Working under the most difficult conditions, in every kind of weather, and often alone for weeks at a time, he has been a pilgrim of the wild, a seeker of those quiet moments of illumination when the very spirit of a particular place shines. The ease with which the rest of us snap images of nature must not blind us to the magnitude of his achievement. The African shore had been mapped for 300 years before George Vancouver first saw the lands that now bear his name. Asian spices had enlivened the cuisine of Iberia for two centuries before Spanish merchants arrived at Nootka Sound to trade cloth and iron for otter skins. Canada's westernmost province has an ancient history of inaccessibility.
Some scientists believe that people arrived in the Americas as long ago as forty millenia.
Such early immigrants could have colonized the southern parts of the continent, but they would not have discovered the land we now call British Columbia. The Pacific Northwest lay buried under a mile of ice. When the glaciers retreated from British Columbia around 12,000 years ago, they exposed a dozen mountain ranges running north to south. The rugged terrain gave rise to a mosaic of climates. Damp ocean air moving east over the ice-scoured landscape supplied some valleys with abundant rain.