Cabin at Singing River

18.95 plus 5% gst = 19.90 CAD

Soft Cover 176 pages

225 grams

21.8  x  14.6  x  1.1  cm

Camden House September 1991                                            Reissued Raincoast Books, January 2008

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Cabin at Singing River is the story of a woman in her mid thirties who started to build a cabin a day and a half’s hike from a road, on private property surrounded by the Tweedsmuir Provincial Park in British Columbia’s Coast Mountains.  The property was owned by Trudy and Jack Turner, who had homesteaded there for 30 years, and was situated near Lonesome Lake of Ralph Edwards fame; Trudy was his daughter.

Chris had never built a cabin before, and learned from a book how to fall trees with a chainsaw.  The Turners helped her move supplies from the lake two miles away (where they had arrived by float plane), and the logs with their horses. Otherwise Chris worked alone.  The Lonesome Lake area abounds with wildlife, notably grizzly bears and Chris had many encounters with them as well as wolves.

Although she could not receive a radio signal buried deep in the mountains, on her monthly trips out for mail, Chris sent letters to Peter Gzowski’s Morningside on CBC Radio.  They became the basis for this book.

Chris departed for what she later called Nuk Tessli four years later, and the Turners moved soon afterwards.  The cabin and the homestead were destroyed in the 2004 Lonesome Lake Fire, portrayed by Chris in Wildfire in the Wilderness.

Illustrated with Chris’s drawings.