Stikine Wild - The Wilderness Years

THE PLACE AT THE END OF ALL ROADS

The place at the end of all roads was called Glenora, a long abandoned gold rush site beside the Stikine River. The dirt road ended on the rocky shore of the river. Past that point for hundreds of miles to the south, west and north, there were no roads and no people until the river finally reached Alaska, 150 miles away. It was there and beyond where we lived and raised our family for many years.

In late winter of 1976 we drove there with our four month old baby and samoyed dog in a van crammed full of everything we imagined we might need to live in the wilderness. The only village was Telegraph Creek, BC, the most remote community in all of British Columbia, Canada, several hundred miles east of Alaska and south of the Yukon. The town had no electricity, telephone or television, and was 400 miles (700 km) by gravel and dirt roads from the nearest town with a supermarket - a ten hour drive away.

Twelve miles beyond Telegraph Creek, the road simply ended by the river where a town once existed called Glenora. It was the end of all roads. We left our van there by the frozen river and went 17 miles (25 km) further down the river on the ice, to live in a tiny 8X10 foot long abandoned log cabin homestead. This is the story of our life in the Stikine wilderness, raising a family of three children, mostly living off the land, creating our own electricity, growing vegetables for the town and eventually helping develop a salmon fishery in the Stikine River wilderness by the Canada/USA boundary near Wrangell Alaska.

The wilderness in-river fishery created an international conflict between Canada and Alaska, since Alaska didn't want to share the Stikine salmon with Canada, even though most of the salmon were spawned in Canada. By that time I had become part of the small Stikine River wilderness fishery, and represented the fishermen at the Canada/USA salmon treaty negotiations, along with a representative from the Tahltan Tribal Council (the local first nation people of the Stikine region) at the Pacific Salmon Treaty talks. Together we helped find a compromise based on co- managing the salmon stocks with Alaska, eventually creating more salmon for both countries. This formed the basis for the Trans-boundary Salmon Treaty.

This story is about our family's personal adventure in the Canadian wilderness with many photographs of our life there. It also tells the largely unwritten history of the conflict between Alaska and Canada over the fishing rights to the salmon spawned in the river, and the future role of the Tahltan First Nation people controlling their own salmon resources. Later I co-managed the commercial in-river fishery with the Tahltan First Nation, which led to many other adventures and an unexpected conclusion.

The book is both a personal memoir of our family's experience, and a snapshot of that time and place in the history of this remote region of the country.