Life in a Northern Town

Sunday June 30 Fernie British Columbia, Canada

Tripometer 6002 miles

More on Whitefish Montana:

Our 11 day stay at Whitefish Bike Retreat was magical.  The camp has just 8 campsites,  a lodge than can hold maybe a dozen people and a small cabin. At least during our stay, the camp was mostly families with kids and the retreat hosts kids bike camps a couple days a week. We hiked and biked in the surrounding mountains and in around the many nearby beautiful lakes.  The town of Whitefish is lovely with some great bike shops.

Whitefish was also the start of our longest stint without any electric hookup for our Airstream and while we had to be more conscious of our energy usage when solely running off the lithium battery bank, we still used our somewhat power hungry Starlink internet for Eloise’s online schooling without issue.  A combination of cloudy/rainy days and the fact that our campsite was in a tree canopy, lessened our ability to recharge from our solar panel.

Fernie BC:

All 3 of us are smitten with this place - call it a love affair if you will.  Fernie is a small mountain town with genuine mountain culture.  Friendly vibes abound.  When I look around at the people each day I see 4 generations of humans all deeply into communing with and recreating in the outdoors.  The ski resort has a lift service bike park in the summer and legendary powder in the winter (averaging 30 feet of annual snowfall).  Of course there are powder hounds who live here, but it also feels like lots of families live here and the average age is 39.  There are hundreds of miles of single track biking trails accessible right from your door step in town, and from Mount Fernie Provincial Park - which is where we have been camping on the edge of town for the last week.  Fantastic biking infrastructure in and around town too with multi use paths. In the winter there are an abundance of groomed areas for cross country skiing and fat biking and many of the hilly biking trails in the mountains become snowshoeing routes.

We hear lots of UK and Aussie accents in the workforce around town, in the shops and restaurants, but it still feels Canadian.  At our campground, 95% of the license plates are from BC and Alberta.

I can’t find a more nuanced way to say this — we are finding everyone here, and especially the Canucks, so very friendly and easy to connect with in a genuine way.  Don’t get me wrong, we found Montana and Utah friendly places too most recently, but here it’s on another level. 

Yesterday afternoon and evening we attended the annual Wam Bam Dirt Jump Jam at the jump park in downtown Fernie - because of course they have a proper jump park right in town. So many locals, so many families, so many people riding their bikes to/from the event.  What a vibe!

This photo montage is of a 12 year old !

And something else we have really appreciated about Fernie  (perhaps more prevalent across Canada than the USA, I don’t know?) is the autonomy that children are given.  We’ve seen elementary school kids,  solo or in groups, on foot or on bike, roaming the town, the campgrounds, the local trails, as well as this public jump park event with many hundreds of people attending  — all with no direct adult supervision.

Here's some footage from last years event and it's very similar to what we experienced yesterday.

Next step for the Reed family and Fernie BC…visit during powder season and see what the vibe is like in the peak of winter….next step after that…come back again another summer and stay longer -- and get some friends to come along with us!

We’re smitten I tell you!