Synopses & Reviews
BC's Sunshine Coast is 100 miles of sublimely scenic shoreline just 40 minutes north of Vancouver. Award-winning humourist and Historian Howard White brings his ample experience as a lifelong coast denizen to bear in this fresh look at a unique place and its unique people.
The Sunshine Coast covers the waterfront in words and over 150 full-colour photographs from Gibsons, where the long-running TV series the Beachcombers was filmed, to Powell River, the largest community in the region and home to one of the world's largest pulp and paper mills. Visit Pender Harbour, where some local fishing folk still do their Saturday shopping in motorized "kicker" boats. Drop anchor in Princess Louisa Inlet, where the likes of John Barrymore and Andrew Carnegie once came to marvel at its canyon-like splendour. Stop over in Sechelt, whose name is a remnant of the shi'sha'lh or Sechelt Nation who once occupied the bulk of the Sunshine Coast territory. And sojourn in Roberts Creek, whose patron saint Harry Roberts put the Sunshine Coast on the map when he emblazoned the slogan "The Sunshine Belt" on a freight shed at the nearby steamer dock.
Join Howard White as he explores the rugged area with its reputation for being the maverick among BC's favoured south coast regions. The painters, writers, hermits, handloggers, stumpranchers, trappers, prospectors, fishers and draft dodgers met along the way will find a permanent haven in your heart.
Synopsis
British Columbia's Sunshine Coast is a sublimely scenic 160-kilometre stretch of waterfront between Howe Sound and Desolation Sound, reached by a 40-minute ferry ride from West Vancouver. Join Howard White, award-winning humorist and lifelong coast denizen, on a guided tour from Gibsons, where the long-running TV series The Beachcombers was filmed, to Powell River, the largest community in the region. Along the way, sojourn in Roberts Creek, whose patron saint, the irrepressible Harry Roberts, invented the name "Sunshine Coast." Stop over in Sechelt, named for the Shi'sha'lh or Sechelt Nation who once occupied the bulk of the Sunshine Coast territory. Follow the seriously twisty highway to visit Pender Harbour, where some local fishing folk still do their Saturday shopping in kicker boats. Drop anchor in Princess Louisa Inlet, and discover why the likes of John Barrymore and Andrew Carnegie once came to marvel at its canyon-like splendour.
With paintings by local artists, poems by local poets, tall tales by local characters, miracles by Sechelt medicine men, tips on predicting the weather, a fair share of risquE gossip about historical figures, a good mix of bold opinions and hard facts and over 150 beautiful colour photographs, The Sunshine Coast is a book to be treasured, not just by residents and visitors, but by anyone with an eye for fascinating places. First published in 1996, this fully revised edition contains updated text and all new photographs of coast life from the area's most talented photographers including Dean van't Schip and Keith Thirkell.
Synopsis
From deep rain forests to logging camps, Indian villages and bustling ports, The Sunshine Coast offers an insider's look at one of the most fascinating regions on the BC coast.
Synopsis
From deep rain forests to logging camps, Indian villages and bustling ports, "The Sunshine Coast" offers an insider' s look at one of the most fascinating regions on the BC coast.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 125) and index.
About the Author
Howard White was born in 1945 in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He was raised in a series of camps and settlements on the BC coast and never got over it. He is still to be found stuck barnacle-like to the shore at Pender Harbour, BC. He started
Raincoast Chronicles and Harbour Publishing in the early 1970s and his own books include
A Hard Man to Beat (bio),
The Men There Were Then (poems),
Spilsbury's Coast (bio),
The Accidental Airline (bio),
Patrick and the Backhoe (childrens'),
Writing in the Rain (anthology) and
The Sunshine Coast (travel). He was awarded the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History in 1989. In 2000, he completed a ten-year project,
The Encyclopedia of British Columbia. He has been awarded the Order of BC, the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Jim Douglas Publisher of the Year Award and a Honorary Doctorate of Laws Degree from the University of Victoria. In 2007, White was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has twice been runner-up in the Whisky Slough Putty Man Triathlon.
Keith Thirkell is a photographer whose work has been featured in
Beautiful British Columbia,
BC Extreme, the Vancouver
Province and the books
Sunshine & Salt Air: A Sunshine Coast Visitor's Guide and
The Sunshine Coast. He lives in Gibsons, BC.
Photographers contributing to The Sunshine Coast:
Ken Bell
Mary Cain
Paul Galinski
Tim Poole
Tim Turner
Dean vantSchip
Table of Contents
CONTENTSThe Sunshine Coast
The Gibsons Area
The Sechelt Area
The Pender Harbour Area
Jervis Inlet
The Powell River Area
INTRODUCTION
UNTIL THE 1980S the sublimely scenic 100-mile stretch of shoreline along the eastern side of Georgia Strait known as the Sunshine Coast enjoyed a blessed obscurity that allowed its forty-thousand-odd residents to indulge their oddness to the fullest. The area has a reputation for being the maverick among British Columbia's favoured south coast regions and seems to rejoice in it. In the past twelve provincial elections, the Sunshine Coast has voted against the government of the day nine times, a contrariness which has rewarded the area with some of the twistiest sections of Highway 101 north of Guatemala.
The oddball image works for geography as well as politics. It's not an island, but you have to take a ferry to get therefive different ferries if you want to see all of it. Local developers have spent years dreaming of bridges, tunnels, overland links and fast commuter ferries aimed at breaching the isolation of the Sunshine Coast while the old-time residents were just as determinedly trying to preserve it. The split between those who wish to conjoin with the growth convulsing BC's Lower Mainland just across the water and those who want to preserve the coast's quiet backwater status provides the spark that animates local politics. At one point in the early 1990s the area was served by no fewer than nine regularly published newspapers, and still there was never enough room to carry all the letters to the editor that flare up around such issues as improving the Westview-Comox ferry service or allowing the first McDonald's restaurant onto the Sechelt Peninsula.
Being neither fish nor fowl from a geographic standpoint, the Sunshine Coast lacks some of that romantic aura that attracted urban hordes to the true islands of the Gulf, leaving the area to evolve in its own way. Among those in the know it has long been seen as a haven where people might do their own thing in their own time with a minimum of interference from the outside world. This has made it a refuge for painters, writers, hermits, handloggers, stumpranchers, trappers, prospectors, fishermen, and draft dodgers of every war since the original of the Egmont Jeffries jumped ship during the 18 5 9 Pig Wars in the San Juan Islands. They and other fugitives from the twentieth century established a string of quiet little villages whose names, from Hopkins Landing to Secret Cove to Gillies Bay, reflect their salty sense of self-possession.
It took until the mid-1980s for the area's attractions to be discovered in a major way, and by the early 1990s the Sunshine Coast was the fourth fastest-growing residential area in BC, to the chagrin of many of those longtime seekers of peace and quiet. But it remains one of the few places within commuting distance of Vancouver where you can still experience some of the sights and scents of the oldtime BC coast of the steamships and the stumpranches, the float camps and the fish plants. Villages like Lund and Pender Harbour still cling to their rocky shorelines like a fringe of storm-tossed driftwood, connected by red-railed boardwalks; Gambier and Savary Island children still ride to school in sea-going schoolbuses; and tide-borne seaweed, shovelled into gunny bags and wheeled up the beach trail in the wheelbarrow, is still the fertilizer of choice for home vegetable gardens throughout the region.