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They sit, majestic, on the quiet surface of Sproat Lake on the road from Parksville to Ucluelet on Vancouver Island. Waves gently lap their hulls and turn the sunshine into dances on the underside of their massive wings. Two monstrous red and white flying boats, the largest ever in service, are the queens here. But that moniker is shattered whenever their four Wright R3350 engines roar with life. “They’re certainly not belles of the ball,” says Wayne Coulson, Chief Executive Officer of The Coulson Group, whose company Coulson Flying Tankers is the airplanes’ new owners.

Indeed not. As serene and […]

Near the eastern tip of Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula, a tiny seaside town called Conche–nestled in Martinique Bay–takes you back to a time when cod fishing ruled this island. A 20-minute walk along a new […]

How do you get a menacing 200,000-ton iceberg out of the way? You lasso it. For captains of offshore anchor handling and supply vessels off Newfoundland’s east coast, it’s just part of the job.

On our landing approach, banking low over St. John’s harbour […]

We hadn’t expected gourmet Hungarian goulash served up on Royal Doulton china. But at the Cape Scott light station on the remote northwestern tip of Vancouver Island–a place that is normally engulfed in wet […]

Heading up Highway 63 out of Fort McMurray, Alta., you are a witness to the frenzied action that is all about the oilsands. Semis, flatbeds, buses, pickup trucks and vans everywhere and gargantuan 400-tonne Caterpillar dump trucks moving with purpose […]

“I turn 100 this year,” says Priscilla Roland. “And I just feel good being a Canadian.” I’m sitting with this charming near-centenarian under the gaze of southern Alberta pioneer images that line the wall of the front room of Calgary’s Memorial Building. Her statements could equally apply to two of Canada’s western provinces this year: on Sept. 1, 1905, the Saskatchewan Act and the Alberta Act were adopted by Ottawa, carving two spanking-new Canadian provinces out of the Northwest Territories.

Priscilla was born a couple of months before that, […]

“These are my last two babies,” says Rick Smith, foreman at Parks Canada’s Ya Ha Tinda Ranch, 75 kilometres west of Sundre, in Alberta’s foothills country. A biting December wind blows off Warden Mountain to the west as he strokes the muzzles of eight-month-old colts Quill and Quigley.

It’s no coincidence both their names begin with Q. Entered in a dusty horse register kept in a 1918 cabin near the corral are the names […]

The river tug Vic Ingraham awaits its skipper at Fort Providence, N.W.T.

Sir Alexander Mackenzie never had it this good. I’m in the middle of […]