No comments about Drive Around Canadian Rockies, 2nd: Your guide to great drives. Top 25 Tours. (Drive Around - Thomas Cook).

1 comments about Frommers Vancouver & Victoria for Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)).

1. i referenced this book throughout my stay in vancouver. it came in very very handy during my stay there. before making any decisions, we checked to see what this book had to say

5 comments about The Same River Twice: A Boatman's Journey Home.

1. I read this book almost in one sitting. Micheal Burke tells a good story and gives the reader the feeling of being on the river and experiencing the beauty of situation while taking us along on his own personal journey. Very good read!



2. I guess I am lucky to be attending Univeristy of Maine at Farmington, where a lot of non fiction writing has come from recently (Gretchen Legler AND Michael Burke).
   I went to Professor Burkes reading last night and it was so fun. His book is full of humor, at least, the passages he read were. I haven't read the whole book (yet).
   But from what I heard, I am buying it and I would recommend it!



3. There is often a schism between our everyday life and our dreams of someday. Someday often stays out reach of us like an carrot on a stick until circumstances that would have allowed the dream no longer exist. Michael Burke gently opens the someday window and steps through. He takes you with him. He gives a balanced and real look at what is on the other side. He speaks with a fine voice that puts you in the raft, in his head, till you smell the wet stuff and feel the angst. He makes a case for making someday happen while you can. He tells a tale that made me look forward to the quiet part of the evening, after the kids were in bed, so I could be back on the river again. The Same River Twice is fertile ground to plant you own someday seeds in. I found it an inspriation.



4. What happens to white-water guides when they leave the rivers? Michael Burke gives us one answer: they never leave the rivers, and the rivers never leave them. Burke's story is part memoir, part "road trip," and part love story about the wild places that "can't be improved by changes." His tale of a 1991 trip down the wildest of British Columbia's rivers is one hundred percent enjoyment.
   
   Having guided seasonally since he was a college student, Burke at thirty-eight was married, a professor at a college in Maine, with a baby on the way. This ambitiously planned trip was a three-week-long pilgrimage to the places where a distant relative, Sid Barrington, had lived a life of legend on the wild rivers of long ago. Burke, along with a stranger named Max whose only qualification was availability, set out with an ancient rubber raft, a heavy load of gear, a rifle in case of bears, and jury-rigged arrangements with bush pilots. From this unpromising start, Mike and Max had a soul-stirring experience in this "humbling land."
   
   Putting in by plane to breathtaking Chutine Lake, they worked their way down glacier-fed rivers with wild names: the Chutine, the Stikine, the Sheslay, the Taku. Along the way they encountered black bears, grizzlies, moose, and on one memorable evening a wolf with two pups. Burke's deep love of the challenging terrain is evident throughout the book.
   
   Stories of the old river runner, Sid, are woven in, along with some hair-raising stories of Burke's younger days as a guide; a wild, adrenaline-saturated life that he remembers with affection at this settling-down time of life. Thoughts of his pregnant wife are with him always but he was unable to resist the pull of the river.
   
   Why do this crazy, dangerous thing? Burke writes about the meaning of memory as a defining concept; about freedom and control. But mostly it's because he loves the rivers. "Rivers," he writes, "are an experience of time. The river is more human than the ocean, limited like humans are, yet sweeping forward in its implacable way, like time itself sweeping past. We are proportioned to rivers..."
   
   Have you ever stood on the slope of a mountain and felt its age and power? Looked up into the weird blue ice of a glacier and heard its deep voice? Or even felt the edge of a river on your ankles and known that it flowed according to forces older than time? Then you should read this book. The geography is bewildering but just put in at the beginning and let the current take you to the end, rapids and all. You're sure to feel the awe and beauty of the planet's wild places. Go there, even if it's just in a book.
   
   Linda Bulger, 2008



5. This work is a delightful memoir that is a pleasure reading, starting from the first page, right along to the last word of the last page. This is the story of a man; a middle aged man at the time the story takes place, and at the same time is a history lesson, a journey of enlightenment, and a tour into one of the truly wild areas left in North America. It is also, and most importantly, a very insightful look at human nature.
   
   The author, Michael Burke, dropped out of the University of California-Berkeley, and became, through faking his lack of experience, a white water river guide. Burke has apparently been guiding now for over thirty five years. The author obviously continued his education, as he now teaches at a University, and beyond a doubt, the guy can certainly write. In 1991, when the author was 38, he found himself with a pregnant wife, two step-children, an academic career, living in Maine and driving a station wagon. Now, although the author does not admit to the fact, it is pretty obvious he is probably losing some of his hair, getting less muscle tone than he had when he was twenty, and, most importantly,(again, not really stated)is feeling rather trapped. Gosh, it does not take much of a creative leap to figure out that a gigantic mid-life crises is about to descend on this poor guy. This is okay though, at least Burke faced his crises with class, like a man, and did not go the route of gold chains around his neck, a little sports car, a poor comb-over and chase twenty year old undergrads around campus; something we see all too frequently. Rather, he returned to the roots of his youth, the river!
   
