hypothermia-inducing cold make surfing here a balance between calculated risk and outright luck. There are many stories of close calls: overturned boats, engine failure, anchors dislodging and boats drifting out to sea.

courtesy Kerry Banks

The few surfers who have the knowledge, resources and cojones to surf up here are a relatively close-knit crew who, on occasion, have saved each others’ lives. Finding the gems – the high-quality surfable waves on a coast this jagged – is next to impossible without someone in the know passing along the coveted coordinates and landmarks. Those secrets are then held close, even within a community where most know one another.  A few Luckys at the pub won’t unlock the vault. And without intimate knowledge of this coast, its coveted waves elude even the most persistent searches. Even with the exact locales highlighted on the chart and flagged on the GPS, the conditions needed to produce both good surf and safe-enough boating conditions are rare.

We pound our way up the coast, rattling every bone in our bodies the whole way. Just when our kidneys have had enough, we spot big white plumes of spray blowing perfectly shaped overhead waves. There’s already another boat anchored in the channel, where we slowly cruise up to the break and set the anchor. I tie the stern line to a strong piece of bull kelp, then wait for a couple of sets with long, long lulls between, to ensure the anchor is holding. If we lose our boat out here we’re done for. While we wait, I pull on a five-mm wetsuit, boots and gloves.

Finally, there’s just the surf to contend with: serious, unhindered, powerful waves that rise abruptly from deep water and explode on shallow rock shelves. We jump over the gunwale and start paddling toward a perfect set of waves, the racing thoughts of how far we are from help inevitable.

“I calculate the time needed to get within VHF radio range, never mind the distance to the nearest hospital. Wave selection becomes critical.  Each drop is a heart-in-throat leap of faith.”

courtesy Kerry Banks

We paddle into the lineup as the two other surfers start the long paddle to their boat. The anticipation builds. A lump shows on the horizon – an approaching set. I’m too far inside, so I paddle hard for the outside. This is easily the biggest set we’ve seen. My pulse quickens, my heart drops. I’m in the worst possible place. I redouble my efforts, taking long, deep, efficient strokes in a race to the edge of the reef. If I make it before the wave I’ll be home free. If not I’ll be pinned to the rocks and will take the rest of the set on the head.

The wave touches bottom and rises, the lip feathering, pitching out toward shore, millions of tiny droplets suspended momentarily, then blown seaward by the offshore winds. I’ve lost the race. The wave trips over itself. Suddenly it’s bearing down on me with menace. I grip the rails of my board as tightly as I can, push my knee into the deck and sink it as deep as it will go, then begin a valiant but hopeless duck dive. Looking up into the guts of the wave about to obliterate me, I’m oddly mesmerized by its beauty. I take a deep breath and brace myself.

“The lip explodes right in front of my face. For a moment there is nothing but whiteness and the sensation of being struck by a freight train, followed by chaos. I’m somersaulting and cartwheeling, limbs akimbo.”

I cover my head. My shoulder slams into the reef, then my knee. Water rushes above me and I’m pinned to the rocks. I know not to fight it, there’s no point. The air in my lungs burns. Each second is an eternity. Finally the violence above me subsides. I kick off the reef toward the surface, now a frothy, boiling cauldron of whitewater.

So why take such risks? Because there is no way to describe what it’s like to sit 45 metres off a reef, miles and miles from even the remotest community, absolute wilderness in every direction – no evidence that the world has been touched by the hand of man. No tourists, no towns, no traffic, no houses, no power lines – hell, not even a fishing trawler puttering back to the shelter of Tofino, just me and my friends sharing perfect waves alone. Surfing becomes something else entirely – a life-altering adventure far removed from the Waikiki and southern California scene. Self-reliance is a necessity; knowledge, skill and experience far more valuable than getting more waves at the local beach. The thousands of hours, the years, spent bobbing in the sea, the money spent on gear, the jobs and relationships sacrificed, all seem worthwhile – even necessary – to snatch these fleeting moments out here in the wilderness, in the surf.

courtesy Kerry Banks

With a nod toward the channel, we start our own long paddle back to the boat. Near the anchorage, the kelp beds thicken, making paddling all the more difficult. The bull kelp grabs at our legs and leashes – it feels as if we’re paddling in porridge. Three hours in the water, and we’re exhausted, cold and hungry. Thankfully the anchor has held, despite the strong ebb tide. I undo my leash and gently place my board in the boat, leaving barely enough energy to haul myself back over the gunwale. We de-suit and pull on dry, warm clothes and cruiser suits. My hands are numb, even with the five-mm wetsuit gloves I’ve been wearing, but I manage to turn the key and the outboard comes to life. We breathe a small sigh of relief. The campsite and protected anchorage is still half an hour away and the seas are building and the wind is rising. If all goes well, we’ll be able to set up camp before dark. We cruise without speaking, with only the drone of the outboard and the slap of the boat as it falls into each wave’s trough to disrupt the silence. After what feels like an eternity, we pull into a sheltered bay with a rocky cobblestone beach that drops off abruptly. Cold, damp wetsuits are put back on; dry bags are packed and unloaded, and all of the camp gear paddled to shore. After a brief scouting of the campsite, we pitch tents and hang the food in a nearby spruce. We’ll probably have a few late-night visits from black bears, and we don’t want them eating our supplies. It’s also not uncommon to wake and find wolf prints around the tent. Thankfully, when we’re out here, we’re usually too exhausted to lose too much sleep over the wildlife.

We hang wetsuits over some driftwood; there’s not enough light left in the day for them to dry, but with any luck they won’t be frosty in the morning. I quickly turn on the handheld VHF radio to check the battery and listen to the marine forecast. It sounds as if tomorrow should be as good as today. I’m sure to double-check that I’ve turned it off. The radio is our only connection to safety and help should we need it.

We get a good fire going – even in this coastal rainforest environment, the driftwood burns well. We heat up the salmon caught earlier and wash it down with cold beer. The sun dips below the horizon somewhere out over the vast Pacific, and suddenly the sky turns on the night lights. There are more stars out here than I remember seeing. A couple of steps into the forest, though, and I’m surrounded by absolute darkness. This is a vast and primordial wilderness and it’s very much alive. There is more biomass here per square foot than anywhere else on earth: gigantic old-growth Sitka spruce, hemlock and western red cedars, the ground spongy, green and alive, not an inch without something growing or decomposing.

“It’s not difficult to imagine we’ve stepped back in time a couple of thousand years.”

courtesy Kerry Banks

Back by the fire, the smoke is blowing offshore – if it keeps up the waves will be perfect tomorrow.  Conversation flows easily as the night grows older. We talk the way surfers do, of travel, waves, love and adventure.  Not much is said about the day, not much is needed. These moments, as brief and as rare as they are, as difficult as they are to obtain, are what it’s all about. They’re the moments we’ll reflect on for the rest of our years.

Photographs: Kerry Banks.

Janice in the forest; courtesy Tom Ryan

Our final day in the East Kootenays begins with a hike through an old-growth forest. Not a difficult hike, mind you. Our guide, Steve Kuijt, operations manager at Island Lake Lodge, assures us it is “a leisurely jaunt.” Of course, Steve is impossibly fit, just like just about everyone on the staff here, most of whom happen to be female. “Fernie mountain girls,” is the way that Tom describes them. “They are a special breed,” he says.

I am still pondering that remark as we ramble into the woods. At least there is not much chance of getting lost. Steve is a certified mountain guide, which means he is proficient in all things involving the outdoors. Apparently it takes anywhere from five to 10 years to complete the program, and mountain guides have to work in several locations to receive their accreditation.

Steve Kuijt; courtesy Tom Ryan

The trail leads through a shadowy world of towering 800-year-old Western Red Cedars. Light filters down through the canopy in celestial shafts and everything smells like has been bathed in air freshener. This pristine forest, which was never logged, has also miraculously escaped the wrath of forest fires. It’s one of the natural gems of the lodge’s 7,000-acre property.

As we plod along, Steve relates some of the local history. Many people, he says, believe this trail was the same one used by the legendary Sam Steele when he came though the area with Division D of the Northwest Mounted Police in 1887. His mission:  to establish the site of what would be the NWMP’s first permanent post west of the Rocky Mountains, and to diffuse tensions between white settlers and the Ktunaxa tribe. Steele, who was front and centre in a number of pivotal historical events in the opening of Canada’s west, including the battle with Big Bear at Saskatchewan’s Loon Lake, and the Klondike Gold Rush, settled the dispute with typical efficiency.

Sam Steele; courtesy wikimedia.org

And what is the evidence that the famous Mountie rode this path? Trees along the trail have been marked with hatchet slashes, and beside one of theses Steve shows us where the name “Steele,” has been carved into the wood.

An hour later, we are back at the lodge. Janice tells Joe and myself that we have a couple of options for the rest of the day. We can join her and Andre on a six-hour hike up into the Lizard Range, or we can stay behind and hang out and have a massage in the spa. Gee, tough choice.

My massage, administered by one of the lodge’s attractive young mountain girls, is very relaxing – so relaxing, in fact, that midway through it I notice that I am drooling. We discuss travel and she tells me, “Wow, iIt sounds like you have a fascinating life.” Afterwards, feeling pretty good about myself, I enyoy lunch on the outdoor patio. Tom drops by to join me.  Joe, however, is nowhere to be found. “He said he had some work to do,” says Tom. “He has to file a story today about his trip.”

“Ah yes, the spectre of the deadline rears it ugly head. I wonder what he’s going to write about?” 

“Probably about how everything out here is not quite as tall as the CN Tower,” says Tom.

Early in the evening I meet up with Janice and André, who have returned from the heavens with sunburned faces. The pair excitedly recount their ascent. The words “steep,” “slippery” and “snow-covered” are mentioned repeatedly. André proclaims it to be “the best day of hiking I’ve ever had.” 

I figured that was the case,” says Janice, “because when we got near the top, he kept stopping, and looking around and saying, “Merde!”

Just as our pre-dinner cocktails are being served, Joe re-surfaces wearing a brown blazer and a blue-and-yellow striped tie.

________________________________________

“Hey, did you get your massage?” I ask him.

“Yeah,” he says. “But to tell you the truth,

it was one of the most difficult things I’ve done.”

____________________________________

“You’ve got to be joking?”

“No, I’m serious. The whole time I was on the table it was like I was on a roller coaster. It felt like I was going to fly over the edge. The masseuse kept saying, “Your body is really tight.”

Tight is right. It sounds like Joe needs 10 massages.

As the conversation veers into the latest methods of avalanche control, Joe suddenly decides that he has to get a picture of the mama moose that everybody else has seen. He gulps down a tumbler of scotch and charges out the door, heading to the lake with his tiny camera. The sun is starting to slip behind the mountains and so Steve scrambles after him.

They return 40 minutes later. Joe proudly proclaims that he not only got a photo of the moose, but also of her young calf. He then goes on to boast that he was the first to spot the wild beasts and not the accredited mountain guide. “I saw them first, right Steve?” he says.

Steve  just smiles.

Part 6

Part 5

Part 4

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1

(Lead image by qyd; wikimedia.org)

by  Andrew Findlay

Ian McAllister and I  drop anchor and lower the Zodiac, then aim for where a tea-coloured torrent spills into the azure waters of the bay. Misty drizzle falls from a sky as grey as the granite ramparts looming above the inlet. Ancient red cedars, like foreboding old men, exchange whispers of wind. As we nudge ashore on alluvial flats and tether the dinghy to a chunk of driftwood, that avian trickster of First Nations legend, the raven, squawks disapprovingly from a nearby cedar-snag perch. We are the only humans at the head of this forgotten inlet in B.C.’s Fiordland Conservancy. But the vast coastal wilderness hums with life, and it’s here we’ll begin our search for that most elusive of wild creatures, the wolf.

courtesy Ian McAllister/pacificwild.org

Our gumboots make loud sucking sounds in the mud along the shoreline, where McAllister, the man Time magazine named one of the “Environmental Leaders for the 21st Century” in the late ’90s, kneels to examine a pugmark – signs of a wolf. But the prints are poorly defined, like smudged pencil markings, suggesting the tide has come and gone since the animal sauntered this way. A few steps further, crammed into a square-foot patch of rich earth: the mingled prints of another wolf and a deer – predator and prey. Clambering up the bank, we enter a field of knee-deep Lyngby’s sedge, cow parsnip and brilliant purple lupines, with a circle of trampled grass where a grizzly has flopped to rest. Bears are opportunistic omnivores that carve chaotic swaths through the estuary as they meander, digging for chocolate lilies and “rice root,” the latter coveted for its starchy bulbs. Wolves are strictly carnivorous and far more economical in their movements, treading purposeful, straight tracks through the grass between rainforest and water’s edge. Two hours slip by. “I’m getting antsy. I haven’t seen wolves for awhile,” says McAllister, his ginger hair damp from the rain, brow creased in lines of concentration – or frustration.

We pause next to the creek, imagining life as a wolf in these wild inlets, where the predator must kill or scavenge daily to survive, armed only with a cunning intellect, speed, agility and jaws that crush with a force of up to 680 kilograms. In a similar spot, McAllister once observed a black-tailed deer grazing within 50 metres of a wolf pack, hidden in the tall grass, that had gone days without a kill. Still, the wolves made no move. Clearly they’d calculated opportunity versus cost and the latter was too high.

I spot movement. “There’s a grizzly!”

McAllister raises his binoculars. “That’s not one grizzly, that’s two, and I think they’re mating.”

