History & heritage
The Little Prince: A Steam Engine’s Journey From Railway Construction to City Park
The small locomotive in Prince George’s park has been a working machine, a salvaged artifact and a community project.
3 min readThe places behind the trail
Stories from Prince George and northern BC
Forest science, mountain landscapes and local history. Find another reason to get outside.
21 to 30 of 79 stories
The Little Prince locomotive standing beside its station in Prince George. The photographer dates this film image to August 2025.₡ґǘșϯγ Ɗᶏ Ⱪᶅṏⱳդ · CC0 1.0 A dragon carving in a cottonwood tree at Cottonwood Island Park, Prince George, 24 May 2022.Adam Jones · Tree carving by Elmer Gunderson. Photo credit is separate from authorship of the artwork. · CC BY 2.0 People and places
The Faces in the Trees: The Artist Behind Cottonwood Island’s Carvings
Elmer Gunderson helped make the park’s paths. Years later, he gave walkers another reason to stop along them: faces, creatures and small surprises carved into the cottonwoods.
3 min readAutumn at Ginter’s Meadow, 7 October 2011. Leaf colour and timing vary from year to year.Andrew Kurjata · CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 · Noncommercial only Local history
The Mansion That Disappeared: A Walk Through Ginter’s Meadow
A grand house once stood above the meadow. Its remaining stonework leads into the story of Ben Ginter, a construction fortune, an unlikely brewery and the landscape Prince George inherited.
4 min readPrince George and the Fraser River from LC Gunn at dusk, photographed in July 2013.Morgan Stewart · CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 · Noncommercial only Close to home
LC Gunn: Seeing Prince George From the Other Side of the Fraser
Cross the river and the familiar city rearranges itself. A walk along the forested bluffs reveals the bowl, the bridges and the long history written into the riverbanks.
3 min readCranbrook Hill Greenway in December 2012. A winter view of the forest corridor, not a current trail-condition report.Andrew Kurjata · CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 · Noncommercial only Local stories
Cranbrook Hill Greenway: The Forest That Connects Prince George’s Favourite Trails
A network of familiar trailheads hides an ambitious idea: keep enough forest connected that an ordinary walk can become a much larger journey.
4 min readCentral Prince George and the Fraser River in 2017. The modern city provides context for the earlier plan; this aerial is not a map of the original Crescents.City of Prince George · CC BY-SA 4.0 City history
Why Prince George Has Crescents: A Walk Through a City Designed in Boston
Follow a curved street, a park-centred plan and a few remarkable houses into the ambitions behind Prince George’s original railway townsite.
4 min readPrince George on 1 May 1919, photographed by J. Simonson. This archival panorama shows the young railway city after the earlier townsite rivalry. J. Simonson · Public domain City history
Before Prince George Was Prince George: The Rival Townsites That Wanted the Railway
A hundred-dollar lot, a newspaper feud and three competing visions of the future explain why the city’s beginning was anything but inevitable.
4 min readHistory and place
The Nuxalk-Carrier Grease Trail: The Great Road That Existed Before Mackenzie
Follow the history of the Nuxalk-Carrier Grease Trail through trade, family connections and Indigenous knowledge, long before Mackenzie’s 1793 journey.
3 min readDunster station in the 1920s, before its later move and restoration. Fraser Fort-George Regional Museum, catalogue 2003.8.15.Unknown photographer; Fraser Fort-George Regional Museum, catalogue 2003.8.15 · Public domain (Canada and United States) History and place
Dunster: The Little Railway Station Its Community Would Not Let Disappear
Dunster’s 1913 railway station survived because local people saved it. Its rescue reveals how a small Robson Valley community keeps its history close.
3 min readMcBride and the Fraser River valley seen from Mount Lucille in October 2017. This landscape photograph provides context for the town, rather than a close view of its station.Rufus Hawthorne · CC BY-SA 4.0 History and place
McBride: The Mountain Town Built Around a Railway Station
McBride’s station faces straight up Main Street. Its architecture, daily routines and surviving town plan explain how the railway shaped this mountain community.
3 min read
