Some of the oldest stories in the human repertoire are a collection of ancient animal tales, which have traversed the ages, and within which a few of Aesop’s fables offer us a faint and familiar echo. Known centuries ago by Europeans travelling on the Silk Road as The Fables of Bidpai, this tapestry of stories is believed to have first originated (as far as we know) in India over 2,500 years ago in some of the Jataka Tales. That huge Pali collection […]
Author: John Zada
As far as environmental issues go, marine pollution is a serious one. Yet, the subject’s relatively low media profile is disproportionate to its reality. Several million tonnes of garbage enters the world’s oceans each year. Much of that pollution is largely out-of-sight: either invisible at the micro-level or found remotely in the middle and at […]
David Crerar, a Vancouverite, has spent decades exploring the city’s North Shore Mountains—partly as a long-distance trail and adventure runner. As Crerar became better acquainted with that section of backcountry, he found that there was little known about its mountains beyond the more popular hikes and peaks closest to the city. As a result, he […]
Adventure-writer and explorer Robert Twigger has more than a few idiosyncratic pastimes known to his readers: searching for exotic creatures, floating down rivers in inflatable rafts and making perfect omelettes. But if he had to choose one activity that ranks above all others, it would be walking. Non-stop walking. Across great, interminable, distances. He identifies […]
As a few readers may know, I’ve been working diligently for years on a non-fiction book about the Sasquatch phenomenon. The travel memoir entitled, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch, chronicles my wanderings through the British Columbia coastal communities of the Great Bear Rainforest, to hear about eyewitness encounters with […]
In 1951, British explorer Eric Shipton and his climbing team came across a set of mysterious snow tracks on Menlung Glacier, along the Nepal-Tibet border near Mount Everest. Shipton’s Sherpa colleague, Shen Tensing, told him that the tracks, which resembled a human footprint with a very large toe, belonged to a “Yeti” – a hair-covered […]
In August of 2018 I went on a weeklong camping trip with a few others to Cape Scott Provincial Park on the northwest tip of Vancouver Island. The backcountry park encapsulates a pristine and wild stretch of coastal temperate rainforest known for its beautiful trails and stunning campsites on the beach. We spent much of […]
A rise in the popularity of outdoor activities in North America, fueled by social media, has resulted in more people venturing into the backcountry to hike, ski and snowshoe. As a result, the city of Vancouver has seen a spike in the number of emergency calls from the adjacent Coast Mountains. The most common cases […]
In 2015 I attended a talk at a North Vancouver library entitled “The First Crossing of the Star Mountains of Papua New Guinea.” A geologist, David Cook, gave the lecture describing an obscure journey half a century earlier, in 1965, in which himself, five other Australians and 13 local porters made the crossing of the […]
A little over a year ago I travelled to the community of Moose Factory, near James Bay in northern Ontario, for a magazine assignment. While there I was introduced to Arthur “Archie” Hester, a 72 year-old member of Mocreebec First Nation. Archie had an amazing story: while in his youth, he had survived almost two weeks […]
