Diary of a Wilderness Dweller by Chris Czajkowski
18.95 plus 5% gst = 19.90 CAD
Soft Cover, 209 pages
318 grams
22.8 x 15.6 x 1.7 cms
Orca Book Publishers, October 1996 Reissued by Harbour Publishing October 2008
Diary of a Wilderness Dweller by Chris Czajkowski begins: “It is two days since I left my truck at the end of a logging road twenty miles east of here. I have hiked through untracked forest and over a mountain, through country I have never seen before, to reach a point of land jutting into an un-named lake five thousand feet hight in the Coast Range of British Columbia. And yet, unbelievably, I now have rights, in our civilization’s laws, to adapt this uncompromising pile of boulders and its wind-weary trees to my own ends; I plan to build on it, single-handedly, two cabins, a business, and a life. I must be crazy”
Thus wrote Chris Czajkowski as, aged 37 years old, she arrived at an un-named location that she later called Nuk Tessli. This book spans a period of three years where first Chris lived in a tent until she erected the first cabin, finding, falling, peeling and hauling all the logs alone, then moved under the first roof while she completed (more or less) the second. Contact with the outside world was via a long hike in summer and a 4-day snowshoe trip in winter. Crazy or not, Chris made this place work for her, and eventually lived there for 23 years.
It is illustrated with Chris’s drawings.
