Above is the Eiffel Tower 3D-printed shoe by Continuum via Architizer. Below, 3D printed working models of Theo Jansen’s beachwalking strandbeests. I bought these for my nephews and am still trying to figure out how to assemble and attach the propellors. The main animal is printed in one piece, and yet its moving parts work perfectly. Watch Stephen Fry play with his here. Printed in New York by 3D printing house Shapeways. It’s interesting how many 3D printed objects have a sort of lattice structure, probably dictated by cost of material and laser use. And how many of the objects are miniatures.

Stephen Fry demonstrating it at 38:45:

Buy Nothing Day was launched by Vancouver’s Adbusters Magazine.

“The journey towards a sane sustainable future begins with a single step. It could all start with a personal challenge, such as this: make a vow to yourself to participate in Buy Nothing Day this year. This November 23rd, go cold turkey on consumption for 24 hours … see what happens … you just might have an unexpected, emancipatory epiphany! … Join millions of us in over 60 countries on November 23/24 and see what it feels like. Then, after Buy Nothing Day, take the next step … for generations, Christmas has been hijacked by commercial forces … this year, let’s take it back.”

My extended family did a Christmas like this a few times. My nephews were 6 and 7 years old the first time. You had to make all presents with things you found, and nothing could be bought. No bought wrapping paper either–everything had to be recycled. These are the best Christmases we ever had. Inventive, hilarious and fun.

I’m not sure that personal choice alone is going to effectively challenge consumer capitalism, but it’s worth a try. North America’s profligate spending and wastefulness is truly repellent.

Also, from a design standpoint, departing from consumerism produces the happy result of automatically creating better design. Every time. At the risk of stating the obvious, our anti-consumerist design/gift guidelines could be:

• Less is more. This is almost always true.
• Buy less and when you do buy, buy items of significantly high quality, items you’ll never tire of and that will improve with age. The expenditure is worth it, and in the end you’ll find this has actually cost you the same or less than the sum of many cheap expenditures.
• Nothing substitutes for the handmade
• Artisanal, high-quality, local production from carefully chosen materials can be far better-looking than factory-produced brand name goods or furniture (but some artisans have to stop adding busy, funky, weird detailing to everything. (3 different woods/materials in one table; curlicues.) Awkward aesthetics are wasteful too–we tire of them, so they work against longevity).
• If you must buy new, try to buy mostly things made/grown in your own town/region/country.
• Use found objects. Items with some history bring some humanity with them. So many spaces are utterly dead because they lack the marks of  their natural origins, or of the human hand, history and use. Bring a fallen tree branch into the house. Google “biophilia” to found out how seeing natural objects is beneficial to health and serenity.
• Don’t buy anything made of chipboard! Better to find solid wood items at thrift shops. At IKEA, some items are far better quality than others. Avoid anything made of cheap laminates.
• Older couches and chairs often have solid hardwood under-structures. Collect these! Instead of buying a new couch, get an old one re-sprung and re-upholstered. This also supports local labour, and you end up with a far better product with longevity; perhaps even an heirloom. Or just throw a nice blanket over the thing.
• Collage a card for a friend/relative rather than buying a present. In the long run these mean far more to people than objects do. I know I don’t want anything bought new. It’s never right.
• Old second-hand books are a fantastic present. We should support local bookstores in general.
• Enjoy your improved surroundings. They will make you happy.

Finally, a new album after ten years. Seems it’s only available on their tour merch tables right now. Beautiful album design, including the following:

More Godspeed You! graphics here

The cabin is probably the true vernacular architecture of British Columbia’s West Coast and other parts of the Pacific Northwest. Vancouver must once have had some of these buildings, thought rampant demolition and ugly development are doing their best to eradicate any trace of this architectural past. All that’s left of the cabin is the practice of attaching big cedar decks onto the imported Victorian and Edwardian and Britishy styles that sadly crowd the housing stock where I live.

Meanwhile there’s little to no building code on islands like this one in Clayoquot Sound, near Tofino. Unlike in Vancouver, with its ridiculously restrictive code and its colonial fixation on transplanted European architecture, when you’re out on the remoter parts of the coast you can do what you want. This is why so many of our best architects prefer building cabins to city houses, and we stay bereft of their influence in the city.

