2024 Comox Valley Collective Fall
The tent is the kind you stand up in, that families use for car camping. There’s a flat of bottled water and small barbecue grill outside, near the entrance. A […]
Words & photos by Andrew Findlay

FUNGI’S POTENTIAL ON OUR REMOTE COASTLINE
2024 Fall/Winter Strathcona Collective
Branden Walle balances on a fallen cedar, home to hemlock seedlings, moss, and countless other unseen organisms. The rainforest canopy allows dappled sunlight to flicker through. Waves can be heard […]
Words by Andrew FindlayIllustration by Lindsay Ness

AT HOME WITH RODERICK HAIG-BROWN
2024 Spring/Summer Strathcona Collective
“A river is water in its loveliest form; rivers have life and sound and movement and infinity of variation, rivers are veins of the earth through which the lifeblood returns […]
Words by Andrew FindlayPhotos courtesy of Museum at Campbell River

40 YEARS OF VOLLY PATROL
2023 Comox Valley Collective Winter
Paul Vroom grew up on Vancouver’s North Shore, ripping the slopes of Mt. Seymour. As a kid, he loved hanging out with ski patrollers. He remembers people calling them “ski […]
Words by Andrew FindlayPhotos by Jess Cavanagh

KEEP IT GREEN
Comox Valley Collective 2023 Fall
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

Migration of the Grizzlies
Strathcona Collective 2023 Spring/Summer
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

AN ICONIC TRAIL IN THE MAKING
Comox Valley Collective 2023 Spring
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 ELEVENTH HOUR FOR OLD GROWTH
Comox Valley Collective 2021 Spring
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

A TALE OF TWO WOODLOTS
2022 Comox Valley Collective Winter
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

A TALE OF TWO WOODLOTS
2022 Comox Valley Collective Winter
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

SHARING THE LAND
2022 Comox Valley Collective Summer
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 […]
Words by Andrew FindlayPhotos by Luke Phillips

THE SEA IS RISING
2022 Comox Valley Collective Spring
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, […]
Words by Andrew FindlayPhoto by Luke Phillips

SHELTER IN A NEW LAND
2021 Comox Valley Collective Fall
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

REIMAGINING REGIONAL RECREATION
Comox Valley Collective 2021 Summer
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 […]
Words by Andrew FindlayPhotos by Sara Kempner

SPEAKING FOR THE TREES
Comox Valley Collective 2020 Winter
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 […]
Words by Andrew FindlayPhoto by Jenn Dykstra

THE SUSPENSE WON’T KILL US
Comox Valley Collective 2020 Fall
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 […]
Words by Andrew FindlayPhoto by Kat Craats

IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL LAND
Comox Valley Collective 2020 Spring
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 […]
Words by Andrew FindlayPhotos by Jenn Dykstra

THE BIG ONE
Comox Valley Collective 2019 Winter
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 […]
Words by Andrew FindlayPhoto by Ron Pogue

GENERATION GAP
Comox Valley Collective 2019 Summer
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

GROUND RULES
Comox Valley Collective 2018 Winter
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 […]
Words by Andrew FindlayPhoto by Dave Ingram

VOTING FOR VITALITY
Comox Valley Collective 2018 Fall
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 […]
Words by Andrew FindlayIllustration by Ian Adams

A SELFLESS PROTECTOR OF ALL THINGS WILD
Comox Valley Collective 2018 Summer
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

THE TROUBLE WITH WOLVES
Comox Valley Collective 2018 Spring
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 […]
Words by Andrew FindlayPhotos by April Bencze

STRATHCONA PARK
Comox Valley Collective 2017 Fall
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 […]
Words by Andrew FindlayPhotos by Lisa Bettany

LOSS OF THE COMMONS
Comox Valley Collective 2017 Spring
You know the expression, “Never trust a man with a moustache?” Well the same goes for a wealthy man in a top hat. Put a group of them together in […]
Words by Andrew FindlayIllustration by Laurel Meyer

A RETURN TO LIFE
Comox Valley Collective 2016 Spring
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 […]
Words by Andrew FindlayPhotos by Dave Prothero

AGRI-BALANCE
Comox Valley Collective 2015 Fall
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 […]
Words by Andrew FindlayPhotos by Kody Kryzanowski

CUMBERLANDIA
Comox Valley Collective 2015 Summer
It’s go time. I have to drop off my Delica at the shop to get a skylight leak fixed. I was planning to sell it, but Cumberland council is about […]
Words by Andrew FindlayPhotos by Dave Prothero

VAN ISLE SKI TOURING
Comox Valley Collective 2014 Winter
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 […]
Words & Photos by
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