RemyScalza.com: Independent Journalism

VANCOUVER SUN – An Alpine Shangri-La in Jasper, Alberta

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jasper_2Having grown up on the East Coast (or “back East,” as Canadians say), I’m easily impressed when it comes to mountains.  Show me a rocky peak, crystal-clear mountain lake or snow-capped anything and I’ll stop and stare. But Jasper, Alberta, is a whole other story.  Tucked inside a national park in the Canadian Rockies, the town is circled by a wall of jagged mountain.  Caribbean-blue glacial lakes dot the valleys and the silt-grey Athabasca River, highway for generations of fur traders, runs through it all.  I explored Jasper recently for the Vancouver Sun.  

An Alpine Shangri-La Minus the Crowds

By Remy Scalza for the Vancouver Sun
(For the newspaper version of the article, click here: Alpine Shangri-La)

With 300 black bears and 200 grizzlies calling western Canada’s Jasper National Park home, running into one isn’t as much a possibility as a fait acomplit.  But even from the reassuring safety of a car, the first encounter can be a jolt.

The particular black bear beside my passenger window right now is man-sized: six feet long, probably 300 pounds.  Cuddly – in a way – except for the long, curving incisor peeking out his open mouth.  He raises his head, waves his nose in the air and looks my direction.

For Chuck Cantlie – naturalist, 29-year Jasper resident and no stranger to these encounters – this is a teaching moment.  Calmly, he guides me through Bear Safety 101.  “A bear can turn on you in a heartbeat and outrun a racehorse,” he says.  Outside, our subject is close enough now to admire his muscled linebacker’s neck and hear his paws thrashing through the wiry grass beside the highway.  “Rule number one is don’t run.”

The Rocky Mountains – which stretch in a ragged band of serrated peaks from New Mexico up into Western Canada – are a stubbornly wild place. And one of the wildest spots happens to be just across the British Columbia border in central Alberta.  In the mountain town of Jasper, geography and history have conspired to preserve what comes close to an alpine Shangri-La: peaks and glacial lakes to rival the best of the Rockies, minus – for now – the crowds.  [Read more…]

BC MAGAZINE – Finding Hope in the town Rambo blew up

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ramboI moved to Vancouver years ago, but until recently I didn’t realize I lived next door to a Hollywood legend.  In the timeless 1981 action flick Rambo, Sylvester Stallone goes on a rampage in a ruggedly beautiful mountain town, blowing it to smithereens.  That town is Hope, British Columbia, an otherwise unassuming pit stop on the edge of the Cascade Mountains.  I poked around Hope recently for this article published in British Columbia Magazine.  

Finding Hope

By Remy Scalza for British Columbia Magazine
(For the magazine version with photos, click here: Finding Hope)

The first face to greet me when I walk into the tiny Hope Museum on a sunny spring afternoon is Sly Stallone’s – staring back with a fierce snarl.  He’s carrying an automatic weapon of considerable size and flexing his pecs on a vintage movie poster for Rambo: First Blood.

“What can I say?  He brings in the crowds,” says Inge Wilson, the friendly  manager of the museum and visitor centre.  It turns out Hope – the otherwise law-abiding community at the confluence of the mighty Fraser and Coquihalla Rivers in southwestern British Columbia –  is the very same town Rambo wiped off the map in the 1982 action movie.  The gas station he blew up, the sheriff’s office he blasted and the canyon walls he clung to for dear life now highlight a popular walking tour.

“Of course, we’re a lot more than that,” clarifies Wilson, who moved to Hope with her husband fresh out of university nearly 30 years ago. “If you want to enjoy small town life and outdoor recreation, this is the place.”  She’s right.  Often dismissed as a highway pit stop for travelers bound for interior B.C., Hope – on closer inspection – proves anything but.  [Read more…]

BC BUSINESS – Sin City Reconsidered

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I’ve never really had any interest in visiting Las Vegas and – through some quirk of fate – have never had to attend a bachelor party, convention or shotgun wedding there.  I don’t gamble.  Smoky casinos, cheesy stage shows and heart-clogging buffets aren’t really my cup of tea.  But everybody’s got to see Vegas once, right? So recently I suspended my better judgement and checked out Sin City for an article in BC Business Magazine. It was as bad as a thought – and also better.

