Stefan Jacob

Stikine Wild - The Wilderness Years Stefan Jacob

In the late winter of 1976, Stefan and Ann Jacob with their four month old baby daughter, Ariana, drove into the village of Telegraph Creek, BC, the most remote community in all of British Columbia, Canada. The town had no electricity or television, and was 400 miles (700 km) from the nearest town and supermarket. At the end of the only road they left their van by the frozen Stikine River and went 17 miles (25 km) further down the river on the ice to live in a long abandoned homestead. This is the story of their life in the Stikine wilderness, raising a family of three children, creating their own water wheel generated electricity, growing vegetables for the town and eventually helping develop the Canadian in-river commercial salmon fishery in the Stikine River wilderness. It is a story of personal adventure in the wilds of B. C., and also tells the largely unwritten story of the conflict that developed between Alaska and Canada over the fishing rights to the salmon spawned in the river, and about the competing forces for these fish within Canada. Later Stefan co-managed a commercial in-river fishery with the Tahltan First Nation people, which led to many other adventures and an unexpected conclusion. The book is both a personal memoir of their family's adventure, and a snapshot of that time and place in the history of this remote region of the country.