Nominated for ForeWord Magazine's 2008 Book of the Year Award - Nature Category

In 1988, Chris Czajkowski walked into British Columbia's Central Coast Mountains to build a homestead, a business, and a life. A Mountain Year is a beautifully produced art book full of original paintings, sketches and diary entries, offering an awe-inspiring glimpse into the life of this independent spirit and the landscape that she calls home.

In this illustrated journal, Czajkowski intimately describes the splendour of seasonal transformation with her trademark expressiveness; each day brings new obstacles and surprising revelations. At the start of the year, she writes, "The night was bright with a silvery soup of moonlight refracted off snowflakes fine as stardust." Spring arrives with breathtaking beauty and summer brings company from abroad. In the fall, Chris travels back to her first autumn at Nuk Tessli when she views "an extraordinarily beautiful moment. The clouds hung low enough to almost touch the water . . . and a wonderful, bluish, pearly luminescence covered everything." Prepare to witness the magnificence of a year in British Columbia's high-altitude wilderness, a place of astounding natural beauty like no other.

Chris Czajkowski was born and raised in the north of England. She lived and worked in Uganda, New Zealand, the South Pacific and South America before settling in the remote reaches of British Columbia's Coast Range mountains, 480 kilometres north of Vancouver, where she created the Nuk Tessli Alpine Experience, an ecotourism business catering to hikers and naturalists. She has written ten books about her nearly thirty years of wilderness living, including Snowshoes and Spotted Dick: Letters from a Wilderness Dweller, A Mountain Year: Nature Diary of a Wilderness Dweller, A Wilderness Dweller's Cookbook: The Best Bread in the World and Other Recipes and most recently, Ginty's Ghost: A Wilderness Dweller's Dream.

Chris Czajkowski's profile page

A Mountain Year: Nature Diary of a Wilderness Dweller