Las Vegas: Sin City Reconsidered

By Remy Scalza for BC Business Magazine

At 6:30 a.m., the casino floor of the Aria Hotel is hardly a postcard for Vegas bliss. The hardy few gambling at this hour have been at it all night: poker fiends with morning-after stubble, glassy-eyed geezers plugging away at slots, chain smokers nursing warm scotch who look like they’ve just bet the farm and lost.

Full disclosure: as someone who can do math, I don’t gamble. And Vegas – a town mathematically rigged to empty wallets – isn’t my idea of a dream vacation. But the flights are cheap, the sun shines and hotels practically give rooms away. So here I am, determined to prove there’s more to Vegas than casinos, Céline Dion and buffets.

I tiptoe past the blackjack table and hustle to the exit to do something that only the most intrepid Vegas visitors ever do: leave the Strip. First stop this morning is Red Rock Canyon, a vision of the Wild West a half-hour drive outside the city. “There’s people who lived here all their lives and never been to Red Rock. Unbelievable!” says Tommy DiPasquale, a former New York City construction worker turned driver and tour guide.

Read the full article on the BC Business website here.

BC MAGAZINE – Local Culture: Adventures in cheese

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When I was growing up, cheese seemed to come in two varieties: yellow and white.  As part of the North American foodie awakening, however, artisan cheeses are suddenly on menus and supermarket shelves everywhere – creamy, farm-fresh goat cheeses, pungent blues, local variations on Camemberts and Goudas.  Some of North America’s most creative and coveted cheeses are coming from Canada’s Okanagan region – a rugged mountain valley, dominated by lakes and vineyards, not far from Vancouver.  I ate about a lifetime’s worth of Canadian fromage – and met plenty of cheesy characters – on a driving tour for British Columbia Magazine.

Local Culture: There’s something ripening in Canada’s Okanagan Valley

By Remy Scalza for British Columbia Magazine

The Kelowna Farmers’ Market on a sunny August Saturday is a scene of tumult and high drama.  Grim-faced older women towing wheeled handcarts slice through the masses, Hell-bent on claiming the juiciest local peaches and freshest carrots.  Young couples make guilty beelines for the exit, arms loaded with the week’s last crates of blueberries and organic chard.  On a good day, up to 7,000 people throng the labyrinth of 165 stands, making it British Columbia’s largest and – during harvest season, when the whole vegetal bounty of the Okanagan is represented here – liveliest farmers’ market.

And on a recent Saturday morning, the biggest crowds are gathered around neither berries nor heirloom tomatoes nor even those legendary Okanagan peaches but 100-percent, raw-milk gouda.   It’s here, at the Triple Island Farm stand, that Johan and Helma Tuijtel – from Cherryville by way of Holland – have assumed the status of, if not quite rock stars, then at least dairy superstars.  While Helma slices off samples, Johan expounds from behind a folding table stacked with wedges of mild, medium and spiced goudas.

“Normally, what you buy in the store is pasteurized and homogenized,” he says in a heavy Dutch accent that confers instant cheese credibility.  “You lose all the flavor and nutrition.”   Johan has a thick mustache, tattooed arms brawny from farm work and is wearing a John Deere ball cap.  With Helma and  their children, he milks 50 cows on a 74-acre spread in the North Okanagan [CQ interview with Johan Tuijtel].  His life’s passion is cheese.  “All the time people come to us sick and tired of the grocery store stuff.  It all tastes the same,” he says, waving his hand to symbolically brush these inferior cheeses aside.  Meanwhile, Helma plunges into an enormous wheel of pepper-corn gouda with a double-handled cheese knife.  A customer asks for their chili-pepper gouda.  It sold out hours ago.

Click here to read the full story on the British Columbia Magazine website (subscription required).

