Somewhere along the line, we went from winter to summer without really seeing spring. This weekend is the May long weekend which is, unofficially, the start of summer.
Despite my best efforts to the contrary, a newspaper for a community of 2500 or so people is not exactly the most lucrative career path, so this summer I am taking on a real job. I will be looking after the Lions Campground.
I’m doing it for a couple reasons. The first is obvious: money.
I hear you asking: aren’t you the publisher of the paper? Doesn’t that pay you lots of money?
In a word, no. (In two words: heck no.)
The last four issues have had less than two pages of ads, which means that sometimes, I’m barely making $1000 before expenses. It costs $717 to print the paper, so ….
This is not a lucrative calling. But it is an important one, so—barring a call from the New York Times asking me to be their Canadian columnist (which is about as likely as me winning the lottery, considering I have not once bought a ticket)—I am going to keep on doing this.
Over the last few months, I have had so many people come up to me and say how important it has been to have a local reporter covering events in town, and that the information on social media has been mostly garbage.
But this is a community paper, both read by and—at least in part—financially supported by, the community.
If you think having a local paper is important, can I recommend an Extreme approach. Not the concept, the band, who wrote—back in 1990 on their massive hit, ‘More than Words’: “…if you only knew/how easy it would be to show me how you feel…” Simply sign up at www.patreon.com/tumblerridgelines to show how you feel about local news.
But, while that is an important part of why I am doing this, it is not the only reason.
Spending the entire summer camping is also a big reason.
I mean, sure, it comes with requirements, like making sure the garbages don’t overflow and the bathrooms are clean and the lawn is mowed, but that’s a fair trade-off for spending the entire summer camping.
And okay, so I’m going to spend the entire summer in one spot camping, but again, that’s not that big of a deal. It’s close enough to town to have power and internet, which means I can still do the paper.
You may not know this about me, but one of my first jobs in town was looking after the campground out at Monkman Provincial Park.
Shortly after moving to Tumbler Ridge, BC Parks hit hard financial times and decided to remove all front-country infrastructure out at Monkman. That would have meant no viewing platform (also, there is no viewing platform this year; they are still working on repairs, and it will probably be 2027 before it’s open again), no bathrooms and no campground.
At the time, Kinuseo Falls was the biggest draw to the town. Dinosaurs had just been discovered. The trail system was still developing. There were no mountain bike specific trails, no museum, no dinosaur tours, no Untamed Tours and no Geopark.
If Kinuseo was not accessible, it would have been a blow to the community’s nascent tourism industry. So the Wolverine Nordic and Mountain Society (WNMS) stepped in and said “we will run the campground and maintain the front country infrastructure.”
That first year, members of the WNMS would go out to the campground for a week or two to look after the campground. But most people had real jobs.
At the time, I was mostly writing the backroad mapbooks. I didn’t have a laptop, but I had a Palm Pilot with a keyboard, and, with a stack of double A batteries, I could work from anywhere. So I spent the lion’s share of my time out at Kinuseo Falls Campground, keeping the place open.
One of my favourite parts of the job was going out and collecting fees from campers. There would be one or two groups in the campground, and it would take me three hours to do my job, as people would tell me their life stories.
I met people from the Beaverlodge area who had been camping out in the area since before there was a town. I met the person who drove the D9 cat that pushed the original logging road (following the old Monkman Pass route, now the South Grizzly Road) through to the Kinuseo Falls area. I met people from around the world, like the solo German traveller who saw a photo of Kinsueo Falls when he arrived in Vancouver. “Where is that?” He asked, but nobody knew. As he made his way up towards Alaska, he asked everywhere he stopped. “Where is this?” But nobody knew.
When he got to Dawson Creek, he asked the question and was told “It’s Kinuseo Falls, and here’s how you get there.”
So he took a day out of his Alaska trip to spend the night at the campground. “If I would have known this existed,” he lamented, “I never would have gone to Alaska. I would have spent all my time here.”
Some people want to keep this place a secret, but for me, I love watching people’s reactions as they discover the beauty that is Tumbler Ridge. Hearing about how they saw Kinsueo Falls for the first time (but not from the viewing platform. Sigh.)
More than that, it shows that we are not defined merely by what happened February 10.
Yes, that is now a part of Tumbler Ridge, but it is not all of Tumbler Ridge, and watching people discover the wonders of where we live is a reminder to me of why I moved here in the first place.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
