By then, it was nearly evening and they had to hike a long way back uphill. They reached Bob’s place at midnight, and George and Paul still had to drive back to Edmonton; they arrived there just in time to start work on Monday morning.
Paul Kindiak
George Evanoff, right, and Paul Kindiak with “arrowed lynx” in Bob’s cabin in Edson around 1961.
When I first met Paul Kindiak in Edson in July 2000, he was still employed as engineering coordinator with the Town of Edson. When we met again six years later, he had retired but was still busy. Although three years younger than George Evanoff, Paul had clearly been a maturing influence on him regarding their shared outdoor interests. Paul explained that it was in 1960 and 1961, when George was in his late twenties and already married, that they began going back to Edson for fishing trips. Paul and George would drive down from Edmonton together. Paul stayed with his mother in Edson, and George (and John, when he came along) stayed at Bob’s cabin. Bob’s cabin was a substantial structure, with a rock fireplace and interior wood panelling that may have given George ideas for his future ski lodge in the North Rockies. Paul taught George how to fly cast on the lawn in front of the cabin, and George used to practise there.
Paul showed me a black and white photograph of him and George with a lynx they had shot with a bow and arrow while walking thirty-two kilometres south of Edson and the McLeod River on a circular, early-season scouting trip for elk. The photo was taken in Bob’s cabin in 1963. Bob Evanoff told me that Paul pulled up to ninety pounds, a lot for his size, but that it was Paul’s skill with the bow, and not just strength that counted.
Paul also talked about George Evanoff’s first bull elk, taken just south of the McLeod River. Paul had called up the elk using a tube made from a cow parsnip stem. The elk began answering, and Paul told George to stay in the pines while he circled around. Paul said: “We heard the elk crashing its antlers against trees, and it approached George, crashing its antlers some more against pine trees. George became very excited and shot at forty yards. The elk ran thirty or forty yards and dropped. It was a nice six-point royal bull, and dressed out at 750 pounds. George was big-eyed when he got that elk.”
Paul Kindiak described George as “very active, very interested in wildlife, hunting, and fishing; he loved the outdoors. He challenged anything and would walk whatever was required to do it — very energetic. He could not often be found lying around, except after a trip. He always talked about hunting and fishing, and was always looking for new things to do in the outdoors. He was not so keen on bow hunting, but was more interested in fly-fishing, rifle-hunting, calling elk, and learning more about wildlife and the lives of animals: how they survived, what they ate, how to track them.” Paul taught George the difference between the tracks of a white-tailed deer and a mule deer. Many years later, when George was a member of the Prince George Search and Rescue group, he learned a different tracking skill — following people who were lost in the bush.
After moving to Prince George, George’s passion for hunting gave him an excuse to explore many remote areas of northern British Columbia. Paul has an old colour print of George, with a familiar grin on his face, holding up a full-curl Dall ram. Perhaps George gave the photo to Paul as a thank you for helping to introduce him to that aspect of the outdoors. The two of them might have shared a lifetime of outdoor adventures together, but George’s career was about to take him across the familiar Rocky Mountains of his youth into north-central British Columbia.
Settling in British Columbia
Chapter 4
When George Evanoff moved to Prince George in 1964, he set about establishing himself in a community that was just emerging as an industrial forestry centre, and a transportation and service hub for north-central British Columbia. In addition to its rapid economic growth in the 1960s, Prince George was, and still is, surrounded by some of the best outdoors to be found anywhere in the world — George Evanoff soon made good use of the opportunities that the environment presented, and his interests and activities veered off in many directions.
Lillian Evanoff described how George received the opportunity to work in British Columbia: “After a few years, George got a job with the pipeline in Prince George. Dick Littledale,1 the engineer in charge with Interprovincial Pipeline, had known George in Edmonton before getting a job in Prince George with Western Pacific Products and Crude Oil Pipelines Ltd., a company that later became Westcoast Petroleum. Dick was impressed with George’s work on the Interprovincial Pipeline and needed someone to do the electrical contract work for him, so he asked George … if he would like to come and work here.” Dick and George became good friends and shared several early hunting trips in northern British Columbia.
George, Lillian, Delia, and Craig Evanoff in their new Prince George home, 1966–1967.
George and his family moved to Prince George in April 1964; they drove “there via the northern route, because Highway 16 wasn’t finished yet.” At first, they lived in a duplex while George designed their new house. A contractor built the house while George did the electrical work and some of the finishing. His workplace was located just off Fifteenth Avenue in Prince George, a few blocks west of their new home. Its well-equipped shop catered to mechanical as well as electrical projects, and was home to more than a few of George’s personal and volunteer undertakings over the years.
Prince George and Its History
Prince George’s origins date back to the heyday of the fur trade, as that historic commerce pushed into Canada’s farthest reaches. In 1807, Simon Fraser of the North West Company established a camp at the site of the present-day community on the banks of the river that now bears his name. Within two years the camp was abandoned. In 1823 the Hudson’s Bay Company established Fort George in the same general location. Simon Fraser was not the first white man to visit the site of present-day Prince George. Alexander Mackenzie had passed through there in 1793, on the last leg of his journey to cross the full width of the North American continent, more than twelve years before Lewis and Clark succeeded in a similar quest in the United States. As he passed through the area that later became Fort George without mentioning it in his journal,2 Mackenzie instead described the cutbanks on the eastern side of the river: “The banks were here composed of high white cliffs, crowned with pinnacles in very grotesque shapes.”3 Those cutbanks and pinnacles are comprised of glacial silts originating from a large post-glacial lake that used to lie over the surrounding area. Two hundred years later, George Evanoff built a recreational trail atop the Fraser River cutbanks overlooking downtown Prince George.4
Prince George lies near the geographic heart of British Columbia, at the confluence of the Nechako and Fraser rivers, in the traditional territory of the Lheidli T’enneh First Nation. The two rivers carved out the bowl that is the site of much of the present-day city, and they form the backdrop of the Heritage River Trail System that George and Lillian Evanoff used often.
The City of Prince George was incorporated in 1915, following the arrival of Canada’s second transcontinental railway (Canadian National Railway), the same railway that played a key part in the life of George’s parents on the other side of the Rockies. Lumber was a mainstay of Prince George’s economy in the first half of the twentieth century, and in the 1960s, rapid growth took place with the arrival of pulp mills, highways, airlines, pipelines, and hydro power. A process of consolidating timber rights and many hundreds of small bush mills into a few large sawmills began. The new sawmills were integrated to supply wood-chip fibre to the pulp mills, utilizing what was previously considered a waste by-product as a raw material. With the arrival of the pipelines