FROMMER'S – Vancouver and Whistler Guidebook

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After living in Vancouver for three years, I finally decided to take the plunge – and write a guidebook about my own city for Frommer’s.  It’s really a daunting task.  You get a few hundred pages to sum up a whole metropolis – restaurants and hotels and museums, touristy must-sees and out-of-the-way spots that only locals know about.  Whatever anyone says, guidebook writing is ultimately a very subjective undertaking.  I’ve presented the Vancouver I’d want to experience: Not the glitzy, Pacific jewel, but the gritty port city that’s still searching for its identity as a world capital. I also contributed most of the photography.

You can browse most of the book by following this link to the Amazon.com website.

Tweet and Protect: Cops turn to social media

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When Vancouver erupted into riots more than a year ago after a Stanley Cup loss, the city – and its police – were taken by surprise.  Today, that might be a different story.  Police across North America and around the world have developed an active presence on Twitter – using the social network both to monitor rabble-rousers seeking to stir up trouble and to preempt confrontations before they start.  Cops from as far as Australia and Belgium descended on Vancouver recently to attend the Social Media the Internet and Law Enforcement Conference (SMILE for short).  I covered the heavily hashtagged proceedings for Vancouver Magazine.

To Tweet and Protect

By Remy Scalza for Vancouver Magazine

On a recent rainy afternoon at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver, 150 cops from as far away as Australia are getting chewed out by one of their own. “A riot can go from zero to 150 with one Tweet,” says Toronto training constable Nathan Dayler. A veteran of both the G-20 riots and Occupy demonstrations, Dayler has had more experience than most policing the Twittersphere. “You can’t let tension just simmer on social media,” he says. “That’s not an option.”

Tweets, hash tags, and netiquette are the subjects of the day at the fifth installment of Social Media the Internet and Law Enforcement (SMILE). A kind of boot camp for police departments training up on social media, the conference broaches issues as diverse as mining Facebook for open-source intelligence to getting the most out of your 140 characters on Twitter.

“There’s such a big gap between where law enforcement is and what they can achieve with these tools,” says Lauri Stevens, who started SMILE in 2010 and has 14,895 followers on Twitter (@lawscomm). The rare expert equally at home discussing perps and pingbacks, Stevens, 50, began her career in the 1980s as a journalist in Boston, walking the beat with police, paramedics and fire officials. She later chaired an interactive media department at a local college, becoming an early social-media convert.

Click here to read the full article on the Vancouver Magazine website.

Urban Wrangler: Canada's Dude Ranch Capital

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British Columbia’s Cariboo Country is a lot like a Canadian version of the Wild West.  It was settled in the mid 1800s by miners in search of gold, then by ranchers, who brought huge herds of cattle to the stark terrain: semi-arid foothills, canyons, sagebrush.  In many parts of the Cariboo, little has changed in the last hundred years or so.  Ranching remains a way of life and many people learn to ride a horse before they learn to ride a bike.   I had a chance to explore the Cariboo – and check in on three guest ranches where city slickers can mount up – for British Columbia Magazine.

Urban Wrangler

By Remy Scalza for British Columbia Magazine

I’ve come to British Columbia’s Cariboo country to find my inner cowboy. But I’m not afraid to admit: I’m terrified.

The Cariboo, a wild, sparsely settled hinterland stretching from the banks of the churning Fraser River to the peaks of the Cariboo Mountains, is home to more than two dozen guest ranches. Options range from working farms to luxury retreats where time can be spent in the saddle—and in the spa.

Horses, of course, are the common denominator. The daily rhythm at all self-respecting dude ranches revolves around riding—long, scenic romps through rolling grasslands, pine and aspen forests, and granite-walled gorges.

This is where things are about to get interesting for me. I’m not really a horse person. My prior experience adds up to a handful of pony rides as a kid at backyard birthday parties. But all that’s about to change.

Click here to read the full story on the British Columbia Magazine website (subscription required).