   The Same River Twice is the story of Michael Burke's journey down three rivers in the Canadian Wilderness of British Columbia. Using his old river raft, a left over from his youth, and in the company of a relative stranger, a fellow adventurer, who was chasing his own demons, the author starts on a very poorly planned adventure. The premise of the trip is to find and trace the territory traveled by distant relative of the author's, who himself was a famous river man during the Klondike glory days at the turn of the century. The author feels a connection with this long dead river man and wants to strengthen this connection with information. The story Michael tells of his trip is interwoven with stories of this old river man mixed with tales of the author's own glory days as a professional guide on some of the most famous white water rivers in North America. This three section story is wonderfully intertwined and the author has the ability to make you feel you are in all three eras with him, as he physically and mentally journeys through them.
   
   Burke's ability as a descriptive writer is truly wonderful. His true love for the wilderness, for the wild places in our planet, for wildlife, solitude and yes, danger, comes shinning through on every page. You can actually squint in your mind's eye, as you read his prose and picture what he is seeing as he writes. The author makes a point that this sort of thing, once experienced, never quite leaves your blood. Great bodies of water have been apart of our souls throughout time...once you are hooked, you are hooked for life.
   
   This work is truly a satisfying read, one of the better reads I have had in sometime now. I will quite likely give this one a second going over down the road. I must admit that I would love for this author to give us another book, telling of his adventures on the other rivers that he ran while learning his trade. The author can be quite humorous at times and I suspect was and is quite good at camp fire stories. It would be a delight to read some of them. NOTE: There seems to be a great deal of nonfiction writing coming out of Maine right now, and has been over the past few years. To be quite frank, the only thing I really knew about Maine was that they had Moose, potatoes, had a good store to order clothes from, and made good canoes...now I find the place is full of good writers...go figure.

No comments about North America's Greatest Whitetail Lodges & Outfitters: More Than 250 Prine Destinations in the U.S. & Canada (Willow Creek Guides).

2 comments about At the Water's Edge: Muskoka's Boathouses (Art & Architecture) (Art & Architecture).

1. At the water's edge

   Muskokaá Boathouses.

   This book gives the reeder a chance of dreaming back to the early yaers of the 20th century and experiance how the riche and famuose people spent there weekends and holidays. If you are intrested in old houses, especially bothouses, and architect designs this book is a must.

   This book is my best inspiration ever.

   Peter Östlund Stockholm Sweden




2. You can not longer build and live so close to the water's edge but these beauties are grandfathered in on beautiful Muskoka and Rousseau, et. al. I thought of my boyhood days on a lake in Northern Minnesota. I remember smaller and less grand boathouses where the sundappled water reflected off the rafters inside. You were really one with the water. This book captures the essence of it all--I could almost smell the water, wood, paint, varnish, canvas, wet rattan and wicker--

No comments about The Wild Coast: Volume 2: A Kayaking, Hiking and Recreational Guide for the North and Central B.C. Coast (The Wild Coast).

4 comments about Notes from The Century Before: A Journal from British Columbia (Modern Library Exploration).

1. I just read this account of the author's three month exploration of northwestern B.C. in 1966 after it was recommended as one of the best 25 books of the last 25 years by the magazine Outdoor Canada. Edward Hoagland is a real find for me. I had never heard of him before, but his description by John Updike as "America's best living essayist" is close to the mark. His descriptions of the country and the people go far to preserve the early days of this wild and untamed corner of Canada. I love to read travelogues, and this one rates right up there with the best of them.



2. Two things brought my attention to this book. 1) Edward Hoagland's introductions in well known works of Thoreau and Muir, and 2) my interest in the beautiful expanse of wildness that is British Columbia. The book might be described as "quirky," and I have to wonder whether it was an influence in the creation of the early nineties television series "Northern Exposure" (one of the few TV programs I have ever cared for). Published in 1969, it is the account of a New York* novelist become journalist in the great, wild watersheds of the Stikine and Skeena River systems, waters coursing from the Cassiar Mountains, "from sources known only from aerial photographs, some of them where nobody alive had ever been."
   *By the time the footloose essayist Hoagland recorder these images in the summer of 1966, he was already quite widely traveled, and had lived briefly in Hazelton, BC in 1960.
   Hoagland renders "portraits" of trappers, merchants, guides, clerics, bush pilots, prospectors, "discoverers", and of the waters and forests that are their homes. He himself often fades from the text, reemerging as a curious anomaly in a world unfamiliar and unusual. In northwest BC, a wilderness "the size of several Ohios" in which the majority of residents are caribou, moose, grizzlies, marmots, wolves, beaver, otter, and lynx, each of the perhaps 1000 human residents, whether Indian or white, might be considered an anomaly. The author gravitates to the old-timers, asking "a dabbler's questions that to me are fun."
   This volume is not for every reader. It is very unlike the wilderness travel accounts of Thoreau or Muir (who investigated closely a landscape's flora and geology). Hoagland's attentions here are mostly directed to the local "characters" and to the nuances of the human history of a great wilderness: "... airplanes have made mapping easier than naming nowadays. ... The surveyors of forty years ago did a much better job because they were actually on the spot. Being men of good intentions, they were glad to incorporate Indian names on their maps when they knew them." However, "it's an exceedingly accidental process ... if no Indian accompanied the mapper, or if he wasn't unusually expressive, all the native names slipped through the sieve and were lost right then and there."
   The author admits, "I'm no outdoorsman, really," but he is taken with the beauty of northern BC: "Swaying and bucking as on a life raft, we scraped over a further series of ridges and peaks. This was the highest flying we had done; we were way up with the snow so that the cabin was cold. But the sunlight washed the whole sky a milky blue. Everywhere, into the haze a hundred miles off, a crescendo of up-pointing mountains shivered and shook. A cliff fell away beneath us as we crossed the lip. ... There was no chance to watch for game; the plunging land was life enough. It was a whole earth of mountains, beyond counting or guessing at, colored stark white and rock-brown. To live is to see, and although I was sweating against my stomach, I was irradiated. These were some of the finest minutes of my life."
   Unlike most books of wilderness travel, this is not a record of the author as a man in the wilderness. It is a series of portraits of the true men and women (mostly men) of the wilderness. At Atlin Lake, for example, we meet three vigorous men in their nineties, one who came to the country during the Rush of 1899. We meet others who had first come to these mountains and rivers in the 1890's. In Hoagland's Journal from British Columbia, the century -- now centuries -- before, seem not so distant.



