What do you think?
Rate this book
Diary of a Wilderness Dweller
In the late 1980s, Chris Czajkowski left her truck at the end of a logging road 300 kilometres north of Vancouver and hiked for two days on unmarked wilderness trails to the site of what would become her home. This is her account of building three log cabins, an eco-tourism business and a life beside an unnamed lake 5,000 feet high in the Coast Range mountains. This new trade paper edition of Diary of a Wilderness Dweller shares Czajkowski's adventures from the beginning as she wields chainsaw and axe to forge a different kind of life.
209 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
7 people are currently reading
246 people want to read
About the author
Chris Czajkowski
16 books25 followersChris Czajkowski is an accomplished writer and spokesperson for wilderness living. She is the author of ten books including Cabin at Singing River (Raincoast Books), Lonesome: Memoirs of a Wilderness Dog (Heritage House Publishing), Snowshoes and Spotted Dick: Letters from a Wilderness Dweller (Harbour Publishing), A Mountain Year: Nature Diary of a Wilderness Dweller
(Harbour Publishing), and Ginty’s Ghost: A Wilderness Dweller’s Dream (Harbour Publishing). Her newest book, And the River Still Sings, is available September 2014, and answers the question "How does one go from English villager to Wilderness Dweller?"
Chris Czajkowski was born and raised at the edge of a large village in England,
until she abandoned the company of others to roam the countryside in search of the natural world. As a young adult she studied dairy farming and travelled to Uganda to teach at a farm school. Returning to England she found nothing to hold her interest, so in 1971 she hitchhiked around the world spending as little time as possible in cities.
Arriving in Canada in 1979, Chris travelled to the West Chilcotin and settled deep in the woods of British Columbia’s Coast Mountains. She called her new home Nuk Tessli and lived there for twenty-three years, turning her paradise into a thriving wilderness
resort and guiding business.
In 2012, after many happy years of living alone in the bush, Chris sold Nuk Tessli, closing a significant chapter of her life.
And the River Still Sings goes beyond the tales of wilderness living, exploring both the experiences that led Chris to a solitary lifestyle and her transition to a life closer to the grid. Her new book offers personal and honest insight into the “Wilderness Dweller.”
(Harbour Publishing), and Ginty’s Ghost: A Wilderness Dweller’s Dream (Harbour Publishing). Her newest book, And the River Still Sings, is available September 2014, and answers the question "How does one go from English villager to Wilderness Dweller?"
Chris Czajkowski was born and raised at the edge of a large village in England,
until she abandoned the company of others to roam the countryside in search of the natural world. As a young adult she studied dairy farming and travelled to Uganda to teach at a farm school. Returning to England she found nothing to hold her interest, so in 1971 she hitchhiked around the world spending as little time as possible in cities.
Arriving in Canada in 1979, Chris travelled to the West Chilcotin and settled deep in the woods of British Columbia’s Coast Mountains. She called her new home Nuk Tessli and lived there for twenty-three years, turning her paradise into a thriving wilderness
resort and guiding business.
In 2012, after many happy years of living alone in the bush, Chris sold Nuk Tessli, closing a significant chapter of her life.
And the River Still Sings goes beyond the tales of wilderness living, exploring both the experiences that led Chris to a solitary lifestyle and her transition to a life closer to the grid. Her new book offers personal and honest insight into the “Wilderness Dweller.”
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
April 18, 2021
This was excellent, though definitely not for everyone. I found it to be the perfect balance of description of (and reflection on) the wilderness, and technical details explaining how exactly a lone woman in the middle of nowhere can build two cabins from scratch. I like how the author explains her love for the wilderness and her eagerness to leave the busyness of civilization behind without it getting too preachy.
My sole complaint is I would have loved more drawings/maps/diagrams. The inclusion of wildflower sketches was charming and I’d have loved many more of them, as well as being able to see some of the more technical aspects of cabin construction clearly explained.
Normally I read fantasy for escapism; but this book transported me just as magically, and to a place I may one day get to visit, if I’m lucky.
My sole complaint is I would have loved more drawings/maps/diagrams. The inclusion of wildflower sketches was charming and I’d have loved many more of them, as well as being able to see some of the more technical aspects of cabin construction clearly explained.
Normally I read fantasy for escapism; but this book transported me just as magically, and to a place I may one day get to visit, if I’m lucky.
November 15, 2011
When people read and heard about what Chris Czajkowski, a woman in her early 40s, had achieved in the wilderness, they exclaimed: How brave! How courageous! Ridiculous, Czajkowski would respond. To her understanding, she had achieved nothing more than many of us might, had we the mind to do so. “Skills will always find a way of arriving, it is the attitude that is important,” she writes in Diary of a Wilderness Dweller. “If you think you can do something, it will happen.” (Page 170)
What Czajkowski especially shook off were the comments that began with “especially for a woman.” And that is the end of that discussion. She’ll have none of it.
