For author Steve Skafte, This River Was Once a Road represents a decade of incessant adventures—ten years of trawling through old maps and property records, searching for the secrets that Nova Scotia's abandoned roads—all still public rights-of-way, open for all to use—have been keeping from "ordinary folks" like him.

In that time, he's explored countless overgrown fields where he's discovered rock walls, old wells, foundations, and signs of former human habitation. For Skafte, each of these roads inhabits a time and place lost; a track through the wilderness to a place that someone once called home.

Featuring 80 evocative colour images, with GPS coordinates to guide readers to each unique location, and more than 20 deeply poetic tales of discovery, This River Was Once a Road traces the paths of our past to reveal the places we've left behind.

Steve Skafte is a writer and photographer from Bridgetown, Nova Scotia, where he's lived all his life. Since he turned twenty in 2007, he's kept and shared an uninterrupted daily journal online, with stories and adventures from all over the wilds of the province—and how it felt to be there. Much of his time is wrapped up in finding forgotten human history that has been left behind in the woods. He is also the author of The Dead Die Twice.

Steve Skafte's profile page