Andrew Findlay is an award-winning freelance journalist who writes about adventure, travel, business, conservation issues, and culture. In the past year he’s had assignments in Norway where he wrote about the country’s oil and gas industry, Torngat Mountains National Park in Labrador, the Caribbean island of Antigua, and his backyard mountains and woods on Vancouver island.
Communities in the Pacific Northwest are essentially human settlements in logging clearcuts. Whack down trees, lay out a street grid, start framing buildings, then landscape around them. Trees were viewed […]
Words by Andrew FindlayOpening photo by Jen Groundwater
Vancouver Island has remote valleys, salmon streams, and mountainsides that, in summer, are ripe with plump huckleberries and blueberries. On paper it’s the kind of habitat grizzly bears love. Why […]
Words By Andrew FindlayPhotos By Moira Le Patourel
Terry Lewis sits in his home office, staring at a computer screen displaying a GIS map that’s a spider’s web of logging roads and contour lines. A reflective vest hangs […]
Words by Andrew FindlayFeatured photo by Chris Istace
The Beaufort Range sits temptingly in our backyard. If you’re a backcountry skier, then you’ve probably gazed at its snowy bowls and ridgelines while driving from Courtenay to Cumberland, when […]
Words & Featured Photo by Andrew FindlayGallery photo by Chris Istace
There are two basic ways to look at a forest you manage—as a tree farm or an ecosystem. To see the difference, stand on the edge of Al Hopwood’s woodlot […]
Words by Andrew FindlayOpening photo by Jarrett Lindal
There are two basic ways to look at a forest you manage—as a tree farm or an ecosystem. To see the difference, stand on the edge of Al Hopwood’s woodlot […]
Words by Andrew FindlayOpening photo by Jarrett Lindal
Land is on my mind a lot these days, as a dad and freelance journalist. I recently interviewed an old Findlay family friend, Trevor Goward. He’s a botanist who studies […]
If you stand on Saratoga Beach and look out at the water on a calm day, the Salish Sea appears silent, steady, and as timeless as the earth’s orbit. However, […]
On a sunny summer evening, Janeth Recinos served up delicious pupusas filled with shredded pork and fresh salsa from her mobile kitchen next to the Courtenay Slough. “This is real […]
Words by Andrew FindlayPhoto collage courtesy of Sue Rambow
Imagine three siblings—Cumberland, Courtenay, and Comox—who tolerate each other, but aren’t exactly brimming with mutual affection. Add in a cousin—the Comox Valley Regional District (CVRD)—who has come to live in […]
Devin Burton grew up in the Comox Valley but only recently discovered the Bevan trails, a network of paths winding through lush forest next to the Puntledge River and near […]
Running a tourism business, especially in an area as remote as Kyuquot Sound, is challenging at the best of times. When Dave Pinel bought the kayak company West Coast Expeditions […]
When my kids were younger, I logged long hours at the Rotary Skypark, going half-dizzy as they performed endless laps on the merry-go-round and other playground apparatus. Cessnas, Pipers, and […]
The stopwatch on the computer screen read four minutes and counting until the Great British Columbia ShakeOut. When the counter hit zero, I—and more than a million other BC residents—crawled […]
In 1927, it was a day like any other for Peter Bardesonno as he clocked in alongside his father Jossepi for another long shift down in the Cumberland coal mines. […]
Words by Andrew FindlayPhotos provided by Cumberland Museum & Archives
When people in the community fear getting sued for speaking freely about a controversial land development proposal, we’ve got a problem. So, in the interests of protecting the innocent, let’s […]
If there was ever a time to exercise your democratic right to vote, it’s now. Across the globe, research has shown that many millennial voters are turning away from liberal […]
If you could divide people into two categories, there would be those who spend their lives taking from the planet, and others who spend it giving back. Ruth Masters, who […]
Words by Andrew FindlayPhotos by Friends of Ruth Masters
A herd of Roosevelt Elk browses willows in a bog near the Mount Cain turnoff. Nearby, a pack of wolves lie hunched over a knoll, as still as the air […]
The map of British Columbia is festooned with splotches of green, and we’ve got the granddaddy of them all—2500sq km Strathcona Provincial Park—in our backyard. This wild piece of mountain […]
There’s a simple metric for the health of a river—can fish live in it? The Tsolum River meanders lazily through farm country north of Courtenay, giant cedars and fir overhanging […]
There are many reasons to make fun of the French–their philandering presidents, that air of cultural superiority carried around like a Louis Vuitton hand bag, and their ability to somehow […]
It was the perfect storm for backcountry success on Vancouver Island; a skier’s dream. Okay, it didn’t have to end at JJ’s but it did. My able partner […]
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