Rum and Reggae? Not Here

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Parts of Jamaica are hopelessly touristy, colonized by all-inclusives marketed towards travelers looking for little more than rum punch, reggae music and white sand.  But Treasure Beach – despite the catchy name – is no tourist trap.  A rural community that still survives mainly on fishing and farming, Treasure Beach is hours from the nearest international airport and worlds away from the hype and crowds of Montego Bay or Negril.   I got a chance to explore the community and meet a few of its residents while working on an article for The New York Times travel section.

Rum and Reggae? Not Here

By Remy Scalza for The New York Times

OUTSIDE Treasure Beach, on Jamaica’s rural southern coast, a half-dozen oxen are blocking the one potholed road into town. When the taxi driver honks, they turn, stare and stand their ground.

But that’s hardly a problem. A twisting, two-hour drive through rain forest from the international airport in Montego Bay, Treasure Beach has long drawn travelers who come as much for its inaccessibility as for the black-streaked sand and azure water. The contrast from the rum-and-Rasta Jamaica of package tours is pronounced: no sprawling all-inclusives, no Margaritavilles; just a string of waterfront guesthouses set among local homes and a patchwork of rolling farmland.

Backwater status may be fleeting.

Click here to read the full article on The New York Times website.

A Look Inside Canada's Most Promising Start-Ups

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Little-known fact: The creator of Flickr, the hugely successful photo-sharing website, lives across the street from me in Vancouver.  In fact, the city has evolved into a kind of Silicon Valley North in recent years, with start-ups attracting attention from major international investors.  I looked at some of Canada’s most promising new tech companies – in social media, gaming and more – for the Globe and Mail newspaper’s Report on Business magazine. 

The People Behind Canada’s Most Promising Tech Start-Ups

Content from Remy Scalza, Dawn Calleja and John Lorinc for the Globe and Mail

The éminence grise of Vancouver’s tech scene is in his late 30s, wears Converse sneakers and plaid flannel. Stewart Butterfield rocketed to tech stardom all the way back in 2004, when he launched Flickr, the site that ushered in the era of digital photo-sharing. He sold it to Yahoo in 2005 for a rumoured $35 million (U.S.). Flickr today is likely worth many, many times that. Butterfield doesn’t mind.

“If I could be doing anything right now, I would be doing this,” he says. This is Tiny Speck, the 40-person company developing Glitch, a web-based multiplayer game involving giants, elfish avatars, barnyard animals and a mission to save the future. He thinks it’ll make his Flickr sale look like small change.

Click here to read the full article on the Globe and Mail website.

The Big One: Vancouver is due. Are we ready?

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When I came to Vancouver several years ago, no one told me I was moving to earthquake country.  The city is vulnerable to the same type of  megaquake that devastated Japan in March 2011, killing more than 20,000 people.  Experts estimate that there’s a one in four chance of a cataclysmic quake hitting Vancouver within the next 50 years.  But because the city has never suffered from a major temblor, almost no one is prepared.  I investigated exactly how a quake might impact the city for Vancouver Magazine.

The Big One

By Remy Scalza for Vancouver Magazine

For someone whose business is disaster, Anne Ward is uncommonly charming. Today, Ward, an older woman who lives in Kitsilano but is originally from Saskatoon, is wearing two-inch silver heels, a shimmering gold shawl, and jade earrings with a matching amulet that looks vaguely Mayan. “I figure you got to look good while you can,” she says with a slight prairie twang. “It’ll come soon enough.”

Ward is president and CEO of Krasicki and Ward, an emergency preparedness supply store in City Square Mall at 12th and Cambie, right next to a beauty salon and below a Fitness World. The “it” she’s referring to is the big one, a major earthquake. In her store, you can buy earthquake survival kits, big bricks of high-calorie rations, crowbars and hatchets, solar-charged flashlights, emergency toilets in a bag called Wag Bags, and most anything else needed for the apocalypse. “You can try calling 911, if the phone lines are operational,” she says, raising a knowing eyebrow. “But you know what? You might not be their highest priority.”

Click here to read the full story in PDF version.

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