The Coffee Creek coffeehouse
What happened to the coffeehouse and resort that existed at Coffee Creek in the late 1940s and early 1950s?
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Greg Nesteroff
May 133 min read
Crawford Bay Canning and Preserving
The story of a rare jam tin from an obscure company that operated on the East Shore of Kootenay Lake in 1909.
413 views2 comments
Michael A. Cone
Mar 510 min read
The legendary Jack Lloyd: Effective, controversial, and enduring
The West Kootenay connection to a famous but divisive fishing lure.
786 views5 comments
Michael A. Cone
May 6, 20236 min read
The Nelson boathouse fire of 1915
Intrigued by a photo of the charred remains of boathouses in Nelson, Michael Cone tracks down what happened.
560 views0 comments
Michael A. Cone
Mar 30, 20237 min read
The remarkable steam launches of Captain Troup
While James W. Troup was renowned for building sternwheelers in the West Kootenay, Michael Cone recounts three steam launches he owned.
468 views2 comments
Greg Nesteroff
Oct 30, 20223 min read
The phantom miner of Crawford Bay
A ghost story from a local mine, presented for the first time in 121 years.
1,540 views0 comments
Jonathan Kalmakoff and Greg Nesteroff
Aug 4, 202114 min read
Doukhobors at Procter and Sunshine Bay
The 1918 and 1919 civic directories listed a Doukhobor beekeeping colony at Procter. Who were they?
1,442 views2 comments
Greg Nesteroff
Jun 17, 20206 min read
The Balfour store
The following memoir by Allison Holt of Victoria looks back on the store that her family ran at Balfour from about 1913-15 and 1919-45....
683 views0 comments
Greg Nesteroff
Jun 7, 20205 min read
The Housekeeping trestle
One of the chief set pieces of the movie Housekeeping, filmed in the fall of 1986 in and around Nelson and Castlegar, was a huge wooden...
2,163 views0 comments
Greg Nesteroff
Dec 28, 20193 min read
First mention of the Cody Caves
Prospector Henry Cody (1861?-1921) is said to have stumbled across the cave system near Ainsworth that bears his name in the late 1880s....
1,502 views0 comments
Greg Nesteroff
Mar 23, 201917 min read
The hotels of Pilot Bay
This week, a rare envelope from the Hotel Pilot Bay, postmarked 1897, sold on eBay for $115 US. Making it all the more appealing, it was...
3,373 views1 comment
Greg Nesteroff
Mar 17, 201916 min read
10 West Kootenay Boundary drive-in theatres
Is anything more nostalgic (at least to certain generations) than a drive-in theatre? From 1947 to 2003, at least 10 of them operated in...
6,591 views6 comments
Greg Nesteroff
Feb 28, 20197 min read
A Japanese-Canadian soldier’s grave
The most unusual military grave in the Nelson cemetery is the one seen below, which belongs to Usaku Shibuta, who died at the Balfour...
1,094 views2 comments
Greg Nesteroff
Feb 22, 20192 min read
Crystal Hall
It sounds like something out of Game of Thrones, but the evocatively-named Crystal Hall at Willow Point on Kootenay Lake was made of...
426 views1 comment
Greg Nesteroff
Feb 8, 20191 min read
First Nations faces in Procter
I bought the photo below about eight years ago. It shows a group on the lawn of the Outlet Hotel in Procter, long a popular spot for...
539 views0 comments
Greg Nesteroff
Jan 21, 20193 min read
An aquatic prodigy on Kootenay Lake
In 1923, Frances West (also known as Florence), the six-year-old daughter of Edbert West, manager of the Ogilvie elevator in Taber,...
1,371 views0 comments
Greg Nesteroff
Jan 10, 20192 min read
Clark Gable in Kuskonook?
Helena White’s 1984 booklet, Sixty Bloomin’ Years: A History of Creston, British Columbia contains this statement on page 21: “Moviegoers...
634 views0 comments
Greg Nesteroff
Jan 1, 20195 min read
Fake news, 1899: a wedding and a coffin on Kootenay Lake
The following story is completely fabricated. The names and circumstances were made up but passed off as genuine. It says something...
602 views0 comments
Greg Nesteroff
Sep 30, 20184 min read
The Balfour Bugle
At the bottom of this page is a rare copy of the debut issue of The Balfour Bugle, the newspaper published by and for convalescing...
1,470 views1 comment
Greg Nesteroff
Sep 28, 20187 min read
The Bluebell Grave
The dramatic story of the Bluebell murder, how Thomas Hammill (or Hamill, or Hammil) died near present-day Riondel on Kootenay Lake,...
2,579 views0 comments
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