It might be hard to fully appreciate the brilliance of this performance unless you’re familiar with the vocal mannerisms of British Columbia’s Premier Christy Clark. But this mimicry is easily as good as Tiny Fey doing Sarah Palin. I’m almost sorry that Clark  and her unliberal “Liberals” will be skunked out of office in the May election because I could watch years of Caitlin Dodds doing Christy. In the Bublé bath. With rosé.

Many more videos by the Deep Rogue Ram collective here.

Very nice map of surveillance cameras in downtown Vancouver, by the Vancouver Public Space Network.

Disturbing content aside, it’s a very attractive map.

Roy Henry Vickers‘ gallery in Tofino, BC. The face of the building, similar to the style of a First Nations longhouse or “plank house,” was painted and handcarved by the artist, whose background is Haida, Heiltsuk and Tsimshian.

Historically the abundance of Western red cedar (there’s one in front of the gallery) as well as other resources led to the development of a strong West Coast aboriginal architecture, a form we now see far too seldom. There are some beautiful examples though though which I’ll include later on.

From the Canadian Encyclopedia:

“Plank houses shared a number of structural characteristics, regardless of their builders. All employed varying forms of post-and-beam construction, which typically exploited the large lengths and dimensions of the red cedar. In the south, Salish-speaking peoples developed a shed-roofed variant that was characterized by a single roof pitch that sloped from front to back. The building’s frame system consisted of massive roof beams, often more than half a metre in diameter, which spanned the width of the house and varied in length from 7.5 to 15 m. These beams were supported by two rows of posts placed about 3.5 to 4 m apart. These beams were often carved to represent important family ancestors or supernatural beings associated with the family’s history. Overlapping roof planks were laid over pole rafters attached to the roof beams. Walls were clad with wide split-cedar planks tied horizontally between paired upright poles. In spring, these planks were usually removed and transported to standing frames at summer village sites.” More here.

Below, every element of the front has been hand-carved.

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.

Seeing the above graphic on Facebook recently (source wasn’t credited) reignited my longstanding frustration over our global failure to switch (back) to hemp as a major source for textiles, paper and food. (This article is about the hemp plant, not the marijuana plant. See more comments on this at bottom.)

I use hemp fabric in my textile work, but I find it far too difficult to source. Hemp is in some ways similar to linen, though I find that it’s less wrinkly, it’s very strong, it improves with washing, and it has a more modern look. I use it as the backing for geometric quilts that I produce as well as for other purposes. But if I want to order it, I usually have to buy fabric that’s imported from China. And the selection of colours and suppliers is small.

I find hemp’s rarity extremely disturbing considering that hemp production could solve many of the environmental problems we now face. Hemp is an extremely productive plant with a small carbon and environmental footprint. Its seeds are remarkably nutritious, it produces some of the best and strongest fibre around for both textiles and paper, it is extremely insect and disease resistant (unlike cotton), and requires far less irrigation and energy to grow. And yet it has been the victim of idiotic legislation and (apparently) lobbies from competing industries.

As someone commented on Facebook about the above graphic, “With record drought and water bans throughout North America this summer, growing hemp requires a tiny fraction of the water that cotton does. So it’s a great crop in coping with the consequences of climate change.” Not to mention helping with the causes of that climate change.

On a related note, people in the developed world need to stop buying throwaway clothes made from poor fabrics with no longevity. On average, we each buy and discard 60 kg each of textiles each year, and almost all of them are made in an extremely toxic and energy-unsustainable manner. 60 kilograms! I have never understood why the textile industry gets such a free ride on this in the arena of public opinion. Elizabeth Cline’s book Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion deals with this topic. If you’re interested there is an very good Metafilter thread on this topic, full of resources.

There is a working farm near Grand Forks, BC where they have been slowly hybridizing hemp for their own local climate, and promoting hemp fabric and clothing. I have written about Joybilee Farm before. The owners also host North America’s only English-speaking hemp festival (which means there must be one in Quebec too). The two photos of hemp here are courtesy of Joybilee Farm. The photo below shows the old hand method of “rippling” hemp plants.

NOTE: for those who don’t know, the hemp used to produce textiles, paper and nutritional seeds does not contain THC or at least any amount that’s chemically significant or can produce mind-altering effects. However, it has long been suspected that the relationship between the hemp plant and the marijuana plant acted as a deterrent to the domestic hemp industry. It is worth reading this discussion by David P. West, a US plant expert and author of Fiber Wars: the Extinction of Kentucky Hemp. The discussion was commissioned by the North American Industrial Hemp Council.

Hemp growing is now technically legal in Canada, but they don’t make it easy. The Government of Canada has put out a FAQ on hemp production. If you look closely, it’s not nearly legal enough:
“Hemp production was prohibited in Canada in 1938 under the Opium and Narcotic Drug Act as part of a combined international battle against the abuse of THC and other controlled substances. Although the prohibition was relaxed briefly during World War II when traditional sources of fibres were unavailable, the prohibition was renewed after the war. Since 1961, Health Canada has allowed limited production in Canada for scientific research purposes.”

If the close relationship between hemp and marijuna is preventing serious agriculture of the former, it’s yet another reason to legalize marijuana. This post isn’t a thinly disguised personal mission to legalize pot for personal reasons (I’m allergic to it and would always rather have a cocktail). But I believe strongly in its legalization—and so do the former mayors and police chiefs of Vancouver. The fact that marijuana is B.C.’s 2nd largest industry but cannot be taxed is producing problems of epic proportions for our province. You can’t have an illegal industry of that size without experiencing high levels of organized crime, related political corruption, the distorted policy of building money-laundering casinos everywhere as a form of covert taxation, fantastically expensive police and court costs, and an empty treasury.

I have a question for people who know about this: were marijuana production to be legalized in Canada, could some of its byproducts also be used in the textile and paper industries, or are they ill-suited to that use? The marijuana crop in BC is huge yet only a portion of the plant is used in drug production. What about the rest? Anyone?

 
Hemp shirt, hemp pants by design label Kuyichi

Hemp fabric by Ecoki. This is a traditional rough milled look; hemp can also be very fine.

[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.