Yet what Czajkowski describes in her book, one of a series she has written about making her life in the northern wilderness (British Columbia, Canada) befits the unrealized dreams of many. She has left “civilized” society far in the distance, making her way into the mountains and woods, where she builds not one, but two log cabins entirely on her own.
For those who have been drawn to the books of Anne LaBastille, another woman who lived in a log cabin in the Adirondacks, I would say that Czajkowski’s are far superior. LaBastille had help building her cabin, and her books veer into personal essays on self-publishing rather than wilderness living. Czajkowski truly is a solitary traveler into the woods, and she stays entirely on task.
Then again, when I crave literary beauty in nature writing, I reach for Annie Dillard. Czajkowski certainly has her moments of artful and literary description, but her tone is mostly one of telling how to get the work done, what obstacles get in the way, how she endures and overcomes them. At times, that made me as a reader feel like I didn’t really know the writer of the diary as a person, even as I knew the world around her in detail.
Czajkowski begins her adventure with a moment of considering her “madness.” She has left her truck at the end of a logging road twenty miles away. She has hiked through unmarked forest and over a mountain to a piece of land beside an unnamed lake. She is going to build a log cabin very nearly with her bare hands, using just a few tools she has carried in or that a small airplane later delivers on the lake. So is she crazy? By end of the book, in retrospect, she writes that this adventure may have seemed mad and risked all, but had she not done it, she would have missed … everything. This is the kind of living that gives her life its value and its meaning.
Much can be explained by her musings midway through the book (pages 88 and 89): “People are always asking me why I live the way I do … I am not ‘sacrificing’ the outside world … I do have the enormous satisfaction of choosing what I want from it. The material things like television and washing machines, which most people take for granted and which, for some perverse reason, are used to measure our ‘standard of living,’ have never been as important to me as my surroundings.”
She explains that it is not that she is so very unsocial—she likes people and eventually creates a business out of her wilderness living by guiding wilderness tours—and she is not averse to tapping into some convenience if it is readily available, but when it is not, and she has the wilderness in trade, that is what she chooses.
“The words ‘remote’ and ‘isolated’ to describe my way of life are city conceits. ‘Remote’ means ‘apart from’ and I am indeed apart from the city and other people. But I am very close to nature and the way the world functions; in this respect it is city folk who are remote.” (Page 89)
Silence is one of her draws. She relishes the sounds of nature rather than the sounds of civilization, and muses that most people never experience it in the cacophony of machinery, automobiles, industry, stereos and conversation.
All ways and styles of life, Czajkowski writes, have their price to pay. Whatever one chooses is to choose against something else, and so we must choose what it is that we value and what we are willing to do without. Although at times she is “terrified” of her choices, facing extreme weather, predatory wildlife and other challenges and obstacles, she overcomes her fear to obtain a life that she can value.
In addition to writing her story, Czajkowski is also a visual artist, and her diary entries are here and there enhanced by skillful drawings. On art, she writes: “We live in what must be the only society in the world to separate art from life and condemn it as an unnecessary frill or, even worse, a hobby.” Yet everyone is an artist, she insists, and we shouldn’t try to subdue that natural part of ourselves. We use our sense of art when we decorate our homes or choose what clothes to wear. Why not relish our creativity and give it full rein?
Even if the author eschews it, the reader can’t help but admire her tenacity and skill at making do with what she has around her. She not only fells tall trees for the logs to construct her cabins, but hauls them over great distance, cuts them into boards for her floors, and fashions all parts of her cabins from them. She installs a reconstructed stove for cooking and heating, moving that, too, over long trails by herself. She hikes many miles through the most blustery cold and survives the night in spite of only partial shelter and one very curious and powerful bear. I wouldn’t say “even for a woman” when I read this diary—I would instead say “what a woman!” in respect for her willingness to follow her wilderness dream.
What Czajkowski especially shook off were the comments that began with “especially for a woman.” And that is the end of that discussion. She’ll have none of it.
Yet what Czajkowski describes in her book, one of a series she has written about making her life in the northern wilderness (British Columbia, Canada) befits the unrealized dreams of many. She has left “civilized” society far in the distance, making her way into the mountains and woods, where she builds not one, but two log cabins entirely on her own.
For those who have been drawn to the books of Anne LaBastille, another woman who lived in a log cabin in the Adirondacks, I would say that Czajkowski’s are far superior. LaBastille had help building her cabin, and her books veer into personal essays on self-publishing rather than wilderness living. Czajkowski truly is a solitary traveler into the woods, and she stays entirely on task.