3. The ONLY way to really appreciate this book is to SEE THIS AREA...99% of the people will never venture into the Dease Lake region or up the Stewart-Cassier Highway or fly a hele into the Grand Canyon of the Stikine...which is so really really unbelievably sad!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
   People waste so much of their time at the Jersey Shore spending thousands for a week in filth when they could do this area for less than a trip to the beach and come home with a lifetime of memories. To anyone who has not experienced this region this book will be a very strange read indeed....BUT for those can get up off their butts, dust off their adventure side and......... get there ...this book is not only a must read but actually a return trip!!!!!!!!



4. This book is the account of noted nature essayist, Edward Hoagland, and his 2+ months spent visiting and interviewing old-timers in Northern British Columbia in 1966. It is reprinted occasionally by the Sierra Club and now has forewords by the well known naturalist David Quammen, and journalist Jon Krakauer.
   
   This is not really a nature book. It contains no descriptions of flora and fauna other than to note there are trees and various animals. So if you're looking for a Natural History of British Columbia, look elsewhere.
   
   Instead, this book is a cultural history of this are from the Klondike gold rush era of 1890 to 1966. It is not a complete history but is hit and miss depending on what village Hoagland visited and which old-timers he interviewed. This gives it a hit-and-miss form that is charming and frustrating at the same time. Charming in the sense of In Patagonia (Penguin Classics), but frustrating if you want a complete picture. Like Chatwin, Hoagland basically wanders around and does what he feels like, when he feels like doing it.
   
   Hoagland and an ex-wife lived in 1960 in Hazelton in this area and then returns in 1966 and spend most of his time north of there up to the Yukon border. He spends time in Telegraph Creek, Smithers, Atlin, Eddontenajon, and Wrangell Alaska, as well as various rivers, lakes and camps in between. If you are interested, there is an old Disney movie with a politically correct plot and the much better book, The Bears and I: Raising Three Cubs in the North Woods, which is the account of a footloose adventurer who adopts three bears on Babine Lake, which is in this same area.
   
   My knowledge of this area began in 1967 and ended when I left in 1983. This is not a comprehensive review of the people and happenings of the area. But it does give you an excellent feel for the history and people of the area.
   
   Hoagland has a clear writing style and allows the reader to get the gestalt of a situation easily. Criticisms are a lack of Natural History (a little bit more would make the book better) and the 5 or 6 mentions of the authors sexual vigor and exploits. I never did figure out what the sexual exploits of the author had to do with anything other than wonder how many STD's he acquired in his life.
   
   As other reviewers noted, this area was unique because it was the last North American wilderness where you could settle down and make a living off the land. There are other wilderness areas further North but the growing season is too short to support agriculture. Much of the British Columbia of Hoagland's essay is gone forever, locked up by environmental policy, lawsuits by the Indians (you'd better call them 'First Nations' in Canada or face a fine), and settled. But what a land and time it was and Hoagland fell in love with it as so many who visit do.

1 comments about The Insiders' Guide to Lake Superior Region.

1. This book is pretty outdated, so I don't know how accurate the information is and if places are still open and the prices won't be correct. It would be useful if you found something you were interested in and then double checked on the internet or called to get the correct information.

1 comments about Trails Illustrated Glacier, Waterton Lakes National Parks: Montana, Usa/Alberta, Canada (Trails Illustrated - Topo Maps USA).

1. This map is fantastic. Durable, easy to read, comprehensive. A must have for any serious back country enthusiasts into Glacier and Waterton.

No comments about Denver & Boulder Walks and Easy Hikes (Altitude Superguides).