I practically tear the binoculars from his hands. Sure enough there are two: a massive boar and a much smaller sow engaged in an unexpected display of spring fever. The bears part and the female walks away, peering coyly at her ursine suitor over a shoulder rippling with muscle. They circle each other in slow, almost choreographed movements, a courtship that continues for a quarter of an hour until the bears suddenly disappear into unseen reaches of the estuary. We too head for the timber, where the acrid smell of carrion drifts on a light breeze, to follow a well-trod wildlife trail running parallel to a stream. McAllister crouches where the path narrows between two tightly spaced hemlocks and pinches a tuft of silver-grey hair – snagged by the rough bark of the trees – between his fingers. We’re travelling a wolf highway. I envision a silent pack of wild canines cantering single file, heading upstream to a den sequestered in the old growth. Walking on, muted light and flickering shadows trick my mind into perceiving movement everywhere. The woods are eerily silent, and I sense why, for many cultures, they represent the dark, the foreboding and the unknown. Somewhere in this wild world, there are wolves.

courtesy Ian McAllister/pacificwild.org

Two days earlier in late June, the two of us had set sail aboard McAllister’s trimaran, Habitat, from Bella Bella on Campbell Island. Ahead of us, a loose eight-day itinerary: to explore and search for wolves among McAllister’s favourite inlets and islands of the Great Bear Rainforest.

An author,  photographer and determined conservationist, the 39-year-old McAllister and his wife Karen have been exploring the B.C. coast for the last two decades, tussling with loggers, government and sport hunters and playing a pioneering role in preserving one of the world’s most ecologically significant temperate rainforests – which 20 years ago was in imminent danger of wholesale industrial logging. The result, his 1997 award-winning work of photojournalism The Great Bear Rainforest: Canada‘s Forgotten Coast, has been credited as the centrepiece for Greenpeace International’s North American forest campaign; Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote the foreword. Yet when he first explored the Great Bear Rainforest, in the early 1990s, McAllister gave little thought to its wolf populations. But that all changed just over a decade ago, when he stumbled across a wolf den, a litter of grey pups bouncing around its entrance, looking confused yet curious. Surprisingly, the adults retreated into the trees and howled anxiously, disturbed by the human intrusion but unwilling to attack.  “If a bear, cougar or any other species had infiltrated a den site it would have been efficiently attacked and likely killed,“ says McAllister. “So the question that immediately came to mind, and that I continue to ponder, is when and where did these wolves learn to not consider humans as prey?” And in the years following, the more he encountered wolves on the coast, the more he was intrigued.

Meanwhile, groundbreaking research by biologists Paul Paquet and Chris Darimont was revealing that the genetic diversity of the grey wolves inhabiting B.C.’s central coast is far greater than that of their interior and northern brethren. So much so that McAllister, along with Darimont and Paquet, became convinced that the wolves are genetically distinct, and that the  biological richness of the temperate rainforest drives this diversity. In a relatively small geographic area, for example, “you can find island-hopping wolf packs eating seals and shellfish, and then just 20 km away,” says McAllister, “another pack subsisting on salmon or tiny sitka deer.”

But something far less tangible than wolf genetics also fascinated McAllister: the fact that B.C.’s coastal canines seem to have no collective memory of the persecution experienced by wolves elsewhere in the province, including indiscriminate shootings by ranchers to protect livestock and by hunters to protect game, as well as government- sanctioned culls aimed at recovering such threatened species as the mountain caribou and Vancouver Island marmot. He read every wolf study he could find, diligently  recorded his own sightings and observations and found inspiration in the writings of author Barry Lopez, who, in Of Wolves and Men, suggests that we know far less about the reality of the wolf and far more about “what we imagine the wolf to be.” And finally, in 2007, after a decade of research, McAllister published his own critically acclaimed work, The Last Wild Wolves.

Yet McAllister’s journey into the world of B.C.’s marine wolves is far from over. Though many environmentalists hailed it as a victory when the provincial government signed its Great Bear Rainforest Agreements in 2006, creating some 55 new land conservancies on the coast, McAllister remains a cautious voice. He believes the agreement falls short of adequately protecting a coastline so rich in biodiversity that American and Canadian philanthropic foundations have directed upward of $60 million toward conservation and sustainable economic opportunities for B.C.’s coastal First Nations. Why? The level of protection afforded wildlife in a conservancy is questionable, he says. Oil supertankers could soon ply the treacherous waters of the Inside Passage. High-grade logging of old-growth cedar continues in valleys and on islands still unprotected. Salmon farms in pristine central coast channels such as Sheep Passage are raising fears of sea-lice infestations among migrating wild salmon smolts. And industrial wind farms are being proposed for wild outer-coast islands that few British Columbians have heard of, but on which McAllister has spent weeks in solitary exploration, where wolves roam windswept beaches, feasting on barnacles and squid.

The diesel engine drones quietly as we leave the bay at dusk and retrace our route back down the inlet, most likely observed by wolves that choose not to be seen by us. McAllister takes the helm and stares fixedly ahead with the air of a man accustomed to spending weeks in the wilds, alone. I go below deck to brew coffee and thumb through sea charts of B.C.’s labyrinthine coast. The persistent, light drizzle  gives way to broken clouds and sunshine, and as the boat chugs slowly up Princess Royal Channel, I can see the trees onshore slipping by. But when we enter McKay Reach, the wind howls down Douglas Channel and wraps around Gribbell Island, transforming the sea from glassy smooth to something rough and recalcitrant. The boat rocks and rolls. Barely an hour later, rounding the northern tip of Princess Royal Island, the ocean is again placid.

The two-way radio crackles. Biologist Janie Wray and partner Hermann Meuter have been studying the whales of Camaaño Sound and recording their sweet voices and subtle communications for the past half-dozen years. Still, Wray’s voice over the radio is full of excitement: humpback whales are feeding near Ashdown Island in Whale Passage. We hurry – as much as is possible in a sailboat with a top motoring speed of six knots per hour – and, 30 minutes later, witness four humpbacks circling languorously, churning the water almost within arm’s reach of Wray’s powerboat. The great mammals exhale – puffs of breath that sound as if they are being forced through a giant snorkel – then dive, their barnacle-encrusted tail flukes slipping silently beneath the surface. Seconds later, one leviathan re-emerges in a burst of bubbling water, great baleen plates exposed, scooping up mouthfuls of krill and other small fish – some of which spill frantically from its jaws. Scientists call this bubble-net feeding: the deft corralling of schools of fish no longer than my baby finger – by a mammal that weighs more than 35 tonnes. It is astonishing to behold.

An hour later we are bucking the tide north up Principe Channel, flanked by two huge, uninhabited isles. Banks Island, to the west, is a brooding expanse of low, rounded hills and weathered trees contorted into bonsai. To the east rise the rugged snowy mountains of Pitt Island, a topography reminiscent of the mainland Coast Range.

“Check this out!” shouts McAllister, pointing off the Habitat’s bow. Killer whales are approaching from the north, a pod of seven led by a massive bull, its elegant dorsal fin proudly protruding two metres above the water line. The pod nears the boat, then divides, and three whales pass rapidly on the portside, four on the starboard, like commuters on a water highway – in pursuit of salmon, perhaps. These “wolves of the sea” are as adept at hunting beneath the waves as wolves are on land.

Two days later, we anchor in a secluded bay near the Tsimshian settlement of Kitkatla. Again the sky is a steely grey, the tide low, the scent of the sea pungent. On shore: a few decaying wooden houses that, along with some rusting farm implements, trucks and a system of dykes, are all that remain of one homesteader’s 1970s utopia.

McAllister is anxious to be ashore in this place where he has spotted wolves many times. Soon we are balancing on stones covered in rockweed, which pops underfoot like bubble wrap, then shadowing a crystalline stream deep into the rainforest past groves of centuries-old trees, their branches laden with witch’s hair and wolf lichen. Canine prints are everywhere; wolves have recently splashed across the stream bed and padded along its silky sandbars. Fresh scat containing bones marks a trail through shin-deep moss of an almost luminescent green. The forest is as peaceful as a monastery, yet I am convinced we are being watched. We lose track of time, until the fading light reminds us that evening is approaching and we are compelled to turn back. Reluctantly, I again resign myself to not seeing a wolf this day, though we have sensed their presence as viscerally as a salmon senses its natal river.

The next morning, the last of our journey, the sun warms the deck where I lie sprawled against the wheelhouse, savouring a coffee. McAllister picks up the binoculars and scans the tidal flats around the bay, then sets them down on the deck. A minute later, alerted by the croak of a raven, he scopes the bay again with keen eyes.

“I see a wolf – a female I think.” He points to a narrow isthmus of sand between brackish pools less than a half-kilometre distant.

It takes a few seconds to locate the  wild  wolf through the binoculars. Without movement she would be perfectly camouflaged against the palette of rocks and sand. She is smaller than the average domestic husky, and lean. Her coat – save for a patch of dark grey on each haunch and an artful white stripe down her nose – is a uniform tan colour, with the healthy sheen of an animal that has only recently shed its winter pelage. I hold my breath as she trots along the beach, charcoal snout pointed our way, until she plops down on a sandy flat. She stays there for half an hour, basking in the sun and observing us with canine curiosity. Then, as unexpectedly as she arrived, she saunters back toward the head of the bay and vanishes ghostlike into the darkness of the forest.

Getting There Yourself:

• Pick a reputable tour operator (all have been given the thumbs up by Ian McAllister):

Ocean Adventures
Maple Leaf Adventures
Mothership Adventures
Ocean Light II Adventures
Great Bear Adventure Tours
Bluewater Adventures
Tide Rip Grizzly Tours
Northern Lights Expeditions

• GEAR Check the above operator websites for requirements.
• UPDATES on Great Bear Rainforest conservation efforts: savethe greatbear.org; raincoast.org; pacificwild.org
• TO LEARN MORE about B.C.’s rainforest wolves and how to protect them: pacificwild.org
• CRITICAL READING The Last Wild Wolves: Ghosts of the Great Bear Rainforest (Greystone Books, 2007; $40/softcover 2009; $29.95);  The Great Bear Rainforest: Canada’s Forgotten Coast (Harbour Publishing, 1997; $40); The Wolf Almanac, by Robert H. Busch (Lyons Press, 2007; $19.95).
• ON SCREEN The BBC video Earth’s Great Events: The Great Salmon Run; National  Geographic’s Last Stand of the Great Bear and Search for the Coast Wolf; Ian McAllister’s “The Last Wild Wolves” video series on YouTube.

Lead image courtesy Ian McAllister/pacificwild.org

It is late afternoon when we arrive in Fernie, and the town’s brick buildings are bathed in a soft, golden glow. It is the perfect evening to see the Ghostrider. Many of B.C.’s frontier towns have legends attached to them, but none are more colourful than the “Fernie Curse.”

The tale begins with mining magnate William Fernie, the town’s founder. During one of his prospecting trips in the area, Fernie met a tribe of First Nations people, and  noticed that one of the chief’s daughters was wearing a necklace of shiny black stones. Knowing these stones were coal, Fernie asked about their source. The chief agreed to show Fernie where the stones had been found, with the condition that the prospector marry the princess. But, after learning the location of the coal deposits, Fernie reneged on the deal. The angry chief responded by putting a curse on the valley, saying it would suffer from fire, flood and famine. In April 1904, fire reduced Fernie’s wooden commercial district to smouldering rubble. Four years later, a second fire gutted the entire city. In 1916, more damage was done when the Elk River overflowed and flooded large sections of town. The near-famine conditions of the Great Depression made residents believe the curse would never end.

courtesy library; flickr.com

That’s the way the situation remained until August 15, 1964, when members of the Kootenay tribe, led by Chief Ambrose Gravelle (Red Eagle), assembled in Fernie for the ceremonial lifting of the curse. Mayor James White made amends for the wrong done by William Fernie by smoking the “pipe of peace” with Chief Red Eagle.

Though the curse has now been banished, the memory lingers. On sunny summer evenings a spectacular shadow appears on a rock-face high above the city that shows the form of the jilted princess sitting on a horse with her father, the chief, who is walking beside her. They call it the Ghostrider.

Fernie: Coolest Town in North America – According to Rolling Stone magazine

Today, of course, Fernie is more popularly known as a mecca for skiers, snowboarders, hikers and mountain bikers, and tourism is on the rise – thanks in part to some glowing media coverage. Rolling Stone magazine have dubbed Fernie the “Coolest Town in North America” and Outside magazine ranked it among its “Top 20 Dream Towns,” two points noted by British Columbia magazine when it did a 2006 cover story on the town, entitled “Coolest Fernie.” However, my first impression is that this is one of the sleepiest places I have ever been to. The downtown sidewalks are deserted and it’s so quiet you can hear yourself think. All that’s missing is a dog asleep in the middle of the main street. I dunno, maybe you have to see it in winter.

Joe finds a store that is actually open – a head shop – and begins interviewing the owner, an attractive woman who came here from somewhere else, which seems to be the secret to Joe’s heart. I wander off and end up in a saloon where I drink a beer and watch dust motes drifting in the air.

courtesy patrick 444; wikimedia.org

National Geographic Traveler 2009 Pick: Island Lake Lodge

A 10-kilometre drive up into the mountains gets us to Island Lake Lodge. Situated at the 1,400-metre level, the remote setting packs a visual punch: green-roofed wooden chalets dwarfed by the towering, grey mountains of the Lizard Range, and everywhere you look ramrod straight evergreens rising up out of a blanket of emerald green. There is a beautiful lake in front of the lodge, bald eagles circling overhead and jackrabbits in the parking lot. The air feels like it is composed of pure oxygen.

The lodge www.islandlakeresorts.com/ is famed for its powder snow and cat-skiing operations, but its summer pleasures – fine dining, fishing, hiking and a full spa – are also attracting a following. Recently, the travel magazine National Geographic Traveler published its “Stay List 2009 Guide,” an elite list of 129 hotels around the globe with a transcendent vision that goes beyond traditional hotel-keeping. Island Lake Lodge was one of only 13 Canadian hotels included on the list.

