In 1983, at nineteen, Greg Nolan was hired (reluctantly) by his older sister’s boyfriend—a treeplanting contractor based in Northern British Columbia. His crewmates didn’t know what to think of the wide-eyed kid whose mom drove him the 750 kilometres to hook up with his first job. But within a week, Nolan was hitting the thousand-trees-a-day …

The common marine life of the transition waters and more exposed coasts of the Salish Sea are abundant and diverse: giant green anemones, amazing sea stars and thick kelp forests. This eight-fold field guide is a useful aid to coastal exploration from BC to Washington and beyond with over seventy colour photographs to help explorers identify the mo …

The Pacific Northwest coast is home to one of the most diverse displays of intertidal marine life in the world, including sponges, clams, snails, crabs, sea stars, sea anemones, jellies, fishes, seaweeds and more. The New Beachcomber’s Guide to the Pacific Northwest is a portable and easy-to-use reference for searching out and identifying the hun …

Of the settlers, prospectors, trappers, mountaineers and loggers who came to British Columbia’s remote Bute Inlet between the 1890s and the 1940s, few remained long. August Schnarr, however, trapped far up the Homathko and Southgate Rivers and logged the inlet shores from 1910 until the 1960s. An adventurous photographer, August strapped his Koda …

The poems in The Broken Face explore a sacramental, imaginative vision within contexts of crime, perception, memory and love. In this collection, Russell Thornton returns to the vital themes of intimacy and family, loss, fear and hope, bringing to each poem the essential quality of a myth or incantation. Reverent and revealing, within those familia …

To the sea, to the sea,

who or what waits here for me?

Pairing two dozen of Carol Evans’s wonderful watercolours with a lilting rhyming story by Caroline Woodward, A West Coast Summer tells of a timeless, idyllic season where “Sea salt in the air floats everywhere / and cedars smell so sweet beside the shore.” Children race bikes along sand fl …

Following on the success of their bestselling board book Hello Humpback!, the celebrated and award-winning authors Roy Henry Vickers and Robert Budd are back with One Eagle Soaring, the second volume in their exciting new series, First West Coast Books. One Eagle Soaring, a “first numbers” book, explores counting and numbers with the help of We …

The title poem in David Zieroth’s the bridge from day to night follows the speaker across the Second Narrows Bridge to North Vancouver, a well-worn moment in a daily commute that opens a window into the sublime: “from the apex / of the bridge with traffic flying / I look directly into / their deepest clefts.” Such moments occur throughout the …

Home to the 2,500-km Fossil Trail, the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, and Dinosaur Provincial Park—a UNESCO World Heritage site—the Alberta Badlands have unearthed more species of dinosaurs than anywhere else in the world and hundreds of thousands of tourists visit the fossil beds annually. Despite …

Nestled in the Strait of Georgia between British Columbia’s mainland and Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands are a hiker’s paradise, each boasting an eclectic character and an array of flora and fauna unique to the temperate climate of the southern West Coast of Canada. Discover the panoramic views, inviting beaches and friendly hospitality of t …

"At first I'm calm as the trees fall. But suddenly a rat's nest of wood, bent horizontal and cribbed into the trees above us, comes down in a rush of a hundred machine gun snaps. Trees caught in the nest flail around before hitting the ground. Our eyes dart everywhere, trying to keep track of every moment. Trees break free and swing themselves like …

In response to her brother's sudden death, Cornelia Hoogland explores the shift in gravity his dramatic absence creates. Set on the Salish Sea on Vancouver Island's east coast, Trailer Park Elegy reaches back two thousand years to the First Peoples, as well as to the brother whose delight was summers spent at Deep Bay.

Hoogland looks to her child- …

Living alone in the remote wilderness, Chris Czajkowski has given her dogs a rich life, although not without its difficulties. Often residing in areas accessible only by float plane, the dogs have encountered grizzlies and cougars, slept in the snow, hiked with packs of food and equipment, and occasionally gotten themselves into scrapes, such as be …

Still compact and the perfect size for travelling, Pacific Reef & Shore has been updated with new species, up-to-date scientific information and many brilliant photographs of the more than 300 common plants and animals found in the intertidal zone off the coast of North America—from the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, to Point Conception, California. E …

One of the most sought-out cruising areas of the Pacific Northwest, the protected waters of Desolation Sound and the surrounding network of the Discovery Islands are world-famous for their pristine and spectacular natural beauty. The interconnecting waterways encompass large tracts of accessible wilderness that entices boaters, sailors and kayakers …

A dog's tail is incredibly versatile. They use them to communicate everything from the furious, full-body wiggling "I'm so happy to see you I could burst!" to the tucked-under-the-bum "N-O-O-O! Is that the vet's office we're pulling up to?" They also keep noses warm on cold nights and conveniently sweep food off coffee tables.

