Photos courtesy of Chris Delaney
Compiled by Griffin Suber
In Barrière, British Columbia, so named for the obstacles set by First Nations peoples to funnel fish in the Barrière river, the Delaneys have refurbished a tiny cabin from the sunset of the trapper era. After a century of neglect, the logs still stood.
Chris Delaney: The original cabin was built in 1903 at the tail end of the fur trade. It was a trapper’s cabin. There’s a little creek that runs 30 feet from the cabin, and when we were renovating three years ago, my wife was digging around in the area near the creek, and she dug up a little trap, so that was our confirmation of its former life!
My favorite part about it is the history, and we tried to stay true to it. Everything in there is decorated in that motif, including furs and taxidermy, traps on the walls and paddles. We tried to decorate so that it felt like you were walking into an old turn-of-the-century cabin, but a bit more modern, of course.
On three sides of the cabin is national land — what they call “Crown Land” in Canada — so it’s wilderness country. We’re on about 160 acres so there’s plenty of land around. We’ve seen cougars and lots of coyotes, which we hear howling at night. I’ve seen wolf tracks on the property but have yet to see one – there’s an old saying, “If you see a wolf it means they didn’t see you.” It’s a great place to run away to when the whole world collapses.
See also: Peek Inside America's Oldest Log Cabin
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