We have dinner on the lodge balcony. Head chef Kelly Attwells recommends the steak. He can personally vouch for the beef, because he bought it at auction. He means he bought the entire cow. “Her name is Midnight,” says Atwells. Hearing that, Janice decides to pass on the steak. She doesn’t want to eat anything that she knows the name of.

courtesy Tom Ryan

During dinner we learn that the area boasts one of the largest concentrations of grizzlies in the province. There is plenty of other wildlife as well. At the head of the trail that leads down to the lake a blackboard lists the latest animal sightings. Today the board reads, “Moose, bear, cougar spotted this week. Make noise on the trails! Keep dogs on leash.” The moose, a 1,000-pound female, is a local celebrity. Every year or two, she swims out to the little island on the lake and gives birth. She stays there until the calf is ready to get around on its own. Apparently, the cow has already has already had her baby this year.

Midnight is delicious and the wine is first-rate. It should be, considering that the lodge has 3,000 bottles in its wine library, ranging from $40 to $600 a bottle. Even so, I’m not sure how Joe can enjoy his. Beside the vino, he also has a glass of coca-cola, a beer and a scotch in front of him. And his foul-smelling cigars are back.

I stare out across the valley at the Lizard Range and its three most prominent peaks, popularly known as “the Three Bears.” A thought comes to mind. “Hey Joe,” I say, “standing out there are the three bears: Papa, Mama and Baby Bear. Which one are you?”

“Bears?” he says. “I don’t see any bears.”

(To be continued …)

Part 5

Part 4

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1

Lead image by Island Lake Resorts

courtesy chiloa; wikimedia.org

We are motoring south on Highway 95 and Tom is telling us that he once worked for Pierre Trudeau. “I used to have to get him a red rose for his lapel every day,” says Tom. I can’t say that I am buying this story, but I nod like I am. Joe, who is evidently not a Trudeau fan, mentions the one-finger salute that the prime minister gave to protesting strikers from his train car in Salmon Arm. ”Yes, but less widely remembered is that the protestors were shouting anti-French slogans at the train,” I note. “Still, all in all, another heart-warming piece of Canadiana.”

Continuing the Canadiana theme, at Joe’s urging we pull into a Tim Horton’s.  He returns a few minutes later carrying a coffee and a bag of donuts. “They don’t move like they do in Toronto,” he says, between mouthfuls.

Back on the road, Tom tells us about a recurring dream he has been having in which he is dating the Queen of England. “This is the queen as she looked in the 1950s,” he quickly points out. At any rate, Tom is waiting for the queen in his car. She gets in and says, “Tom, I can’t take it anymore. I want to leave the palace and hang out with you.”

But Tom replies stoically: “No Liz, you’re the queen and I’m just a little guy. It would never work out.”

None of us know quite what to make of this. I offer some helpful advice. “You know Tom, they say that all the characters in your dreams are parts of your own personality. Maybe you want to be the Queen, or maybe a queen.”

Any further probing of Tom’s subconscious is abandoned when Joe poses a football trivia question. “Which NFL player was Howard Cosell referring to on Monday Night Football when he said, “Look at that little monkey run.” Joe is disappointed that I know the answer. Cosell was referring to Washington Redskins receiver Alvin Garrett, who was black. That controversial 1983 remark ultimately caused Cosell to leave Monday Night Football a few months later.

Why Howard Cosell’s name has popped into Joe’s mind in the midst of the B.C. Kootenays is a mystery, but it provokes a round of sports trivia that causes Janice to groan in frustration. Tom laughs at her discomfort. “This isn’t turning out be much fun for you is it Janice?”

courtesy Hollylewi; wikimedia.org

Flanked by 3,000-metre snow-capped peaks, we roll through the Columbia Wetlands. Considered the last intact portion of the Pacific flyway, the 27,000-hectare expanse was designated a wetland of international importance in 2005. In spring and fall, the area attracts up to 60,000 mallards, 20,000 northern pintails, 10,000 swans, 15,000 sandhill cranes and 50,000 Canada geese.

We pull over to admire the panorama of the glittering green floodplain and get into a conversation with an aboriginal woman. She is wearing pigtails, a straw cowboy hat, a grey T-shirt, baggy, checkered purple shorts and pink Crocs. She is here trying to find some friends who are re-creating explorer David Thompson’s exploration of the region by canoe in the early 1800s. “They have one token white guy to play David Thompson,” she says. “He should be easy to spot.” She shakes her head and chuckles, “That David Thompson, he wouldn’t know where he was going. He would have had to ask his squaw wife.”

A bit of revisionist history? Well, Thompson was married to a Métis woman named Charlotte Small, and she did accompany him on some of his expeditions. Their marriage lasted 58 years, the longest Canadian pre-Confederation marriage known, and they had 13 children together, so this was definitely no summer fling. Still, during his many years of surveying, the man the Natives called “the Stargazer” mapped more than 3.9 million square kilometres of North America, so I’m guessing he must have had some sense of direction. Unfortunately, Canada’s greatest geographer died blind, penniless and in virtual obscurity in 1857 in Montreal.

Our final destination today is Island Lake Lodge near Fernie, but we have time to make a few stops along the way. The first is Radium Hot Springs. I’m not sure that naming your town after a radioactive element was a wise business decision, but the springs are popular. There are two large pools, one with hot water for soaking (usually around 39°C), the other a two-thirds-size Olympic swimming pool that is kept at about 29°C. There is also a hot-tub sized pool that has been dubbed the “Plunge Pool,” because the water can be hot – right from the source at 44°C – or cold, right from a creek running beneath the pools.

After we enter the complex, Joe pulls out his tape recorder, approaches one of the employees and says, “Well, the first question I have to ask is how many people have you saved?”

While he asks his questions, I wander off to check out a tourist shop that looks like it has been preserved in amber since the 1960s. Feeling nostalgic for the family road trips of my youth, I buy myself an Eskimo Pie.

Later, we stop for lunch in Invermere, which is also known as Calgary’s “Whistler.” The permanent population of the town is only 4,000, but on summer weekends it swells to 40,000. This may be why it takes us about an hour to be served lunch. Joe doesn’t appear to mind. Excited by the fact that so many of the people working in these parts are from southern Ontario, he is now interviewng everything that moves.

Hit man? courtesy Riley Banks

After eating, André and I don our sunglasses and walk off to explore, eventually ending up gazing at a statue of David and Charlotte Thompson. When we come back, Tom says, “Geezuz, everyone is staring at you guys. You look like a couple of hit men.” I’m wearing a green sports jacket, a black shirt and black slacks, while André is clad in a black track suit. I guess it doesn’t take much to stand out in Invermere.

(To be continued …)

Part 4

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1

Lead image by sallylondon; flickr.com

So after a two-year hiatus,  I felt like it was about time for a visit, so I peeled myself off the couch and my eyes from the computer screen, and headed back to the buzz. It was Saturday and Robson was in full swing: jam packed with slow-moving tourists, giggly teenage girls taking Facebook pictures of themselves and muscled meat heads honking at skimpily dressed 20-somethings from their gas-guzzling SUVs.

The first place that caught my eye was The Candy Aisle. This brightly coloured sugar palace is childishly fun. I explored the shelves and shelves of gummy animal-shaped treats and those red ones shaped like lips and big feet. Yum. It really takes you back to your childhood, then reminds you of that trip to the dentist when they took that little screaming drill to your back molars… Ick. It was worth it? Right? Maybe not, but at least now you are a grown up now and can set alarms on your iPhone to remind you to brush your teeth.

Bang-On

Next, I trekked over to the massive disaster that is Granville Street. What a mess! It’s a minefield of rubble, wires, cement and construction debris. Next time I’ll wear boots and not flip flops. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Bang-On, an eclectic, retro, custom T-shirt shop packed to the rafters with funky tees, accessories and the friendliest store employees around. You can spend hours perusing Bang-On’s collection of rockin’ retro prints and picking the perfect tee to complement the print. There are also fabulous sunglasses, belts, caps and a very nerdy collection of vintage electronics. I may have swooned when I spotted a Commodore 64 in the middle of the store.

El Kartel

A few blocks down from Bang-On I found another cool clothing store, El Kartel. This hot spot isw definitely funky, perhaps a bit too funky for me and my wallet, but their 50 per cent-off sale rack had a few pieces I could manage, though maybe not the small, gold, sequined halter top I tried to squeeze myself into. Luckily, there was a DJ spinning hip hop beats, so no one heard my profanities when the zipper jammed and  I got stuck in said small, gold, sequined halter top.

Cupcakes

After wrestling with possessed halter tops, I was feeling bit peckish. My hunger radar lead me directly to the new Cupcakes shop on Robson and Thurlow. If you haven’t tried these delicious $3 bites of heaven yet, you haven’t lived! Diet Smiet, these are worth a few extra bulges in your bikini bottoms. Just suck it in, no one will know

I was almost done savouring my last bite of  the pink and sprinkled “Sweet 16″ cupcake, when I ran into a mob of Japanese exchange students taking pictures of their new monkey balloon hats. In front of me was a very happy Balloon Man (Robson and Bute), blowing up a dozen heart-shaped balloons and counting the stack of $20s in his hands. I’m not sure if he’s there every day, but if you see a large, slightly smug, balloon Elmo, poking his head above the crowd, you’ll you’ve struck gold.

Balloon Man

Candy, cupcakes, funky tees, DJs and balloon animals? Maybe Robson isn’t so bad… I’ll definitely come back for a gander and some sugary snacks this summer!

courtesy Tom Ryan

Twin Falls is a sweet piece of eye candy: water spilling through two grooved chutes at the top of the chasm, falling through air, then merging into the same flow farther down, before crashing over the rocks and becoming a frothing cauldron. There is a bench that offers a head-on view of the show, so I sit down and soak it all in. Tom hauls out his camera and snaps some shots, including one of the three muskeeters.

Within seconds, a golden-mantled ground squirrel appears and stands on his hind legs peering up at me. I suppose he figures this is his turf and he is looking for an admission fee. Feeling rather good about having survived the hellish hike to Twin Falls, I open up my pack. ”Do you like pretzels, little guy?” Turns out he does. He takes one of the salted snacks and begins munching away, holding it aloft in his paws like a steering wheel. To complete the picture, he even has a pair of snazzy racing stripes.

courtesy damclean; flickr.com

Since our rodent pal is eating, we decide to follow his example, devouring the lunches that the lodge packed for us. The spray from the falls is having a soothing effect and I am starting to feel very relaxed. Janice, however, is disappointed that the tea house isn’t open. Yes, out here in the middle of nowhere there is a tea house that serves scones with jam. It’s a national historic site, built in stages by the CPR, beginning around 1908 with a one-storey cabin for patrons taking backcountry tours. In 1923, the company added a two-storey log structure to create a larger and more attractive chalet. A woman named Fran Drummond has owned and operated the place since 1964. Constructed from local spruce, the chalet now houses a main-floor kitchen and eating area with bedrooms on the second floor. The menu includes a selection of soups, sandwiches and desserts, which are served daily during the summer months.

Denied her chance at high tea, Janice decides that that we should start back. Man, the girl just can’t keep still. But the phrase “start back” comes as a jolt. It is an unpleasant reminder that we have only reached the midway point of our circular 17-kilometre hike. Janice also mentions that we will be taking a different return route.

My thinking is that this trail has to be much easier since we will now be descending. Once more I am proven wrong. Ten minutes into the return hike, things are already looking grim. There is no trail. Instead, we must traverse a moonscape of huge, jagged boulders on an upward diagonal. Why “up” I don’t know, but we are climbing again, and once again trying to keep pace with the long, machine-like strides of Janice and André.

This time, however, the pair lose interest in stopping to let us catch up. They vanish over the ridge, leaving Tom to deal with the stragglers. ”Would you take a cripple up these rocks?” asks Joe, a reference to Tom’s earlier anecdote about the Filipina journalist. The moraine is unforgiving stuff and it is not long before Joe, despite his trusty walking stick, begins to complain. He says that he has a bum leg and doesn’t think he is going to be able to make it.

courtesy Tom Ryan

Since we’re not equipped to camp, I wonder how feasible it might be to get a helicopter in here for an evacuation. Would the Toronto Sun foot the bill for that? Tom calmly urges Joe to continue, promising that this nasty section of rubble ends shortly, while steering the conversation away from the current situation. He also begins offering Joe pretzels as a reward for completing each new stretch of terrain. The pretzels work their magic and Joe, his lily-white knees glowing like headlamps in the afternoon sun, makes it through the moraine.

From there we descend through the forest, where I quickly remember that descending is no easier than climbing. I start gobbling ibuprofen tablets, but by the time we finallly make it back to the car my legs still feel like someone has been pounding on them with ball-pen hammers. Janice asks everyone what they thought was the highlight of the hike. I spoil a unanimous vote for Twin Falls by stating that I liked Takakkaw Falls best. “Of course, we saw that in the first five minutes,” I point out.

We dine that evening at Cilantro at Emerald Lake Lodge, overlooking the lake of the same name. The upscale resort attracts a large international clientele and, judging by the fleet of red canoes tied up at the dock, a healthy contingent of Japanese tourists. The restaurant’s location is stunning and everyone’s mood is upbeat. Even silent André has started talking, his tongue loosened by several glasses of fine Okanagan red.

Joe has made a miraculous recovery from his ordeal in the Yoho Valley, either that, or the experience has tipped his mind over the edge. He is still carrying his walking stick and he goes around the tables with it, chatting openly to total strangers. “I almost died today,” I hear him tell one couple in a happy voice. “I hiked for 55 kilometres.”

I must admit, the guy has a writer’s instincts. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

(To be continued …)

Part 5

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1

Takakkaw Falls, courtesy Xevi V; flickr.com

We are trudging up a forest trail somewhere in the Yoho Valley, just west of the Continental Divide. I am sweating buckets and gasping for air. We are on the hike that Tom and Janice earlier described as “pretty easy.” I now know that these two can’t be trusted. The lone consolation, and it isn’t much, is that Joe is having an even tougher time of it than me.

The hike might not be so bad if we didn’t have to keep up with the maniacal pace that Janice and André are setting. The duo appears to be competing to see who is fitter. As for Tom, a former college track athlete, he comes and goes, merrily firing off wisecracks and taking pictures along the way, and, hopefully, keeping watch for bears.