Tails Don't Lie 2 is …

In the next decade, a 60-metre-high wall of compacted earth will stretch more than a kilometre across the main stem of the Peace River, causing the waters behind it to swell into a 93-square-kilometre artificial lake, drowning the best topsoil left in the BC north. The waters will swallow fifty islands and a valley that is home to farmers, ranchers …

Birding is one of the fastest-growing hobbies in North America--one in five Canadians enjoy identifying, photographing or filming birds. With easy access to coastal mountains, marshes and mudflats of the Fraser delta, temperate rainforest, and rocky shores of the Pacific Ocean, the Vancouver area is a wonderful destination for birdwatchers. Of the …

This print-on-demand title is available by request from most booksellers.

Today, it takes just a few comfortable hours to drive from Vancouver to Squamish, Whistler, or Pemberton. Regular ferry service runs between the Lower Mainland, the Sunshine Coast and Howe Sound islands, such as Bowen, Gambier and Keats. Passengers and supplies move easily t …

Is there such a thing as British Columbia culture, and if so, is there anything special about it? This is the broad question Dr. Maria Tippett answers in this work with an assured "yes!" To prove her point she looks at the careers of eight ground-breaking cultural producers in the fields of painting, aboriginal art, architecture, writing, theatre a …

Frank White started writing the story of his life as a pioneer BC truck driver in 1974 when he was only sixty. His boisterous yarn in Raincoast Chronicles about wrangling tiny trucks overloaded with huge logs down steep mountains with no brakes won the Canadian Media Club award for Best Magazine Feature and was reprinted so many times everyone urge …

This print-on-demand title is available by request from most booksellers.

When Elsie Hulsizer was little, she lived on the shores of Puget Sound in Washington where she spent the summers sailing in a small open sailboat with her parents. Her parents would always start out by sailing to windward, or against the wind, so they would have an easy ride …

A born naturalist, Ian McTaggart-Cowan grew up exploring the woods around his North Vancouver home and went on to embrace his passion and energize others with his enthusiasm and knowledge. He greatly influenced conservation and scientific documentation of nature within the province and beyond.

Ian McTaggart-Cowan contributed significantly to the Roy …

David Zieroth's Albrecht Dürer and me, an autobiographical travelogue spanning the author's journeys through central Europe, explores the transformative effect of dislocation. Inspired by and responding to art and music, history and war, architecture and place, this collection unearths knowledge that can only be realized by leaving home.

Throughout …

"Lane is a poet more of the individual, hard-hitting poem; like physical blows, he wields his pieces like small threats of intense beauty."
--Globe and Mail

Following the success of his award-winning memoir There is a Season (2004) and his bestselling novel Red Dog, Red Dog (2008), Patrick Lane felt his celebrated poetry career might be at an end an …

If wild berry foragers followed vague advice such as "berries of red and you'll soon be dead" or "berries of blue will do harm to you" imagine how many of nature's delicacies would be passed by! On the other hand, for anyone who has thought twice before popping that delicious-looking morsel into their mouth, the reality of poisonous berries growing …

The most detailed collection of North Shore hiking trails is now more comprehensive than ever!

From Horseshoe Bay and Lighthouse Park to the Baden-Powell Trail and Goldie Lake, discover the rugged beauty of the North Shore up close and on foot.

Featuring detailed information on thirty-nine routes winding through the North Shore's spectacular wilderne …

The tale begins in sixteenth-century Venice, when explorer Juan de Fuca encountered English merchant Michael Lok and relayed a fantastic story of a marine passageway that connected the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. This tale would be the catalyst for centuries of dreaming, and exacerbate English and Spanish rivalry.

The search for the fabled Northwes …

The crows pick at the waste on the asphalt.
The men push jingling shopping carts. Or stand and mimic life
in a prison yard. The wild white swan is dead. Where I caught
trout as a child, no trout swim now. The drives
and crescents gouge ravines, make creeks disappear. Where wild
baby fish run, they run the gauntlet of penned fish. They are eaten al …

Clarke had no interest in "trophy climbs" and never did ascend many of BC's highest peaks. On the other hand, he explored more virgin territory and racked up more first ascents than any other climber--perhaps more than any climber who ever lived.

Although he came to be honoured far and wide and is one of the few mountaineers to be awarded the Order …

Salt Spring, Pender, Galiano, Mayne and Saturna are the best known of the Southern Gulf Islands. Their residents value a rich food and drink heritage, and experiment busily with new foods and approaches to improve diversity and flavour, and support special diets and local sustainability. They celebrate slow foods--and slow islands; and many embrace …

Song and Spectacle, the third collection by award-winning poet Rachel Rose, is composed of fierce hymns to the particular and universal struggles of birth, passion and loss, and the paradoxical quest for non-attachment in a treacherous, unpredictable and yet deeply beloved world.

