Peace River Country

So to that end, we hired a professional photographer, whose name was Diamond Xu, to do the photographing.

So the extended family members, like, they came from, uh, the far north of the province, up in the Peace Country, from the interior, uh, Va- as well as Vancouver and Vancouver Island.

And they, they were quite enthusiastic.

They, uh, they brought their paintings on this one Saturday in, in Burnaby, and, um, the paintings w- were, were photographed.

But the bush country of northern Alberta got hold of him, and it never quite let go.

The Peace River country, the land stretching north from Edmonton toward the Northwest Territories.

In the 1920s, this was genuine frontier.

Communities like Fort Vermillion had been there for well over a century.

There are sections where the current runs too fast for the surface to freeze solid all the way across.

There is overflow ice, water that is pushed up through cracks and refrozen in rough, uneven layers.

Wap May knew the Peace River country.

He'd flown stretches of it in better seasons, but knowing a river from altitude in the summer is different from needing it as an emergency landing surface in January of 40 below.

You couldn't plunge further into the earth at a rate...

Faster than a precision drilling rig outside of Peace County at this point.

You know what I mean? It's fascinating and you just got to watch the destruction before your eyes.

If you're still going to Tim Hortons with the idea that you are going to get 100% satisfaction when you receive your order, I tell you what, I wish you well.

My parents were from Norman Wells prior to that, and I was lucky to live there.

But then when we came to the peace country here, you know, it's very high at the time and still is like so much of the province population is growing everywhere.

But this was before a lot of the agricultural stuff just started kicking off and they just started pumping out a lot of, they have that three point zone and they just started pumping out a bunch of winter tags, youth tags, everything else.

So there's super high elk populations at the time.

Right on.

So I know in the last couple years you've done some guiding up in northern BC.

And I'm just curious, I know the country that you would have, I'm presuming, because I know the outfit that you work for, I'm presuming that the country you were elk hunting in when you were guiding was was more mountainous terrain and different terrain than what you're typically doing in the peace country for your elk hunts.

Did you find that that changed at all as far as where you were finding? Were you still able to find those hallways or is it the same program, just a little more vertical?

The kind of cold where metal burns your bare hands and your breath freezes before it gets two feet from your face.

Somewhere up north, past the Peace River country, deep in Alberta's boreal forest, a child is sick.

Then another child.

Then another.