“Bears?” Joe repeats loudly when informed that some had been spotted recently in these parts. He seems genuinely astonished to learn that bears inhabit the wilds of B.C. I suppose he figured the big fellows only show up to beg for sandwiches along the roadside, like you see in the postcards. At any rate, the struggle to keep within eyeshot of the two marching metronomes has made it too difficult for him to talk, which is a blessing. But then again if he had enough wind to converse, we would have less reason to worry about bears. The booming sound of his voice would have sent them scurrying.

Admittedly, the trail started out promising enough– the first kilometre of it was paved. The route took us past thundering Takakkaw Falls, a long, narrow, horsetail-shaped slice of glacial melt water that makes a spectacular plunge down a narrow channel fed by the Daly Glacier. Takakkaw Falls has a height of 384 metres and a vertical drop of 254 metres, making it Canada’s second-highest waterfall after Della Falls at Della Lake, B.C., which has a vertical drop of 440 metres. In comparison, Niagara’s famed Horseshoe Falls drops a pitiful 57 metres, though it has a much greater volume of water.

The sight of Takakkaw Falls was certainly uplifting, but what I didn’t realize then was that “up” was going to be the operative word for the day. The trail we are on does nothing but climb. This might be fine if you run a few miles every day, not so good if you job keeps you chained to a desk. Thankfully, there is some beautiful scenery enroute to relieve the pain. The water at Laughing Falls, for example, was an amazing milky green colour. Even knowing that the hue is caused by silt deposits carried down from the glaciers didn’t detract from its magic.   

Our destination is yet another waterfall-–117-metre high Twin Falls. The view, according to Tom, is supposed to make the hard slog worth it, but then this is the guy who called this a “pretty easy hike.” Meanwhile, the sight of all this dazzling, glacier-fed water has stirred up a fresh obsession in Joe. He desperately wants to stick his feet in B.C. mountain water. “How cold will it be?” he asks. “Will I be able to stand it?”

“It will be this cold,” says Tom, making a tiny circle with his thumb and forefinger.

Kicking Horse River, courtesy Feffef; flickr.com

Another kilometre on, we cross a babbling creek and Joe indulges his wish, taking off his shoes and socks and jumping in. He then bends down and begins happily slurping handfuls of the stuff into his mouth. When Tom, who has paused to take some shots of a trio of pretty female hikers, catches up with us and spots Joe in the water, he says, “OK. Just tell me that you didn’t?”

“Didn’t what,” asks Joe.

“Didn’t take a drink.”

“Yeah, I did. Why?”

“I’m guessing you haven’t heard of ‘beaver fever,’” replies Tom, who promptly launches into a very detailed, gory and highly exaggerated description of the intestinal infection’s effects.

Joe’s exuberance over his mountain-water baptism is instantly swept away. “How long before I know if I’ve got it?”

“Could be a couple of hours. Could be a couple of days,” says Tom.

We plod on, eventually reaching the base of a series of steep switchbacks that lead up to Twin Falls. The climb is a killer. Halfway up, Joe drags a branch out of the brush and uses it as a walking stick. Dripping with perspiration and caked with dust, we finally make it to the top and stare out across the yawning gorge.

(To be continued …)

Part 1

Part 2

Lead image by Keith Young; wikimedia.org

//

courtesy woodchuckiam; flickr.com

Now that his cellphone is no longer functioning, Joe is forced to converse. He begins tellling us about the celebrities that he has interviewed for his newspaper column, or, in the case of Ben Affleck, tried to interview. Joe collared Affleck at a Toronto Blue Jays’ game, but the actor blew him off, so Joe sat behind his subject and glared at him for nine innings while Affleck kept calling him nasty names.

We are all pumped to be in the B.C. Rockies. This is Joe and André’s first time in these mountains, and I was last here several decades ago, so the drive is stirring up some fond memories. Crossing the border through Yoho National Park  is a spectacular way to make an entry. Named for a Cree word that means “awesome,” Yoho was declared a UNESCO world Heritage Site in 1984. Despite having 28 peaks higher than 3,000 metres, several amazing waterfalls, including Takakkaw Falls, the third tallest in Canada, 400 kilometres of hiking trails and an array of green alpine lakes and roaring rivers, the park has a low profile. Despite its close proximity to Banff National Park, it attracts far less traffic than its famous counterpart, which draws about four million visitors a year, making it Alberta’s number one tourist destination.

courtesy meironke; flickr.com

Just inside Yoho, we pause to admire the Canadian Pacific Railway’s famous Spiral Tunnels, which were built to solve the problem of running trains up Big Hill. To complete the CPR as quickly as possible, a decision was made to delay blasting a 430-metre tunnel through Mount Stephen and instead build a temporary 13-klilometre line over it. That required scaling Big Hill, whose 4.5 percent grade was the steepest in North America.  Trains going up the hill required four extra engines to push, while several runaway spur lines greeted the trains on their way down. As one might guess, disasters were common. After 25 years, the Spiral Tunnels finally replaced the “temporary” route in 1909. This new route added 10 kilometres, but reduced the grade to 2.2 percent. Today, from a highway viewpoint you can watch a train disappear into Mt. Ogden. The train then exits the 890-metre circular tunnel, crosses under the highway and enters a 992-metre circular tunnel in Cathedral Crags.

Our next stop is the town of Field (population 300). No more than a few wooden houses, backed by an amphitheatre of sheer mountains, it looks like an old-world pioneer settlement, little changed from its 1884 origins as a railroad-construction camp. The town was named after Cyrus Field, an American financier who led the company that laid the first transatlantic communication cable in 1858. Field later invested heavily in railroads in New York, and evidently the CPR’s executives felt he might be inclined to the same in B.C. if they named a pioneer town after him. But Field didn’t invest, and so for no particular reason we have this tiny mountain town named after a Massachusetts entrepreneur.

Even though we are going to be dining in style at Cathedral Mountain Lodge, Joe appears to be concerned that he is not going to have enough to eat. At the general store in Field he buys an armload of junk food: twizzlers, ding dongs, Doritos, beef jerky, chocolate bars and a bag of cookies.

“Had your cholesterol count taken lately?” I ask him.

He chuckles. “I’m no health nut.”

Cathedral Mountain Lodge www.cathedralmountain.com/ has a rustic look, but it is high-end rustic. The resort’s 29 log cabins feature wood-burning or gas fireplaces and deep soaker tubs. The timber frame lodge was constructed of re-claimed Douglas fir posts and beams and was designed by Vancouver architect Brad Lamoureux. The dining room has an indoor/outdoor river rock fireplace, 24-foot vaulted ceiling and 18-foot high windows.

courtesy cathedralmountain.com

Our dinner, hosted by lodge owner Nancy Stibbard, is sensational. As we demolish the meal, she tells us about the various hiking options available in the area. We decide to make a trip tomorrow through Yoho Valley to Twin Falls. “After all this food I don’t think I’ll be able to hike very far,” says Joe.

“The hike is nothing too serious,” Janice assures him. 

As Janice polishes off the last of the chocolate-dipped strawberries, Tom tells us about a writer from the Philippines who he squired through the Rockies a couple of years ago.  She was writing  a piece on wheelchair accessibility. At one point in the trip she asked him, “Mr. Tom, what is another word for handicapped?” The story she later published in the Manila Bulletin was entitled “A Cripple Visits the Rockies.”

After dessert, Joe invites me to have a beer with him on the porch of his cabin, where he confesses, “You know I’m really having trouble with this cellphone blackout. I’m addicted to my cellphone.”

“You gotta relax, man,” I reply. “You’re not in Toronto anymore.”

The lodge is scenically situated beside the Kicking Horse River and directly beneath Cathedral Mountain. Joe looks up at the stony peak and asks his favourite question. “Do you think that mountain is taller than the CN Tower?”

“That mountain is 2,766 metres high,” I tell him. “The CN Tower is 553 metres. It’s no contest.”

“Maybe,” he says, “but it doesn’t look higher.”

I have to wonder about his bizarre attachment to the CN Tower. Is it just that he has no sense of scale, or is he having trouble accepting that Toronto doesn’t have all the biggest things in the country? We sit there gabbing for awhile until Joe’s next-door neighbour ambles over. He doesn’t speak a word, but simply stands there with a grimace on his face. Finally, he says, “Are you guys having a good time?” It’s only about 10 p.m., but then again Joe’s voice does pack quite a wallop. We decide to call it a night. I start dreaming as soon as my head hits the pillow.

(To be continued …)

Part 1

by Kerry McPhedran

The moon is almost full. Each stroke of our paddles lifts and spi lls lime-green stars.We are stardust. No one speaks.

White talcum-powder beach, turquoise waters – this could be Fiji. Only we’re sun-kipping on tiny island 32, one of the more than 100 islands and islets that make up British Columbia’s world-famous Broken Group off the west coast of Vancouver Island. If there is a sea kayaker’s mecca, this is it. And island 32 is just our lunch stop.

My double-kayak partner, Jennifer, hangs sloth-like, suspended by her pink gumboots and arms off a cantilevered log tossed high by a storm. Guides Natalie and Liz, having packed the leftover guacamole, quesadillas and fruit salad, sprawl in their own sandstone “paradise recliners.” Fellow paddlers Nora, Condrea and Stan are beached in the unexpectedly hot September sun in various stages of digestive dozing, hands folded over bellies. Someone burps contentedly.

On the last day of our trip, I’m rerunning a slide show of trip highlights on the back of my eyelids.

Five days ago, we were seven strangers sizing one another up on board the coastal freighter MV Frances Barclay on her three-and-a-half-hour run down the Alberni Inlet to unload kayakers and their gear at historic Sechart. A whaling station in days gone by, Sechart is now the gateway for the Broken Group and week-long guided camping/ kayaking trips with Batstar Adventure Tours.

Batstar appealed to our phalanx of urbanites because of one key phrase on its website’s “Why Choose Batstar” page: “Unplug from the grid.” Owners Blake and Rhonda Johnson, who packed up professional careers and two kids in Calgary back in 2001 to follow their passion for kayaking, hiking and biking the west coast, understand that time is everyone’s most valuable asset. Seeing us off on the Frances Barclay that morning, Blake cryptically advised: “Forget the city – go to the Happy Place.” We weren’t sure what he meant, but we were willing to look.

Natalie and Liz, hard-core West Coast transplants from Montreal and New Brunswick, expertly loaded a week’s worth of food, drinking water and gear into the single and double Seaward kayaks at Sechart, and our flotilla headed across Sechart Channel to explore the now-protected wild places that make up one third of Canada’s Pacific Rim Park (along with the West Coast Trail and Long Beach). A leisurely hour-and-a-half paddle out of Sechart landed us on the tree-fringed sandy beach of Keith Island – Batstar’s ace in the hole when it comes to competing with the 11 other operators trolling the Broken Group (out of some 60 kayak operators in B.C.). Thanks to the historic 2005 agreement signed by the Johnsons with the Tseshaht Band to train and license Tseshaht youth as sea kayak guides, Batstar guests – never more than eight in a group – have exclusive use of the island as a “no trace” base camp. “There are more than 100 islands in the Broken Group,” explained Natalie, “but only eight have designated campsites and competition can be fierce – especially in summer when paddlers arrive from all over the world.” Not only private, but protected and central, Keith Island is the ideal paddling-off spot for daytrips to the Broken Group’s Inner and Outer Islands. We feel privileged to share this ancestral village site.

An hour after landing, we’d unloaded the week’s gear, hauled the kayaks above high tide and pitched our tents – the only work Natalie and Liz allowed us all week. Not a potato to be scrubbed, not a dish to be washed. I felt like a free-range kid all over again, with grown-ups who let us wander around if we don’t go too far from home, take us somewhere fun every day, teach us new skills and call us when meals are ready.

When Natalie and Liz aren’t planning the next day’s route, cleaning gear or checking weather on the VHF, they’re rappin’ and cookin’ under the white-and-yellow-striped tarp suspended between trees over a two-burner Coleman on a plank. Using local organic ingredients and “a lot of lovin,’ ” they set a folding table with such tasty dishes as curried chicken, basmati rice, wild greens, grilled salmon, even sushi rolls, chocolate cake and fresh-fruit flan. A jar of wildflowers or a sea urchin’s discarded shell decorates our table.

Camp couldn’t be cozier or more comfortable with roomy three-person tents for two, camp chairs around a nightly beach fire and a spotless and discreet cedar outhouse. Montreal-born “Nat” and Liz scamper about like deer shod in bright blue and yellow Holeys, but are amazingly strong, with an easy energy and cheerful friendship that sets the tone: happy campers all.

Each morning we woke to the wild, weird, rattling call of a kingfisher and his blue-winged flash; the smell of freshly brewed organic coffee; French toast and bacon, frittatas and bagels, or pancakes custom-shaped like starfish. At night we sipped wee drams in companionable silence around the campfire and watched sparks fly to the stars. Days ended with Liz handing out hot-out-of-the-pot cloths reminiscent of Japanese restaurants, to wash our hands and face – all part of the Batstar promise of “five-star service, billion-star view.”

But our guides’ true competency played out on the water that first day of paddling, when we opted to explore the outer rim of Effingham Island with its 100-metre-high cliffs and paddle through sea arches, only to find we’d slipped from sunshine into an unnerving wall of thick fog. Next landfall, Japan, and the Pacific swell was building. While the Broken Group’s great appeal is its protected waters for first-time paddlers and open ocean for veteran kayakers, the weather can change from calm to storm in less than an hour. I was grateful we were with guides. Natalie herded us into a tight pod and we made for more protected Dicebox, that day’s lunch spot – peering like Mr. Magoo, barely able to see our kayak’s bow let alone an island.

Once home to nine longhouses, Dicebox today draws kayakers to explore on foot the wave-swept cave whose ocean garden floors are thick with starfish, sea urchins and lipstick-pink lichens. The Tseshaht people called this beach A:ts’:a:tsophshil, meaning “when you’re there it’s so beautiful that you don’t want to leave.”