Then again, when I crave literary beauty in nature writing, I reach for Annie Dillard. Czajkowski certainly has her moments of artful and literary description, but her tone is mostly one of telling how to get the work done, what obstacles get in the way, how she endures and overcomes them. At times, that made me as a reader feel like I didn’t really know the writer of the diary as a person, even as I knew the world around her in detail.
Czajkowski begins her adventure with a moment of considering her “madness.” She has left her truck at the end of a logging road twenty miles away. She has hiked through unmarked forest and over a mountain to a piece of land beside an unnamed lake. She is going to build a log cabin very nearly with her bare hands, using just a few tools she has carried in or that a small airplane later delivers on the lake. So is she crazy? By end of the book, in retrospect, she writes that this adventure may have seemed mad and risked all, but had she not done it, she would have missed … everything. This is the kind of living that gives her life its value and its meaning.
Much can be explained by her musings midway through the book (pages 88 and 89): “People are always asking me why I live the way I do … I am not ‘sacrificing’ the outside world … I do have the enormous satisfaction of choosing what I want from it. The material things like television and washing machines, which most people take for granted and which, for some perverse reason, are used to measure our ‘standard of living,’ have never been as important to me as my surroundings.”
She explains that it is not that she is so very unsocial—she likes people and eventually creates a business out of her wilderness living by guiding wilderness tours—and she is not averse to tapping into some convenience if it is readily available, but when it is not, and she has the wilderness in trade, that is what she chooses.
“The words ‘remote’ and ‘isolated’ to describe my way of life are city conceits. ‘Remote’ means ‘apart from’ and I am indeed apart from the city and other people. But I am very close to nature and the way the world functions; in this respect it is city folk who are remote.” (Page 89)
Silence is one of her draws. She relishes the sounds of nature rather than the sounds of civilization, and muses that most people never experience it in the cacophony of machinery, automobiles, industry, stereos and conversation.
All ways and styles of life, Czajkowski writes, have their price to pay. Whatever one chooses is to choose against something else, and so we must choose what it is that we value and what we are willing to do without. Although at times she is “terrified” of her choices, facing extreme weather, predatory wildlife and other challenges and obstacles, she overcomes her fear to obtain a life that she can value.
In addition to writing her story, Czajkowski is also a visual artist, and her diary entries are here and there enhanced by skillful drawings. On art, she writes: “We live in what must be the only society in the world to separate art from life and condemn it as an unnecessary frill or, even worse, a hobby.” Yet everyone is an artist, she insists, and we shouldn’t try to subdue that natural part of ourselves. We use our sense of art when we decorate our homes or choose what clothes to wear. Why not relish our creativity and give it full rein?
Even if the author eschews it, the reader can’t help but admire her tenacity and skill at making do with what she has around her. She not only fells tall trees for the logs to construct her cabins, but hauls them over great distance, cuts them into boards for her floors, and fashions all parts of her cabins from them. She installs a reconstructed stove for cooking and heating, moving that, too, over long trails by herself. She hikes many miles through the most blustery cold and survives the night in spite of only partial shelter and one very curious and powerful bear. I wouldn’t say “even for a woman” when I read this diary—I would instead say “what a woman!” in respect for her willingness to follow her wilderness dream.
May 19, 2021
This is a fantastic book detailing the wilderness life of Chris. Building her own log cabin 20 miles from nowhere. An insight into that life and a fantastically written book.
March 3, 2019
I enjoyed this. Really impressed with what she was able to accomplish. Gives courage to anyone willing to try.
January 13, 2021
One of my all time favorite books. This woman in her 40's builds herself a cabin. What's not to like?
April 18, 2021
Interesting diary, more info than I need about building a cabin. Sounds like a beautiful place to live but very remote with dangers and struggles. I would have loved some pictures.
November 10, 2023
Chris is an inspiration to anyone If you dream of living in the wilderness and building your own cabin. After receiving crown land in the wilderness of British Columbia, this strong woman heads into the Chilcotin Mountain range to single handedly fell and strip logs to build her cabin (all while having only a tent as shelter to sleep at night between her and the wolves). Beautifully descriptive and inspiring. You can also follow Chris on her wildernessdweller Blog as she is STILL living out there.
March 25, 2013
Although there is no atom of my being that wants to emulate this woman, I am so happy that she followed her desires and then wrote this book. It's so interesting and a testament to what a person can achieve. As the writer avers, it's not the skills, it's the attitude. I truly got the feeling that she couldn't have done anything else other than set off into the wild, with her trusty dog and her dreams. And she is an excellent writing and I love her little sketches.
September 14, 2014
Inspiring story
Read
April 25, 2016Written a bit too scantily for my liking. She concentrates too much on the building of her cabins but tells little of the surrounding wildlife, flora and fauna.
February 18, 2013
Very impressive story. Fair writing.
April 2, 2017
So good, was sorry to come to the end...looking forward to reading this authors other books. Its exactly as it says in the title, well worth a read.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews