Nelson

Nelson is four hours east of Vancouver by air — or seven hours by car through the Coquihalla and then south through the Kootenay Pass — and the distance means it exists slightly outside the BC that gets talked about. People in Vancouver say “the Kootenays” the way people in Paris say “the countryside”: with a vague benevolent affection and no particular rush to go. I didn’t know what I was walking into when I drove over the Kootenay Pass in late September, the larches going gold above the treeline, and descended into the West Arm of Kootenay Lake with Nelson on its northern shore. The lake is one of the largest in BC, long and cold and implausibly blue, and the city sits above it on the sloping hillside in a way that forces you to look at the water constantly.

The downtown is the most intact collection of late Victorian and Edwardian architecture in BC. Baker Street runs a dozen blocks through the heart of it, the brick storefronts with their ornate cornices and large plate-glass windows largely unchanged since the silver-mining boom of the 1890s that built them. The city had enough silver to justify opera houses and hotels with billiard rooms; it had enough subsequent stagnation that nobody tore them down. What’s inside the buildings has changed several times — the saloons became hardware stores became the yoga studios and galleries and farm-to-table restaurants that occupy them now — but the bones remain, and walking Baker Street is one of the more genuinely pleasurable street-level architectural experiences I’ve had anywhere in Canada. There is a clock tower. The coffee shops are in hundred-year-old commercial buildings. The bookshop, in a particularly good two-story space, smells right.

The arts scene here is a product of the 1970s back-to-the-land migration that seeded the Kootenays with potters, musicians, printmakers, and woodworkers who came for cheap land and fresh air and stayed for the community they built. Their children and grandchildren are still here, and the result is an arts culture that is embedded rather than ornamental. The Touchstones Nelson museum does local history unusually well. The Capitol Theatre, a 1927 building restored to its original vaudeville-era detail, puts on a serious season of music and theatre. The gallery density on and around Baker Street is high for a city of eleven thousand people. I spent an afternoon in a ceramics gallery and bought a small bowl that I now use daily and that I can identify by maker, place, and approximate season of firing.

The food is serious in the quiet way of places that have had good ingredients nearby for a long time. The farmers’ market at Cottonwood Falls Park brings in produce from the Columbia River valley farms. The restaurants — particularly along Baker Street and on adjacent Josephine Street — work with local Kootenay lamb, wild-caught Kootenay Lake fish, locally grown heirloom tomatoes. I had dinner at a small place on Josephine that seated twenty people and where the owner cooked, the wine list was mostly BC and natural, and the mushroom risotto used porcini foraged the previous weekend from the mountains above town. Nobody told me that; I asked.

When to go: June through September for the full outdoor season — swimming at the lake beaches, hiking into the Selkirk Mountains that rise directly behind the city, cycling the Kootenay Lake shoreline roads. Late September and October for the larches turning gold in the high country and the food scene at its most local-intensive. The ski resort at Whitewater, twenty minutes south, operates December through April and gets some of the deepest powder in BC — light, dry Interior snow rather than the wet coastal variety.