I wondered what the Tseshaht called Wower Channel, our afternoon paddle alongside a Steller and California sea lion haulout, where hundreds of giant pinnipeds – what Blake calls “eight-year-old bully boys” – weighing up to 900 kilos, groaned, roared, burped and barked fishy-breathed testosterone. “Don’t make eye contact,” I urged Jennifer, paddling in the bow seat.

“Wow! It doesn’t get much better than that,” Jennifer called back over her shoulder as we left the bully boys behind and paddled on into Coaster Channel and back toward camp. “Whale at 2 o’clock!” called Stan. A white flash of belly. Nothing. And then the telltale, heart-shaped spout of a 30-tonne great grey, spraying his valentine from two blowholes 12 metres into the sky. Some 25,000 grey whales migrate north to their summer home in Alaska, and the Broken islands lie smack in the middle of their route. Resident whales, like this one, are visible year-round.

Only Day One, and we were definitely off the grid.

For five glorious September days now, we’ve had the Broken Group almost to ourselves: lazy picnic lunches in sheltered coves, paddling into sea caves, beachcombing for breast-shaped moon-snail casings and hiking past shell middens into an ancient Sitka spruce forest. We’ve gunkholed along rocky shorelines in our kayaks, drifting above the intertidal world of burgundy and orange batstars, pink sunstars, apple green anemones and hermit crabs. Arctic loons, great blue herons, orange-footed oystercatchers and cormorants are just some of the 230 species here. Natalie’s silent raising of her paddle overhead is our cue to stop paddling, be silent and look.

It’s hard to believe the Broken Group was once home to more than 10,000 First Nations people. But the evidence is all around us, in shell middens, in tranquil lagoons where rock-walled fish traps line the shore, in burial caves – and in Ty Marshall, a handsome apprentice Tseshaht guide who joins us halfway through the trip and shares stories his people have passed down from father to son. Traditionally his people have gathered cod, salmon and sea mammals off Keith Island. The island’s timber was used for planks and canoes. Hermit crab shells still rattle from the clothing of Tseshaht dancers.

Natalie interrupts my mental slide show. It’s time to leave island 32 to paddle back to Keith Island for our last night. Magic time: the moon is almost full. Natalie promises bioluminescence – the startling flash of millions of tiny sea creatures always present but rarely visible. We slip into our kayaks and, in the shadow of a neighbouring island, each stroke of our paddles lifts and spills lime-green stars, our hulls cutting the wine-dark sea like laser beams. We are stardust. No one speaks. As we slowly paddle back to our campsite, Natalie breaks the silence. “This is what animals do: eat, travel and sleep.”

Early the next morning, ours is the last boat to slip off the beach. Only our skid marks show we have landed. There is not a ripple on the water. By a trick of light, there is no horizon. The white clouds and blue sky are now the sea. Paddling, I glance sideways at the other kayaks. All are suspended in the Happy Place.

piggy-back paddlers

Not a camper? Check out Mothership kayaking from historic Columbia III.

“The Columbia is coming!” was the welcome cry along B.C.’s coast early in the last century, when a series of stout ships operating under the Anglican church’s Columbia Coast Mission served isolated logging camps, lighthouses, floating homes and First Nations villages, bringing medical help, religious services, Christmas parties and cartoons (an enticement to visit the dentist). Today the cry still goes up, but from kayakers as they paddle around a remote rocky bluff to see the waiting Columbia III, a handsomely restored 21-metre vessel now operated by the Campbell family as Mothership Adventures.

Why this company: To explore the pristine wilderness destinations of Desolation Sound, Broughton Archipelego, Johnstone Strait and the Great Bear Rainforest from the comfort of a mothership, knowing that after a day’s kayaking there are hot showers, freshly brewed organic coffee, Fern’s gourmet dinners with wine in a cozy salon — and a dry bed in one’s own cabin.

Comfort and security for novice kayakers aside, a mothership also equals unique experiences for hard-core sea kayakers. The ship repositions daily for a greater variety of wilderness than camping kayakers can hope to cover. Columbia can also easily access remote stretches of rugged coastline and steep-sided, glacial-carved fiords expedition kayakers avoid (knowing there is nowhere to camp or haul out in an emergency). “We never backtrack,” says Ross Campbell, former coastal logging helicopter pilot and current owner/captain, who knows just where to position guests for their best chance to see pods of 30 orcas in the Broughton Archipelago or beachcombing bears in the seldom-visited Great Bear Rainforest. And while most guests want to paddle rain or shine, they can always opt to stay on board with a book from the ship’s well-stocked library, or to chat with Ross in the wheelhouse as he navigates the many islands and inlets, always remaining out of sight and hearing of the paddlers.

Details pay off: Personal kayaking gear is neatly stowed under cover on the aft deck; a mini-crane system quickly retrieves the double Necky kayaks from the roof; professional sea kayak guides Miray and her partner Luke, born and bred on the West Coast and passionate about their work, help guests embark off the broad stern swim grid — managing the tricky balance between professional service and relaxed informality just right. As one visitor put it: “First class people running a first class operation.”

Day trips can include paddles up river estuaries past lush grassy meadows, lake swims, walks to abandoned native villages, picnic lunches and fresh crab feasts. Wildlife is everywhere. Brightly coloured intertidal life clings to the surf-swept rocks; sea otters and seals play in the kelp beds; osprey and eagles laze overhead and, with luck, wolves or a grizzly lope along a beach. At night, a Celtic tune or two from Luke and Miray and much laughter at anchor in a remote cove, lulled by the cradle that is Columbia III.

Who should go: Beginners and up.

Tips: Book Vancouver to Bella Bella flight early — for cheaper fare (and to guarantee a seat). Take waterproof, not waterrepellant, rain gear; technical inner clothes wick sweat.

Basics: June to October, depending on destination (e.g., Great Bear Rainforest — August and September only). Departures from Campbell River, Port McNeill and Bella Bella. All-inclusive rates (gear, accommodation, guides, meals, wine) run from $1,900 for four nights to $2,850 for six. Themed tours (historical, photographic, natural history) run two, four or six nights ($690 to $2,850). 1-888-833-8887; www.mothershipadventures.com

island fix-you uppers

Why this company: Batstar sets the standard for B.C.’s kayak touring industry; co-owner Blake Johnson is past president of the Sea Kayaking Guides’ Alliance of B.C. Batstar uses the best gear, pays top wages and benefits and rotates staff to avoid burnout.

Details pay off: B&B overnights both before and after each trip allow guests to re-pack gear into supplied dry sacks. Chartering a water taxi back to Port Alberni at trip’s end cuts travel time in half. Only Batstar guests have exclusive use of Keith Island, ancestral site of the Tseshaht Band (a big plus in peak season with only eight campsites in Broken Group).

Who should go: Beginners and up

Tips: Pack everything on Batstar’s excellent gear list; all kayaking, camping and kitchen equipment is provided. September expeditions mean less fog and rain than in summer, fewer kayakers.

Basics: Weekly, May to October. $1,689/person; eight guests, two guides. 1-877-449-1230; www.batstar.com

In “Canada’s Provence,” the five major food groups are fresh, local, sustainable, seasonal and organic

by Jeff Bateman

Sighs of contentment rise and fall in steady waves as one score and 10 fortunate souls tuck into the fruits of the Cowichan Valley. A collection of leading chefs from this rapidly emerging culinary region has pooled its talents to raise funds for Providence Farm, a 160-hectare spread in the Vancouver Island countryside east of Duncan. For a century, the historic property was run as a boarding school by the Sisters of St. Ann. Today it serves as a therapeutic retreat for those with physical and mental disabilities, where a central part of community life is horticultural therapy. The organic produce sold at the Duncan Farmer’s Market and Providence’s on-site store is the result of willing hands sunk deep into healing soil. In fact, the crisp greens that follow the appetizer platters of Denman Island oysters were plucked from the ground here minutes earlier. As one wag at our convivial table puts it, the salad is a classic example of the “100-metre” diet.

Chef, cookbook author and master of ceremonies Bill Jones interrupts the luncheon to toast Providence’s worthy activities and applaud the largesse of its paying customers. He then turns to the half-dozen chefs in starched whites arrayed beside him. Brad Boisvert of AmusBistro in the village of Shawnigan Lake takes a bow for the rabbit terrine now being served. The roasted butternut squash soup in the on-deck circle is courtesy of Matt Horn, chef at Cowichan Bay landmark The Masthead. Fatima Da Silva from Bistro 161 in Duncan smiles briefly at the mention of her name, then vanishes back into the kitchen to continue preparing her contribution – seared duck breast with blackberry demi-glaze. Welcome, in other words, to a high-end slow-food Cowichan feast. All the ingredients are harvested locally from land and sea and paired with wines from such fine valley vineyards as Averill Creek and Blue Grouse. Glasses are clinked and laughter bubbles up freely, but our attention remains squarely on the white china plates before us.

At the Forefront of the Island’s Culinary & Agritourism Trend

In the burgeoning world of culinary and agritourism, the Cowichan – tucked between Victoria and Nanaimo in the fertile lands on either side of the Trans-Canada – is an upstart newcomer coming on like gangbusters. While retaining its blue-collar, dirt-under-fingernail roots, this region has undergone a shift in the last 20 years as the forestry and fishing industries flounder and a new wave of farmers, restaurateurs, vintners and foodies reinvent what has traditionally been a pit stop for fast food and gasoline. A generation of daytrippers weaned on the Food Channel and equipped with discriminating palates now detours off the highway here to track down fresh-from-the-field veggies, artisan-baked goods, free-range meats and top-notch wine and cider in such pocket-sized communities as Cobble Hill, Cowichan Bay, Chemainus and Glenora.

Beautiful Fanny Bay Oysters (courtesy Edible BC)

“Bring your own shopping bags and an empty car trunk,” advises Kathy McAree, organizer of B.C.’s first culinary tourism conference early this year and a driving force in marketing local foods and wines through her Victoria-based Travel with Taste epicurean tours. “British Columbians are realizing how lucky they are. Rather than travelling to France or Italy, they’re now taking advantage of the amazing food scenes right in their own backyard.”

Fresh farmgate eggs and seasonal produce are available around many Cowichan corners, if not quite every one just yet. In the north of the valley near Ladysmith, herb-laced jellies can be purchased at Hazelwood Herb Farm and berry-laden marmalade at Yellow Point Cranberries. At the Victoria end of the Cowichan, in Cobble Hill, the tasting bar at Merridale Estate Cidery is routinely jammed with tipplers, while antibiotic-free turkey is on the takeaway menu at Mill Bay’s Stonefield Farm. The hub of the region is Duncan, and there’s nowhere better to take the local pulse than at its award-winning farmers’ market, fractured by small-town politics but thriving nonetheless on Saturday mornings in two locations: one in Duncan’s revitalized downtown core, the other up the highway at the Forestry Discovery Centre.

Certainly the Cowichan isn’t the only food-centric region in B.C. – not with emerging slow-food scenes in Pemberton, Vanderhoof, Nelson, the Gulf Islands and other pockets of the Island (notably the Comox Valley and Saanich Peninsula). But this fertile valley, protected by a horseshoe of mountains from the storms that batter the far West Coast, is both easily accessible to the province’s largest population centres and unique in its concentration of producers, chefs and culinary visionaries. “The Cowichan has the most disproportionate number of food-aware people of anywhere in Canada,” states Heidi Noble, one of the new-breed cooks and vintners making an international name for herself in the southern Okanagan. “We’ve got some amazing gems out here, but everyone’s spread out across the great divide between Osoyoos and the Shuswap. By comparison, the Cowichan is incredibly compact. It’s a great place to vacation if you want to sample amazing food and wine right from the source without piling on the mileage.”

The Pioneers

Wineries have been key to the Cowichan’s character since Zanatta bottled its first harvests in 1990. With 10 vineyards now in production, the valley has been dubbed “the new Napa” by excitable tourism reps and headline writers – just like the Okanagan, Ontario’s Niagara Peninsula, Quebec’s Eastern Townships and practically every other emergent grape-growing region north of California. Yet the Cowichan stands alone as “Canada’s Provence,” a widely quoted epithet coined by the late James Barber, the beloved food writer and ebullient host of television’s The Urban Peasant who passed away last December at his Cowichan farm with a pot of chicken stock bubbling on the stove.

As with chefs Mara Jernigan and Bill Jones before him and writer/CBC broadcaster Don Genova shortly after, Barber was among an influx of influential food mavens drawn to the Cowichan by its charm, upside potential and the fact that a small farm holding could then be purchased for not much more than a two-bedroom Vancouver condo. Shortly after planting his first garlic bulbs here in 2001, Barber coined his catchphrase for the valley in a newspaper column, and it has stuck as the area continues to grapple for a marketable identity.

“It’s the only region in Canada with what the meteorologists call a ‘maritime Mediterranean climate,’ ” explains Jones, a French-trained gourmet chef with a quick wit who leads cooking workshops at his Deerholme Farm. Like the fabled southeast region of France, the Cowichan enjoys the kind of dry summers and mild, wet winters ideal for a year-round growing season. Cowichan itself is a Coast Salish word meaning “the warm land” or “land warmed by the sun.” Lavender, sage, rosemary and basil winter nicely here, notes Jones, just as they do in Provence.

Not everyone is fond of the comparison. Jernigan is a pioneer in the West Coast Slow Food movement who, a decade ago, kick-started the Vancouver Island edition of Feast of Fields – the leading foodfest among a growing number of local seasonal events. She feels the ‘P’ word creates unduly high expectations. “I don’t think we need to be imitative,” she says from her kitchen at Fairburn Farm, where she teaches her “field to table” cooking philosophy (read: fresh, local, sustainable, seasonal and organic) during popular culinary boot camps that range from a few hours to five days. “Besides,” Jernigan adds with a laugh, “I haven’t noticed any olive trees around here lately.”