These photos are from a remote West Coast island where my aunt and uncle built a small, simple octagonal cabin on log posts that sit on the granite bedrock without even a concrete footing to alter the landscape. (I can only include a few details out of respect for privacy.)

Over the Labour Day weekend we sat on the deck and watched a pod of orcas hunt and jump offshore, smacking their tails on the water.

The smooth round rocks are pretty but they serve a purpose: they’re the “laundry rocks,” keeping handwashed clothes from blowing off the deck while they dry.

Ceiling and tiny skylight in the small sleeping cabin next to the main cabin – my woodworking uncle’s own design and handiwork. He’s a genius. Below, the tiny island deer are pretty tame and sneaky. No dogs or cats are allowed on the island, to protect wildlife.

Raven on deck. Also saw: kingfishers, kinglets, warblers, sandpipers, little red crossbills, bald eagles, harbour seals, harbour porpoises, orcas and grey whales.

My aunt just brought me a bottle of Left Coast Hemp Vodka which is produced here in British Columbia. There are several levels of excellent design and craft involved in it:  the vodka itself, the label, and also the distiller’s great logo, a stylized still. The maker is Victoria Spirits, a professional family-run distiller located on Vancouver Island just north of the city of Victoria. Victoria Spirits is already famous in B.C. and beyond for its very aromatic Victoria Gin—”Canada’s First Premium Gin.” I’m not sure what hemp  should taste like but the vodka is not what I expected. A friend tried it and said “it tastes like chocolate!” I don’t know about that, but it is unbelievably delicious and has a creamy texture. I think you don’t need to combine it with anything; it has a perfectly mixed taste and aftertaste. You could just chill it and serve in a martini glass, or there’s a rhubarb cocktail recipe on their blog here. I’m not sure where it’s available yet, but check the website. (This bottle was bought from the maker, a friend of my aunt’s.)

It’s so nice to see such a beautiful, clean, well-designed label come from this region. The label features the coastline of British Columbia including Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii.

[Update: The Globe and Mail has finally run the story about our trip. Wilderness guide and Globe travel writer Bruce Kirkby came along on our leg of the trip. He also took some excellent photos.]

I have been out of internet range for weeks, riding through the remote Northern Rockies on a pack horse trip. The expedition was led by Wayne Sawchuk. Wayne grew up in Northern BC, once worked as a logger and hunting guide and is now a wilderness guide and environmentalist. He spearheaded the protection of this place, and it is now known as the Muskwa-Kechika Management Area. It is one of the largest and most species-rich protected areas in North America, and it is also the ancestral Dene territory of my companion for the trip. Along with us were 5 others most of whom work in one way or another with BC’s wild areas (including one of the founders of BC’s Breeding Bird Atlas, in which birders can participate).

Many of the passes and valleys we travelled through have not been visited much, at least in recent times. But this area is part of a route known by anthropologists as the High Trail, one of the paths taken 10,000 years ago by those who travelled across the Bering Sea ice bridge from Asia to North America, back when the last ice age was receding. People travelled south along the high ridges because they are rich in game (as we observed ourselves) and because this saved them from making constant ascents and descents. Today this trail is mostly hard to access unless you go in on a trip such as Wayne’s.

It is staggering to think most empires in history were built on horseback. Have you ever packed a pack horse and then ridden all day? It is not easy. It makes an hour of boot camp seem leisurely. None of the movies show each morning’s 3-hour process of building a fire, making breakfast, packing up and striking camp, evening out the panniers and and luggage, and saddling the pack and saddle horses. Every morning we’d wake at 6:00 am; one day we broke a record by riding out of camp at 9:45. Then you ride all day, and do it all again, but in reverse order except for the fire, which always happens first.

The Northern Rockies are beautiful, quite strange and majestic. They are older than the Southern Rockies, containing rock from near the beginning of the world, long before life forms, before shells, before fossils. They come to an end just south of the Yukon border.

For more information about each photo, click to reach Flickr page.

Red pin drop shows Tuchodi Lakes, end point of 13 day trip. Dotted line above is Yukon border, and you can also just make out the yellow line of the Alaska Highway. (Green pin drop is Liard River Hot Springs; photos near bottom.) Click photo for bigger version.

