(Long Read) It was the late spring of 1957. I was six, just about to turn seven. One afternoon, I was walking home from school when I suddenly began to feel pain in my legs and shoulder. Our house in the temporary Smeltersite settlement in the new town of Kitimat, British Columbia was uphill […]
I have been enthralled by the age of fighting sail since I was a boy when I read the Hornblower series and later Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin Maturin_series of novels. I am now working on a nonfiction historical investigation, set during the Georgian era Royal Navy. In a recent online discussion people were complaining how one […]
There is an interesting connection between Kitimat and Lahaina the site of the Maui fire disaster last week. After I saw the item on CBS Morning Sunday News last Sunday about the Happy Whale tracking site, I uploaded all the photos I captured of humpback whales in Douglas Channel over the past few years. Of […]
“There’s something familiar about this place.” I was on a bus tour of Kitimat’s giant $40 billion LNG Canada facility on Saturday, July 8. I’ve never been on site, but had this strange feeling I had seen it before. The LNG Canada Liguified Natural Gas project, is the largest industrial construction project in Canadian historythe […]
Masthead for Field in March 1908 In May, 1908, 114 years ago, two presumably rich, presumably British, hunters came to Kitamaat Village, hired two Haisla guides named “Frank” and “David” and went bear hunting in the Kitlope, Giltoyees and up the Kemano River. One of the two hunters, named John H. Wrigley, would later write […]
A mariner sailing from BC’s Douglas Channel to Haida Gwaii is seduced by mysterious lights on Hecate Stait, not knowing a seductive monster lurks off Aranzazu Banks. My short story Aranzazu Banks appears in the new anthology of Canadian horror and magic realism Canadian Dreadful edited by David Torcher […]
A big crowd turned out Wednesday night, January 25, 2017 for the launch of Kitimat Chronicles III, the third volume in the self published history of the Kitimat valley and region by Walter Thorne and Dirk Mendel, the follow up to the popular Kitimat Chronicles I and Kitimat Chronicles II (Good Reads links) The stories […]
In the opening short story of Haisla First Nation author Joe Starr’s collection, Nuyem Weaver, an elderly woman, the weaver, makes her last journey, by canoe, to the site of an abandoned village where the yellow cedar trees call to her so she can strip the bark and weave a new floor mat, a thlee-we […]
The salmon of wisdom The raven of war Legends from the Celtic northwest Kitimat Museum and Archives Annual General Meeting & An Illustrated Talk by Robin Rowland, beginning at 7 p.m., May 28, 2013 For most people today, the image of Wales, Ireland and England conjures up Downton Abbey, with its rolling hills and green fields dotted […]
It’s been snowing in Kitimat since Friday. With Kitimat called “Snow Valley” and the word Kitamaat meaning “people of the snow” in the language of the Tshmishian First Nation, snow in Kitimat is not usually news. The gauge at the FireHall says 91 centimetres between 6 pm Friday and 9 am Monday. Environment Canada records […]