Rose delves into the world of myth, using the stories of Daphne and Pe …

The history of the Klondike, with its harrowing narratives of climbing the Chilkoot and White passes, braving the rapids of the Yukon River and striking it rich only to go broke again, has become legend. Yet there are still more untold stories that linger in the boarded-up ghost towns, forgotten wilderness cabins and along overgrown trails. Yukon h …

Tom Wayman's newest collection of poems, Dirty Snow, unflinchingly considers the impact of the Afghan War: its absence and presence in Canadians' everyday lives as citizens of a nation at war.

The collection explores Wayman's view that Canada's military intervention in a civil war between two odious sets of combatants has degraded Canadians' quality …

In September of 1959, freshly minted physician Eric Paetkau and his new bride travelled the narrow, winding road on BC's Sunshine Coast. The road suddenly ended at a twin-gabled, two-storey building perched on a bluff overlooking picturesque ocean bays dotted with islands. The young doctor gazed up at St. Mary's Hospital and thought, "this is for m …

The Kelowna Story is a comprehensive full-length history of the largest metropolitan centre outside BC's Lower Mainland, a labour of love by a leading local historian whose family roots have been entwined with Kelowna's for five generations. It embraces the full sweep of central Okanagan history, starting with the days of the S-Ookanhkchinx, who en …

Sea stars are amongst the most common and conspicuous invertebrates that thrive in the rich waters of the Pacific Northwest, from northern California to southeast Alaska. Worldwide there are more than 2,000 different species, but no other temperate region has a greater variety and abundance of these colourful and often very large echinoderms, which …

Patrick Lane is one of Canada's pre-eminent poets, winner of numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Canadian Authors Association Award, the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence and three National Magazine Awards. His distinguished career spans forty-five years and twenty-four volumes of poetry as well …

British Columbia's colourful story has been told many times, but until now no one has attempted to relate the chronicle specifically for young readers. From the gold rush to the Gumboot Navy and from "brideships" to W.A.C. Bennett, BC history comes alive in this highly illustrated and vivid account by award-winning writer and historian Daniel Franc …

"Bring me moose meat! You will not be sorry!" So says Whitehorse author and cook Michele Genest to the hunters in her circle. Wild is wonderful when it comes to Genest's creative treatments for northern viands, with exciting ideas such as moose cooked in Yukon-brewed espresso stout and finished with chocolate, lime and cilantro, Arctic char marinat …

With information on ancient native settlements, hidden campsites and everything in between, Boat Camping Haida Gwaii is a fascinating and comprehensive guide to this wild and beautiful archipelago, written especially for kayakers and other small vessel operators. The book has
a wide range of informative maps and photographs of the north, south, ea …

Winner of the 2010 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional BC Book Prize

Winner of the 2009 Lieutenant-Governor's Medal for Historical Writing

In 1909 Captain John T. Walbran published one of the most beloved and enduring of all BC books, British Columbia Coast Names. Harbour Publishing celebrates the hundredth anniversary of that landmark work by presenting th …

Those who have been following Arthur Black's award-winning publishing ventures over the past few years, or remember him from his long-running CBC radio show, Basic Black, will have come to appreciate the hilarious and unique vision of the world through the eyes of Canada's Blackest humourist. No less hilarious is his newest collection of observatio …

Parks and Nature Places Around Vancouver is a guide to the parks of Lower Mainland with special emphasis on natural history. Over forty naturalists with specializations in geology, ecology, botany, ornithology and marine life offer tips on spotting a sandhill crane, directions on where to explore amongst old-growth Douglas fir trees and beautiful w …

Dig deep into to the history of some of Victoria's most interesting areas; The Ross Bay Villa, D'Arcy Island, Rodd Hill and the Royal Jubilee Hospital. Archeologists, anthropologists, historians and heritage researchers sift through the soil to unravel the mysteries below our feet, and to explore Victoria's unique cultural landscape. Ancient artifa …

With its island-studded Inside Passage, towering fjords, open-ocean beaches, quaint villages and sparkling cities, the BC coast is known as one of the world's great maritime cruising destinations. What many travellers may not realize is that you don't need to own a yacht or go on a cruise ship to explore it. This indispensable book shows how you ca …

Mining is BC's second largest industry but you'd never know it to visit any BC bookstore. Books on logging, fishing, and tourism are there in abundance, but the subject of mining is practically untouched. As Tom Henry proves beyond a doubt in this lively volume, it is not for any lack of wonderful stories about the men and women who have been bitte …