Spunky, my horse for the trip. He got his name by surviving a 2 month-long pack horse trip while badly wounded in the shoulder as a foal. His mother Hazel is the pack’s lead mare, needed for keeping the pack string together, so she had to make the trip and Spunky had to go with her as he was not yet weaned.  He does have a sort of messed up front left shoulder, as you can see in the photo, but he’s fine.  The funny thing is that I asked Wayne for a spunky horse last January and Spunky is what I got.

Most of Wayne’s horses were saved from meat auctions. They get the entire long winter off, so they lead good lives. Some of them are a bit young or feral, or as Wayne diplomatically puts it, “unsophisticated.”

Curious, almost fearless cariboo approach us in the high alpine. Brian on Comet, John on Hazel. This is part of the High Trail.

Tuchodi River, Wayne answering a question about geology. In the foreground, an authentic stetson—there’s some pleasing irony in a First Nations man wearing a hat that apparently used to be known as an “Indian killer.”

Behind me on the pack string. Kailo, poet Donna Kane on Bucky, followed by Chrissy, Lock It, Mel, and way behind, Levi. Fording overflow from the Tuchodi River which was running high.

Donna riding with some of the 10 pack horses

 Moss campion at Henry Creek with striped rocks characteristic of the Rockies, which were created when ancient sedimentation was pushed high up by the collision of the earth’s plates

View from tent at Henry Creek

Dreadlocks in Percy’s mane. The horses graze wild all winter on beautiful land in Rolla BC, so at the beginning of the summer their manes are matted. I spent hours untangling their manes so as not to have to cut all the dreads out, collecting any dead hair that came out to make horsehair bracelets for the group. Interestingly the horses, though a bit wild, seem to enjoy having their manes worked on. Instead of protesting they seem to go into some sort of trance, and soon the other horses drift over to watch or line up. They seem to want the contact. I was going to be on Percy  but in the end he went to Bruce Kirkby, travel and adventure writer for the Globe and Mail and the tallest rider. I did ride him into the Sweetgrass 905 Music Festival the week before our trip, as part of Wayne’s pack-horse packing demonstration at the fest.

Lock It and Hank the day before the trip. Not shy.

My favourite of all the pack and riding horses – friendly Mel, basking in evening sun in a high alpine meadow

Fording one of many creeks, John of the BC Nature Trust on Hazel. Hazel is the lead mare, the decision maker for the pack. She usually brought up the rear. 

Brian training Comet on the trail

Lunch in alpine meadow. Lunch is whatever you pack in the morning and can fit in your saddlebags. There’s no unpacking the pack horses during the day. And usually you’re completely starving.

Spunky on the trail in a mossy valley wood

Every night the horses are let loose, with some of them hobbled and 4 of them belled so they don’t wander too far and can be found in the morning. They stay in packs so you don’t have to hobble them all. That’s Gataga with a bell on – the prettiest horse in the pack. He always looks as if he’s wearing silver eyeliner.

Percy at 9 pm on the last night in a beautiful stand of white-barked aspen. It was quiet except for the trembling of the leaves. It’s almost ridiculously mysterious in there, as if an elf from Lord of the Rings might suddenly walk by on the way to Rivendell.

Ed did very well on a very strenuous trip, partly by taking advantage of every chance to sleep off all the running. He was so camouflaged on this beach we kept tripping over him.

The famed Urs picked us up in his Twin Otter to take us from Tuchodi Lake back to Muncho Lake on the Alaska Highway. Urs came here with his wife decades ago from Switzerland and bought the Northern Rockies Lodge. He pilots most flights in this region and knows it intimately.

Approaching Muncho Lake by Twin Otter. That’s the Alaska Highway down there.

Muncho Lake

Full Moon, last night in the Rockies

Ferns and horsetail at Liard River Hot Springs

Liard River Hot Springs

Back in Fort Nelson, waiting for flight back to Vancouver. The Fort Nelson News doesn’t have a Business section. They just call that topic “Oil and Gas.” I don’t think most people in Southern B.C. have any clue that much of the NE of the province is effectively oil patch. It’s another world up there.