Robert the Gardenerinvited Scott and Al for a visit last summer. Robert lives on the old McDame Creek road just outside of Good Hope Lake, which is located about 15 km north of the Holloway Bar Placer Mine.
One of the things you realize after meeting some of the residents of the Cassiar mountains is that the are almost entirely self-sufficient, and often have to "make do" with what is as hand. Purchase of any kind of materials or supplies is next to impossible, particularly fresh goods. Sometimes you might be able to buy a couple of litres of milk what might best be described as a "randomly-stocked: corner store, but usually a shopping trip requires a journey to Watson Lake, a one and a half hour drive north, or Dease Lake, which is a couple of hours south.
So, out of necessity, some very interesting lifestyles have evolved in this part of the country.
So, how does a person go about building a house and living in an area like this? Well, as you can probably tell from this picture, you have to be very creative and use whatever materials are at hand at the time you need them.
This isn't your average suburban house. It's pieced together from materials salvaged mainly from the Good Hope Lake landfill, which is a very good source of recyclable materials. In fact, on this trip to see Robert, we had just come from the dump and had acquired some treasures of our own - a discarded satellite dish that would soon serve as a "hat" over the Holloway Bar dragon to give it some protection from the elements.
You see, that's what it's all about. Protection from the elements. Robert's house fills that role quite nicely. The tin roof keeps the rain out, the roof and walls are insulated, the windows keep the wind from whistling through the main rooms, and there's a nice little porch out in front.
Robert is a stargazer and likes to look up into the night sky and like all of us, often wonders what's out there beyond the stars. However, he made sure that he could feed his quest for knowledge by building an observatory off of the end of his house.
If you look closely, you can see that the roof on his observatory is like a clamshell. It opens up to expose his telescope to the night sky, just like the million dollar observatories built high on mountaintops around the world to get above the haze in the city air. Robert doesn't need a mountain for his observatory because the air is so clean here - there's very little haze to look through (except for during "forest fire season" - but that's just nature at work!). So, he built it for convenience - right off the end of his house.
Ingenious! When you don't have to "keep up with the Joneses" and can see all of the uses in the materials, you can build just about anything that you need to.