Sinclair Philip, a champion of culinary tourism locally and co-owner of the internationally celebrated Sooke Harbour House, doesn’t like the comparison game either. “We live in a beautiful part of the world with its own character and charm. We don’t have the history or culture of Provence, but then again we’re not overrun with tourists either. We need to develop our own reputation and personality. Every new farmgate and restaurant serving local food is testament to the fact that it’s happening.”

Hilary’s Cheese Co., True Grains Breads & the Udder Guy’s Ice Cream Parlour, Cowichan Bay

Postcard-perfect Cowichan Bay is a good starting point for understanding the valley both historically and in terms of what rates – by my rather proletarian, non-foodie standards – as superior comfort food: chewy ciabatta, other- worldly ginger cookies, cheese so runny it “gallops” (again citing the words of James Barber) and real-deal homemade ice cream. A rainbow arches above wind-lashed waves as the cheesemaking Abbotts hold court in their waterfront lunch spot, Hilary’s Cheese Company, renowned for its homemade soup and rich assortment of creamy, blue-veined cheeses. “Not long ago this little community was in major decline,” says Patty Abbott, a former banker and landscaper who was pulled irresistibly into the cheese business when her husband, Hilary, mastered the fine art of transforming goat and cow’s milk into thick rounds of aromatic fromage. Storefronts were boarded up. The hotel at the top of the hill was closed and the marina was in disrepair. “Now the challenge is to retain the charm of the place without it being overrun with cars and parking issues.”

Today, Cowichan Bay’s colourful main street bustles with life and retail activity as visitors and locals browse the shops and stroll the boardwalk. The renaissance can be credited in large part to Hilary’s Cheese Co., True Grain Breads and the Udder Guy’s Ice Cream Parlour. “I think we’re giving people in the Cowichan and beyond good reason to visit on a regular and even daily basis,” says True Grain’s Jonathan Knight as he expertly shapes raw dough into plump rolls ready for the ovens of his natural organic bakery. After clocking his apprenticeship in North Vancouver, Knight, 33, cycled across Canada and ran a bakery on the northern tip of Cape Breton Island before setting up shop here in May 2004. Most mornings he and a trio of fellow bakers are submerged in fragrant heat and clouds of flour by 5 a.m.; the first baguettes are steaming fresh when his doors open three hours later. Knight currently grinds heirloom Red Fife wheat imported from Saskatchewan. In keeping with his dedication to locally sourced ingredients, however, he is encouraging Island farmers such as Metchosin’s Tom Henry to experiment with crops of their own. A house special called the 30 Mile Loaf uses Henry’s first batch of wheat from last summer, and a Three Mile Loaf will be a blackboard favourite if Providence Farm follows through on its plans to grow wheat.

Artisan Breads for an Al Fresco Feast (courtesy Edible BC)

True Grain is on the site of what was once “Cow” Bay’s general store at the close of the Victorian era. The deep-water port was one of the first landfalls in the area for European settlers in the 1850s, reports Kathryn Gagnon, curator of the Cowichan Valley Museum and Archives. One of the earliest local farmers, William Chalmers Duncan, arrived on the H.M.S. Hecate in August 1862 with a group of men who came to the valley in hopes of taming the wilderness. Though the task of clearing the thickly forested land proved too arduous for most, a few pioneering families with the names Dougan, Drink- water, Chisholm, Bell and Alexander did build cabins and plant crops to feed themselves and their cattle. The local population grew in earnest with the arrival of the Esquimalt & Nanaimo rail line in the 1880s. Experiments with tobacco crops failed, but dairy farming took hold. The Cowichan Creamery was producing award-winning butter by the turn of the century, and milk shipped from Duncan’s Station (as Duncan was  then known) to Victoria and Nanaimo was considered superior to any supplied by other regions because of the Cow- ichan’s lush grass and mild climate, says  Gagnon.

Mara Jenigan & the Archers, Fairburn Farm; Lyle Young, Cowichan Bay Farm

A handful of those pioneering farms are also pillars in today’s slow-food scene. Mara Jernigan’s culinary guesthouse is located on 53-hectare Fairburn Farm, a circa-1884 spread where owners Darryl and Anthea Archer operate Canada’s only water-buffalo dairy despite a rough early ride from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (which dictated that the couple’s first 18 buffalo be destroyed for fear of mad-cow disease). It’s also possible to step back into history while negotiating the rutted road into Cowichan Bay Farm. Poultry farmer Lyle Young’s grandparents first settled the acreage in the 1920s, and the past is charmingly visible in its vintage barns and farmhouse, rusted tools nailed to the sides of outbuildings and classic automobiles housed in open-door garages. Sheep browse in the close-cropped fields and mud-spackled geese honk loudly as visitors pull up to the self-serve farm store to purchase frozen chickens and homemade sausages.

Young’s pasture-raised meat is also routinely served in the valley’s finer restaurants, most of which have hung out their shingles in recent years. Bill Jones isn’t kidding when he says burgers and below-par Chinese food were effectively the only local dine-out options back in the 1990s. Now there’s a consistently packed brewpub in downtown Duncan (the Craig Street Brew Pub) and such further-afield gems as the waterfront Genoa Bay Caf elegant Steeples Restaurant (in the former home of the Shawnigan Lake United Church) and little-known Old Road Inn, a B&B on the road to Cowichan Lake that serves “splendid, market-fresh meals,” according to Hilary Abbott.

Christophe Letard, Castro Boateng & Brother Michael, the Aerie; Dick & Georgie Clement, Hummingbird Haven Farm

The area’s one Relais & Cheaux hotel, the Aerie, has long utilized local food under its former executive chef Christophe Letard. His successor, Castro Boateng, is equally committed to all things fresh and seasonal. “Food is an art and an adventure for chefs, but we are indebted to our suppliers – they are the real heroes,” Boateng tells me one evening in the hotel’s restaurant, before serving a six-course repast that begins with a crab salad topped with basil foam and ends several dazzling hours later with a slow-poached apple from Hummingbird Haven Farm. The farm, a few minutes south on the Malahat from the hotel, was once a hobby for former auto mechanic Dick Clement and his wife, Georgie. Now, like other ambitious retirees in the region, the couple are busier than ever with a .8-hectare garden in which they grow spinach, chard, parsnips, beans, onions and heirloom tomatoes. For his part, Boateng particularly enjoys trekking into the forest with Brother Michael, a Benedictine monk at the nearby Sole Dao Monastery with an uncanny nose for chanterelle, pine, hedgehog and lobster mushrooms. Hotel guests can forage alongside the fungi specialists, then learn how to prepare their finds with lessons from the chef back at the Aerie.

Sinclair Philip, Sooke Harbour House

The other hotel on southern Vancouver Island routinely cited in the pages of CondNast Traveler is located just outside the Cowichan. But most food critics in the know cite the Sooke Harbour House’s Sinclair Philip as the regional scene’s prime mover for the past quarter-century. “Sinclair and [his wife] Frique have supported local producers from the get-go, purchased local wines in volume and generally brought credence and an international profile to the region,” is how Jernigan puts it.

Seated beside a crackling fireplace in his Sooke House art-strewn restaurant, the BC Restaurant Hall of Famer with a Ph.D in political science and an omnivore’s passion for everything from fine wine to karate serves up an hour of rapid-fire home truths. “Good things are happening here, no question, but there are growing pains,” says Philip, wrapped snugly in a jacket he picked up at Feast of Fields a few years back. “The salmon runs are drastically diminished. The dairy industry is in serious decline. Our aging farmers are wondering why they should keep working 70-hour weeks when they can sell their land to a developer and become overnight millionaires. Ten years ago we produced 10 per cent of the food we ate on Vancouver Island; today it’s six per cent. So I’m both optimistic and pessimistic about the future. I’d be a lot more positive if the government stopped focusing on promoting single crops and began to genuinely support independent small-scale farmers.”

But when the conversation shifts to food, Philip waxes poetic about what’s emerging from the Cowichan, Salt Spring Island and southern Vancouver Island as a whole. (Right outside his doors, in fact, is Whiffin Spit, where seaweed diva Diane Bernard harvests the ocean for unusual ingredients.) “The difference between 15 years ago and today is that you’ll find local food served and promoted in many top-end restaurants, such as Zambri’s and Brasserie L’ole in Victoria,” he says. “There’s a growing cachet about the word ‘Cowichan.’ And the reputation is solid because a large, enthusiastic group of dedicated people are working incredibly hard to establish slow food as a way of life in this province.”

Pulling apart one of Jonathan Knight’s crusty rolls  at the Providence Farm chef’s luncheon brings back images of the young baker hefting large sacks of grain to his mill – hard, physical labour in pursuit of artisan delights that require little effort to devour. We’re having the kind of grand, bubbly time that is commonplace when the valley’s epicurean set gathers in one place, and as plates and glasses appear and vanish in seamless succession, a warm glow suffuses the room. Local food served with skill and love from field to table with creativity, skill and a profound love of the earth. It may be more than just a recipe for a green and leafy organic future.

Getting Mobilized

Self-guided roadtrip: Vancouver Island Tourism (vancouverisland. travel); Tourism Victoria (tourismvictoria. com); Cowichan Tourism (cowichan.net/visit/ index.htm); BC Culinary Tourism Society (bcculinarytourism.com).

Guided roadtrip: Travel with Taste Tours (250-385-1527; travel withtaste.com).

Contact info for events, accommodations and producers in this article: bcaa.com/cowichan.

More info: Contemplate & Serve An Edible Journey: Exploring the Island’s Fine Food, Farms & Vineyards, by Elizabeth Levinson (TouchWood Editions, 2003; $23.95).

Lead photo: Gourmet Kayaking Weekended Wine Line-up (courtesy Edible BC) 

• ambience (whether my room is a bure on a Fijian beach or rustic backcountry escape)
• the uniqueness factor: what sets the hotel apart from its peers, and surprises and delights?
• a sense of ease, comfort and lack of pretension
• staff or owners skilled in the art of making everyone feel immediately at home, without fuss, and who go well beyond the expected in terms of hospitality
• a certain flair and attention to detail in design, decor and presentation
• value for money
• great location

Victoria’s Magnolia Hotel & Spa won me over immediately – on all counts.

Built in 1998 by developers Rourke Group Design as a labour of love, and classed as a four-diamond city boutique hotel that Conde Nast Traveler readers consistently rank as one of the top hotels in Canada, the seven-floor, 64-room Magnolia on Courtney Street is conveniently tucked amidst downtown Victoria hot spots. Floor-to-ceiling windows with views of the Inner Harbour, classic-but-relaxed decor by Vancouver-based award-winning BBA Design, Aveda toiletries (including fabulous, daily “bath bombs”), a newly reopened onsite spa, a new, independently owned restaurant off the lobby, gas fireplaces in many rooms and feather pillows so plump I’m currently scheming how to beg, borrow or steal six for at home . . . and it only gets better. Because, ultimately, what makes everything in a hotel mesh, no matter how polished its separate components, is something rather intangible….that feeling….of being at home, of feeling welcomed without the perception that it’s business as usual or a bit of a front. In other words, staff who are interesting, interested individuals and not PR clones or, worse, indifferent.

Anne and Jana at Magnolia's grand spa opening and restaurant launch

As with any business, I believe good staff are honed by the leadership at the top, and in this case that’s general manager Jana Cornelius. Jana has that rare ability to imbue any encounter

with a naturalness and quiet charm, making those she is speaking with feel like they’re the most important person in the room. And she’s the reason, I believe, that before Christmas when my teen missed the last ferry home to Vancouver from Victoria, and I phoned another hotel we’ve stayed at over the years and was told “No,” they couldn’t give my daughter a room because they didn’t have my credit card imprint (nor, apparently, any suggested alternatives), I phoned the night desk at the Magnolia.

Markus came on the line immediately: discreet, calm, the epitome of class. Yes, perhaps I was the editor of a travel magazine and website who had stayed at the hotel recently. Perhaps not. More important, I was a mother with a young teen stranded in the city at midnight. There was no “I’m sorry, ma’am, that’s the hotel’s policy.” No “I’m sorry, the manager has gone home for the day.” Just a good human being on the end of the line who took my credit card number on faith . And I’ll be forever grateful he did, as will a certain tough-but-still-sometimes-scared teenager.

The Other Victoria

I confess, I used to consider Victoria a tad staid. What a mistake! The capital’s hoppin’ these days, with one of the best microbrewery scenes in the Pacific Northwest; funky, artsy shopping, including the Lower Jo, for starters, where even the teens at our house can find something cool (a small miracle in itself); the island’s Cowichan and Comox valley foodie enclaves barely a half-hour drive away; winery tours; Travel with Taste foodie tours with Kathy McAree; the only tea-tasting bar in North America, Silk Road and Spa (book ahead for a green-tea facial); the Royal B.C. Museum, a world-class museum doing nifty things year-round, including this summer’s Treasures: the World’s Cultures from the British Museum (a global journey charting the development of civilization through art and artifacts); and the list goes on (www.tourismvictoria.com/gettinghere; www.tourismvictoria.com/vacationguide;
www.tourismvictoria.com/events; www.tourismvictoria.com/videos)

Not Your Average Steakhouse

Chef Bruce Batty: Where were you when I needed you most?

I’d have been a better mother if Bill Almeida had opened his pride and joy 10 years ago. As in, my kid would have been begging, yes, begging, for vegetables versus picking off “all those green things.” Instead, I’ve been trapped in the kitchen with the pickiest eater on the planet, pureeing veggies into soups and conniving with my own mom over chocolate cake recipes surreptitiously stuffed with zucchini. Where were you then, chef Bruce Batty? Because Prime, though ironically billed as a steakhouse (and yes, beef-lovers, its lovingly tended servings of High River, Alberta beef are superb, too), performs wonders with those “green things.” I’ll put it this way: since raving over the four side-dishes of vegetables I had at the restaurant’s Grand Opening (after two days of events I was desperate for something light), I’ve been indulging daily at home with my own makeshift version of Batty’s beefsteak tomatoes, even at breakfast. But my versions just haven’t had quite the same panache. So finally I broke down and begged for the recipe posted below. Now if I can just nab the secret behind the chef’s magic touch with asparagus — sea salt, olive oil and ?? (which I’m thinking might do wonders for green beans, too.)

Then there’s the Magnolia’s just-opened redesigned Aveda spa…already hailed as “the best spa in Victoria” by locals in-the-know. Soaring old-world ceilings, seabreeze-aqua walls – now that the weather’s finally turned Mediterranean the plan is to drag he-who-can’t-stand-his- feet-touched over the local pond for a pedicure, along with my online tech partner who apparently has a similar phobia re: anyone laying hands on his hair. (Us wives are dying to have fun with this, but more about that when we have the video in hand). I mean, hey, why should other women have all the fun - and they are having fun, with 33% of leisure travellers flocking to hotel spas in droves,  and boyfriends and husbands accounting for some 29% per cent of those spa visits annually.

Meanwhile, laptop fired up, fire on, a view of the harbour framed in the rainy background and that first succulent forkful of blue-cheese-dotted greens and gourmet “hamburger” (sans bun) giving a whole new meaning to the term “room service,” I’m already feeling spoiled rotten despite the five hours of work ahead.

***
Batty’s Beefsteak Tomatoes
2 large beefsteak tomatoes (one per person)
Sweetest onion you can get your hands on (red or white; tripiline is good), shaved super fine (use mandoline)
Blue cheese (Rosenberg or Salt Spring Island’s Blossom Blue by Moonstruck)

Dressing (makes enough for 6 tomatoes):
1 tbsp dijon
1 oz rice wine vinegar
1 oz lemon juice
pinch salt
pinch pepper
pinch of sugar
1/2 sweet onion
Blend, then slowly blend in 1/2 cup canola oil, 1/2 cup olive oil)

To prepare:
1. Slice tomatoes 1/4″ thick and fan on plate
2. Arrange arulula in middle of tomatoes and top with shaved sweet onion
3. Drizzle with dressing
4. Top with blue cheese

courtesy Kerry Banks

The sun beams down as we proceed to Lake Breeze Vineyards, which I always want to call Lake View because the panorama of Lake Okanagan from the vineyard’s veranda is so spectacular. Still, with 17 acres under vine and nine different varietals, including Pinot Blanc, Semillon, Ehrenfelser, Merlot and Cabernet Franc, this is definitely a working vineyard. (Annual production is a modest 9,000 cases, which is fairly typical of the boutique-style wineries of the Naramata Bench.) Backdropped by the view, we then take seats around a table on the balcony as Rhys Pender launches into a discussion of the art of food and wine pairing.

How to Pair Foods with Wine

The main concept behind pairings, advises Pender, is that certain elements (such as texture and flavour) in both food and wine react differently to each other, and finding the right combination of these elements makes the dining experience more enjoyable. No missteps with this demo, of course. The wines we are drinking are provided by Lake Breeze, while the food is supplied by Joy Road Catering, which has earned an excellent name for itself hosting wine-paired dinners featuring “cuisine de terroir” Wednesday and Sunday evenings throughout the summer at God’s Mountain Estate, on a cliff with another stunning view (of Skaha Lake).

As Pender explains, there are three basic methods used in wine and food pairings. One is the “weight method,” which involves pairing heavy wines with heavy food, and vice versa. For example, a pasta with a heavy red sauce would ideally be paired with a substantial Cabernet Sauvignon, while a light salad would taste best when paired with a more delicate Pinot Grigio.

The second technique is the “complimentary method,” which involves pairing similar flavours – such as duck and pinot noir, so that the gamey quality of the meat matches the earthy flavour of the wine. The third approach is the “contrast method,” in which a wine with a high acidity is used to cut through the fattiness of the meal. For example, a greasy dish such as sweet Italian sausage is paired with a dry, acidulous wine, a zesty Barbera perhaps, which cleanses the palate and lightens  the heaviness of the entrée. Pender also recounts the basic rule for dessert wines: the wine must always be sweeter than the food: a cherry port with chocolate, for example.

What to Avoid When Pairing Food with Wine

While the general approach to pairing foods and wine has relaxed, there are still some definite no-no’s. These include quaffing wines that have high acidity – or high tannins – with spicy foods “These types of wines ignite the spices. It’s like adding kerosene to the fire,” says Pender. “You want a sweeter wine in this case, to contrast with the spices.”  Another absolute no-no is pairing a tannic red, such as Cabernet Sauvignon, with fish – because it creates a metallic taste. “It’s like chewing on tinfoil,” says Pender. And, too, there are a few foods that really do not go well with wine at all. For example, “Asparagus is considered a wine killer.”

It’s All in the Tongue

A taste session follows where we learn about “tongue zones.” Apparently the human tongue has “zones” for each type of flavour it can taste, so you want to swirl the wine in your mouth so that it is flows over each section. The tip of the tongue senses sweet, the front sides sense salt, the back sides acid, and the very back bitter. And even within each of these sections, there are buds of different “intensities.” So to practice, we sample different wines after eating jelly beans, salt, tart pieces of apple and jalapeno-flavoured potato chips –  to demonstrate how wine reacts, for the better or the worse, with different flavours. In between, there are also several courses of Joy Road Catering’s offerings (and proving its reputation is justly deserved), which I later realize I have neglected to describe in any detail. Even more disconcerting is the realization that what I have scribbled in my notebook is close to illegible. Obviously, way too good a time is being had by all.

Adding to my confusion is my abundance of gear. Not only am I writing and photographing, I am also attempting to film the proceedings with a pocket-sized Kodak camcorder that I have never used before. The device is supposed to be dead simple to operate, but then I’ve heard that line before. And perhaps because of its supposed simplicity. the camcorder’s instructional manual contains virtually no instructions, its pages filled instead by useless reams of small-print guarantees, French translations and drawings of the various components.

courtesy allposters.com

Our lunch finished, we pile into the car and head for our next destination: Van Western Vineyards, a Naramata vineyard with a tight focus on brands that begin with the letter V. The roll call here includes Voluptuous (a red Bordeaux blend), Vivacious (a white blend) and Viognier, a Rhone white with a powerful, rich and complex aroma that has been likened to overripe apricots mixed with orange blossoms or acacia. The effect of orange blossoms I can guess at, but the flavour of acacia, the thorny, parasol-shaped tree that dots the African savannah, is a complete mystery.

(To be continued …)

flickr.com

We start drinking wine at 10:30 a.m. and are still drinking wine at 10:30 p.m. Not continuously mind you. There are a few breaks in between the elbow-bending sessions and some time spent travelling from one winery to the next. Because of the continuous flow of glasses, we are cautioned not to try to finish every sample, but rather to taste and then spit into a bucket. However, spitting up fine wine runs contrary to my instincts and I have trouble following this directive, which may explain why much of the weekend passes in an aromatic blur.

Naramata Unfiltered
We have come to the Okanagan to experience a condensed version of “Naramata Unfiltered,” a two-day wine education retreat offered three times annually by the Naramata Bench Winery Association (retreat@naramatabench.com), at which people learn about wine making from the ground up in seminars with owners, winemakers and growers, and sample some of the best wine and food available on the Naramata Bench. The event’s $799 ticket price includes first-class accommodation, two lunches and two gourmet dinners (all of which build on the theme of wine and food parings), plus transportation between seminars, meals and custom gum boots. The weekend concludes with a “Graduation Dinner” where participants have an opportunity to challenge their palates alongside the winemakers during a blind tasting.

courtesy naramatabench.com

Background

Since 1990, when the region’s first two wineries opened, the Naramata Bench has become one of the most desirable stretches of winery real estate in the Okanagan. Many wine tourists now consider it to be the number one destination in the Okanagan. The scenery is stunning and there is no other place in the province where can you cover as many wineries with as little time spent driving. Some enthusiasts even tour the options by bicycle. Currently, there are 22 wineries operating along or just off scenic and winding Naramata Road, all of them characterized by their intimacy and charm.

Laughing Stock Winery: Creating the Perfect Wine

Our tour begins at Laughing Stock Winery, where we meet owners David and Cynthia Enns, and Rhys Pender, a 34-year-old Aussie wine educator, wine writer, wine judge, wine consultant and the host of the Naramata Unfiltered program; all three are keen to introduce us to the art of blending and some of the winery’s award-winning vintages. Laughing Stock specializes in making a few wines well, including Pinot Gris, Chardonnay and Portfolio, its flagship Bordeaux blend. The winery has developed a cult-like following since it first opened in 2003, and its 3,000-case run sells out quickly, with about 60 per cent of it purchased online.

Before getting into the wine business, the Enns were both successful business consultants and so their winery’s name is a play on the risk of launching a winery. As David likes to say, “This winery is our vow of poverty,” Their wine labels resemble a ticker tape, showing the values of widely-held stocks on the days on which the grapes were harvested.

According to the Enns, assembling a blended wine takes finesse and judgement, so that the experience of the whole will be greater than the sum of the individual parts. Take for example, the winery’s Portfolio wine, which captured gold at the 2005 Canadian Wine Awards in the category of Meritage Red. The 2006 vintage is a combination of five Bordeaux varietals: 61% Merlot, 16% Cabernet Sauvignon, 16% Cabernet Franc, 5% Malbec and 2% Petit Verdot.

courtesy Kerry Banks

One of Laughing Stock’s newest offerings, available in both red and white versions, is Blind Trust. As its name suggests its ingredients are a secret. The wine might contain some, but not all of the following: Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Malbec, Petit Verdot. Says David: “If you are really curious about the blend, just blind taste the Blind Trust and try to guess the varietals before checking out the ingredients which are kept under the seal of the capsule.”

Educating Those Taste Buds

Listening to Rhys Pender and David Enns discuss wine and flavours is an education in itself. As Pender points out, the mouth only recognizes five taste sensations: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umamai, a name applied to a savoury, earthy, mushroomy flavour. All other flavours are received through our retro-nasal passage, which means a sharp sense of smell is a key to appreciating wine. Of course, you also need a wine lexicon to follow the experts when they begin dissecting flavours. Individual wines can have a “great mouth feel,” “big floral notes,” “a polished nose,” “fleshy, full, mid-palate taste” or a “long finish.” A long finish is highly desirable–it refers to the flavour that lingers in the mouth after you swallow the wine. By the time we conclude our visit and get ready to move on, I have a Laughing Stock long finish coating my taste buds.

To be continued …

Home of the white Spirit bear (just one of the many species that depend on the intact rainforest for survival), the Great Bear Rainforest has lately been cited as a conservation success story because of the multi-stakeholder approach taken to achieve the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement. Two million hectares are now protected against logging; outside of the protected areas Ecosystem Based Management will be implemented for logging operations; and conservation-based economies will be supported in coastal communities.

At this year’s EPIC Sustainable Living Expo, the White Bear label was launched to an environmentally tuned-in audience. A 2007 Pinot Blanc and 2008 Sauvignon Blanc were sampled by thirsty expo-goers. I had the chance to ask Sierra Club of BC’s Moira Campbell about the uniqueness of the Great Bear Rainforest, and to talk to Janelle Donn from White Bear about how the winery is helping.

Lead photo courtesy of White Bear Wines.

These circle tours are essentially self-guided roadtrips with suggested stops – from gardens, herb farms, open-air markets and farm-gate vendors and eateries to heritage sites, fairs, cheesemakers and hazelnut orchards. The idea is to  visit multiple farms in a single day (or two) and enjoy the best each has to offer. At each destination, samplings, tastings and behind-the-scenes tours may also be offered.

Participating regions include:

• Langley
• Mission
• Maple Ridge / Pitt Meadows
• Chilliwack
• Abbotsford
• Harrison / Agassiz

All of which are 30 to 90 minutes away from downtown Vancouver.

I recently checked out the Harrison/Agassiz Circle Farm Tour, which wends across the mountain-rimmed countryside to the amazing Tulips of the Valley Festival. (Unfortunately, there’s a super-short timeframe for catching this orgy of colour due to the greenhouse/tulip lifecycle.) From there I zipped over to historic Kilby, on to  Farm House Natural Cheeses,  Limbert Mountain Farm, the Back Porch (for pottery & roasted coffee) and, finally, Canadian Hazelnuts. And I came home loaded with local goodies, from chili-pepper-lime dark chocolate to rooibos tea and beer-nut hazelnuts. My only regret was not stopping in to pick up some Farm House cheddar, which is currently enjoying legendary status among restaurant-goers in Vancouver.

You can download brochures for each tour online to plan your day accordingly. Or, contact any of the stops by phone or email ahead of time to arrange tours upon arrival.

1. Revelstoked – Selkirk Mountain Experience

In the 23 years since Swiss mountain guide Ruedi Beglinger stumbled across an imposing slab of the Alps north of Revelstoke, he has steadily transformed his Swiss-chalet-style lodge into a modern mountainside hotel.

The latest additions – a propane-powered shower room, micro-hydro-generated electricity throughout and Wi-Fi – only complement the old standbys like indoor toilets, a wood-fired sauna and chef-prepared meals (including a tabletop of sushi, “a guest favourite”). Equally sought after: the chance to follow in Beglinger’s tracks, given that the Selkirk Mountain Experience means making as many turns and bagging as many peaks as possible. From $1,890 per week. 250-837- 2381; selkirkexperience.com

2. Whistler’s Wild Side – Callaghan Country Wilderness Adventures

Well before 50 km of ski trails were built to host the 2010 Olympics’ cross-country and biathlon events, the Callaghan Valley, south of Whistler, was a stellar – if undeveloped – backcountry skiing destination. And now, Callaghan Lodge is a winter Shangri-La. A short ski or snowcat ride from the road, the lodge has added 42 km of private, packed, ski and snowshoe trails, plus tobogganing and backcountry skiing out its back door – a diversity of activities that makes it well suited for group get-togethers. It’s also the closest thing to a traditional hotel among B.C.’s backcountry lodges, offering four room options (standard with shared bathroom to superior with private bath and family style suites). From $199 per person, per night. 604-932-6696; callaghancountry.com

3. Peak & Bowl Paradise – Purcell Mountain Lodge

Unwilling to risk its crown as the most palatial backcountry ecolodge in the province, Purcell recently underwent an interior facelift. Now, after a hard day’s giddy pleasure exploring rolling meadows and glades in the mountains west of Golden, skiers snuggle into bathrobes in rooms featuring fresh, mountain-classic decor, complete with in-room sinks (with hot water). A sauna and three shared bathrooms with steaming showers and a stand-alone chalet for privacy-loving couples or families are also new. As always, though, there’s no pressure to keep up with the Joneses, assures lodge rep Petra Musick. Whether snowshoeing, telemarking, touring or alpine skiing in guided groups divided by skill level, R&R is most definitely “part of the package.” Three-day private rooms, from $1,460 per person. 250-344- 2639; purcellmountainlodge.com

4. Undo This Snowbelt – Sol Mountain Touring

One of the relative newcomers on B.C.’s backcountry-lodge scene, Sol Mountain doesn’t disappoint, with indoor plumbing, showers, a cozy living room and a relaxation-stretching zone. The three-storey lodge, perched invitingly in the Monashees near Nakusp, is a particularly “great option for couples,” notes owner Aaron Cooperman, thanks to private double rooms – a rarity on the backcountry circuit. Other popular draws: a hearty, locally sourced menu with fresh Okanagan and Shuswap produce (flown in with guests weekly), as well as deep snow, including fresh powder almost daily. One week stays, $2,150 per person. 250-674-3707; solmountain.com

5. Agog at Magog – Mount Assiniboine Lodge

In 1928, the Canadian Pacific Railway built a lodge on the shores of Lake Magog, with the Matterhorn of the Rockies – Mount Assiniboine – dominating the view. And no wonder. Though recently modernized, the lodge has remained true to its wilderness setting, boasting spectacular views, “green power” from a nearby stream, running water in the kitchen, a sauna cabin with hot showers and new, individual cabins heated and lit with propane. Hearty fare in mountain-guide-sized portions is served communally at three massive tables. Easy access to the light powder the Rockies are known for by helicopter or snowshoe – plus plenty of intermediate ski terrain and multiple trip lengths – also help make the Assiniboine a smart pick for backcountry first-timers. From $220 per person, per night. 403-678-2883; assiniboinelodge.com

I rode a bus to the University of B.C. campus and then descended down Trail 6. There are several routes that will get you to the beach, but Trail 6 is the most spectacular. I remember taking Trail 6 back in the late 1970s when I first came out to Vancouver from Toronto and being blown away by the massive trees and the first breathtaking view of the vast expanse of sand and the crashing waves. It was like stumbling into a secret world. Of course in those days, Wreck Beach was something of a secret world, and one that aroused considerable suspicion, and perhaps a little envy. Some Vancouver politicians wanted to shut Wreck down. The most vocal anti-nude campaigner was a deep-voiced Pentecostal preacher and alderwoman named Bernice Gerard, who claimed that the naked sun-bathers would have a detrimental moral effect on students at the nearby University of B.C. I guess she wasn’t familiar with the school’s Engineering Department.   

In those days there were no apartment complexes encircling the crest of the hill and no picturesque wooden stairway to guide you to the bottom. You had to clamber down an overgrown dirt trail and, if I recall correctly, you also had to swing on a rope to traverse one section. It’s much more civilized today. There is a large coloured map at the top of Trail 6 that tells you “You Are Here,” and other signs telling you what you can’t do, such as walking your dog on the beach between March and September. There’s even a sign posted at the halfway mark that tells the people coming up when they have to put on their clothes.

I was introduced to Wreck Beach by my friend Mike, another transplanted Torontonian, who went there virtually every day during the summer. It was like a religious act with him. He would take a journal and scribble his thoughts. He called the beach “his office.” I didn’t go down to Wreck to write. I just loved the atmosphere. This was the best beach in the city: big waves, big sand, big sky and big blue herons. In fact, when you were down there you never felt like you were close to an urban centre. Wreck Beach was a place that simply couldn’t exist anywhere else in Canada and most definitely not in uptight Presbyterian Toronto. It was part of the frontier feeling that still existed in Vancouver back then. The beach epitomized a sense of freedom that I found completely captivating.

Then again, Wreck Beach boasted other visual delights beyond the local flora and fauna. (Actually, there were probably more visual horrors, but I have erased those from my mind.) One sight that still occupies a prominent place in my memory was the mirage-like appearance of a beautiful tanned and topless brunette strolling up the beach with a tray of aquamarine-coloured drinks in her hand. The blue drinks were catchy, but even more intriguing was the fact that she wore a leopard-skin bikini bottom. Somehow, that lone scrap of clothing made her appear a lot sexier than if she had been totally nude.

The jiggling vision of leopard lady selling alcoholic drinks from atop a tray was certainly a novelty. I’m not sure that would be the case today. In mid-summer, the beach is a buzzing outdoor emporium. There is an entire area known as Vendor’s Row, where people sell postcards, massage oils and suntan lotions, clothing, gourmet snacks and various intoxicants. If you are so inclined there are also tarot card readings, henna tattoos, body painting, wood carving, energy healing, portrait sketches, casino games and umbrella rentals.

Vendors Row was empty when I arrived this time. But to my surprise there were a couple of dozen nude or nearly nude people bivouacked in the sheltered section of the bay. Some of the men were playing Frisbee and an impromptu jam session was underway. A hardy tribe, this lot. No one seemed to mind that I had a camera, but then I didn’t linger in the nude section. Instead, I got blissfully lost in space taking photos of glittering shells, seaweed-draped rocks and the graffiti-covered searchlight towers that were installed during World War II to keep a lookout for invading Japanese. Thankfully, the old hippy haunt had not yet succumbed to gentrification. The afternoon sun was glorious and the salt air was invigorating and the hours just melted away. Seduced by the beach’s wild beauty, I stayed to watch the sun burn into the sea.

When I finally made my way up the 436 wooden steps and back to the real world, I felt just as I had 30 years before–grateful that Wreck Beach exists and glad to be living in Vancouver.

Photo Credits:

 #1, 2, 3, 4: Kerry Banks

A few days before Christmas I was tromping around downtown Vancouver, searching for some last-minute gifts. It was snowing heavily and the city was ablaze with an assortment of festive lights. I bought some presents and then took out my camera and started snapping. Everything looked new to me, partly because of the crazy weather, but also because I had not been downtown at night in awhile. That snowy evening I became a tourist in my own city, which was an odd but invigorating sensation. The photos I took revealed a different Vancouver than the one I was accustomed to seeing. For example, the image on the left is of the Sheraton Wall Centre, part of a complex of three skyscrapers in the city centre. On its side there is a reflection of One Wall Centre, another tower with black glazing that Vancouver’s City Planning Department initially opposed because of a concern that it would dominate the downtown skyline. After considerable squabbling, the city planners agreed to a compromise, allowing dark glazing to be installed on the lower half of the tower, with a lighter shade used on the upper half. But when I took this photo there was no lightness to the scene at all. It looked menacing and mysterious and very much like it belonged in Gotham City. The only thing missing was Batman.

As you can plainly see, it was 7:55 when I snapped this shot of the art-deco clock that sits atop the Vancouver Block at 736 Granville Street. As I was aiming my camera, a guy walking past said to his friend, “You know more tourists take photos of that clock than anything else in the city.” I don’t know if that’s true, but it prompted me to try to find some information about this neon landmark. Evidently, the clock dates back to 1911 and was designed by J.E. Parr and Thomas Fee, who were the most prolific Vancouver architects of the pre-World War I boom. The duo also built the Manhattan Apartments on Thurlow at Robson (1907), and the first reinforced concrete structure in Vancouver, the Europe Hotel (1908). Their patron was W. Lamont Tait, a lumber wholesaler, for whom Parr & Fee did one of the first mansions in Shaughnessy Heights, “Glen Brae” (1911), which is now the Canuck Place Children’s Hospice.

Another of the CPR’s legendary railway hotels, the present-day Hotel Vancouver, which was built in 1939, is actually the third Hotel Vancouver. The second version, constructed in 1916, was designed in a grand Italianate revival style, and was considered one of the great hotels of the British Empire. It had several ballrooms and lounges, as well as an adjacent opera house and all the bathrooms were fitted with marble sinks and gold-plate faucetry. Until the opening of the CBC Regional Broadcast Centre in the 1970s, the offices and broadcast studios of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Vancouver bureau were on the hotel’s mezzanine floor, overlooking the corner of Hornby and Georgia. A large art-deco sound stage used for radio theatre and musical broadcasts was located on the ground floor. The preposterous 1975 thriller Russian Roulette, starring George Segal, which features a plot to assassinate Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin, staged its climactic gunfight on the hotel’s famous green rooftop, which looked like a castle battlement on the night I took this shot.

There are several huge construction projects taking place in Vancouver right now. One of the more prominent is a $400 million redevelopment of the old Hotel Georgia. The 1927 heritage hotel is being completely renovated and will re-emerge as a Valencia Group property, a U.S. hotelier known for its exclusive boutique properties. The new hotel will actually have fewer rooms than the Georgia, down from 313 to 170. There is also a 48-storey tower being constructed next door that will feature 155 condominiums called “The Private Residences,” which sounds anonymous and pretentious at the same time. An image of the design is draped over the site. I took a shot of it with this futuristic-looking light in the foreground that was shining a beam on the north wall of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Although this is definitely a city shot, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would place it in Vancouver.

The image being projected onto the facade of the Vancouver Art Gallery by the powerful beam of light in the previous picture was part of an installation entitled “The House of the Ghosts” by Kwakwaka’wakw artist Marianne Nicolson. The show has ended now, but while it was still running the projected image of a Big House was continuously shining on the facade, although it was only visible after sunset. That reflected the traditional Kwakwaka’wakw belief that the world of ghosts, although continuously present, is only accessible to humans at night. Though extremely modern in its medium, the techniques and subject matter used in “The House of the Ghosts” are based in the traditions of Pacific Northwest First Nations’ art. Nicolson’s creation includes stylized killer whales, wolves, owls and a ghost puppet, all believed to heal the sick and revive the dead. Also included is the Sisiutl, a double-headed serpent with a human face at its centre, which appears as the crossbeam of the Gallery’s facade, reinforcing a sense of balance.

Plodding south on Burrard Street through driving snow, I came across St. Paul’s Hospital’s “Lights of Hope” display. The goal of the annual show is to raise funds for equipment, research and patient care, and it’s been quite successful. More than nine million dollars have been donated since St. Paul’s started lighting up the sky in 1998. This December, the exuberant display inspired a man who was walking past to start singing Christmas carols. That in turn caused another man, who was clearly overflowing with the holiday spirit, to punch the singer in the head three times. I witnessed no head punching when I was there, but the lights of St. Paul spoke to me as well. In this shot they look more like a painting than a photo and, like most everything else that night, completely surreal.

Photo Credits:

#1,2,3,4,5,6: Kerry Banks

In my case, the sense of discovery has been enhanced by the fact that we recently acquired a new puppy. Her name is Lulu and she is 12 weeks old and full of vim. She’s a Sheltie, like our other dog, two-year old Jack. We initially had some concerns that the pair would not get along, but Jack has managed to control his jealousy and seems grateful for a new playmate. Lulu’s first winter has exploded with a bang and it’s a hoot watching her and Jack frolic in the drifts. I have been snapping a lot of photos of the dogs and I think that their chaotic antics have opened my eyes to some experimentation with my lens. I’ve started seeing new possibilities. A few days ago, my teenage daughter and I took the two canines down to the local forest. It was Lulu’s first venture into the woods and her first time off leash. The dogs eventually wore us out, but not before we did some bonding and filled our eyes with some spectacular natural wonders.

I was born in Toronto, so this snowfall is not a complete shock. When I was a kid I can remember the snow reaching as high as the top of our front porch. We used to build snow forts on the front lawn, which quickly turned to solid ice. One year I got stuck in the entranceway of my igloo and my mother had to rush next door to get our neighbour to haul me out. I can still remember the feel of the ice penetrating through my clothing as I lay there wedged in tight. It was not a pleasant experience.

Even though I hear some Vancouverites griping about the cold, I know that they if they think this is cold, then they must have a limited experience of Canadian winter. In Toronto, you often had to contend not only with subzero temperatures, but also a biting wind full of ice granules that would rip your face to pieces. The freeze came in late November, signalling it was time to prepare the backyard hockey rink, which my father stoically prepared each year by running the hose over the lawn for nights on end. He was dedicated to the task. I can remember looking at him out there through my bedroom window, stamping his boots with water dripping from his reddened nose. When we skated on the rink we always stayed out too long and invariably froze our feet. I would come inside and stand on the kitchen vent and wait for the circulation to begin again. It came back slowly and when it did it felt like someone was jabbing needles into your skin. 

I also lived for a time in Edmonton where you had to plug your car engine into a heater at night so that it didn’t freeze solid, and where the sun went down every day before 4:00 p.m. During my one winter in Alberta I had the misfortune of working in a factory outside of town that had no heating. The place resembled an airplane hangar with open doors at each end of the building. As a concession to the shivering workers, management hung a few space heaters from the ceiling, which were next to useless as a source of warmth unless you happened to be standing directly under one. Myself and a buddy were constructing roof tresses for prefabricated houses and our work station was located next to one of the open doors. We reported to work each morning wearing hooded parkas and longjohns. We wore gloves too, but we had to take them off to perform our job, which involved stapling segments of wood together with a nail gun. You can imagine how it felt to pick up that frigid piece of metal first thing in the morning.

 So, no, I am not finding it cold here. 

As I gaze out my office window today I see that it is still snowing. The flakes are the size of sugar plums. I am sure that walking home will prove to be an adventure. Let it snow.

Photo Credits:

#1,2,3,4: Kerry Banks