Last Ranch

About the Book

The LAST RANCH shares the author's experience of a family's concentrated efforts to try to bring back to life a splendid historical ranch in the hills of the south Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. An additional hand was their 12 year old son Eric, who had grown experienced in the ways of cattle and isolation during their three years of homesteading life in the Upper Squamish Valley, near Vancouver.

This bold and energy-intensive cattle ranch undertaking coincided with the ten year period of the highest inflation and interest rates which North America has ever experienced. This fact undercut the success of the project in an unexpected way. Impacting as well was the growth of bureaucracy which caused ongoing delays of their progress.

Known commonly in the 1970's as those 'back to the landers', the author and her husband had earlier known city lives of university educations and professional directions. Her husband's interests were devoted to Architecture which he put aside to pursue an alternative way of life.

The author also offers an updated examination of the ongoing loss of British Columbia ranches and the reasons behind these changes.

About the Author

The city-raised author had varied life experiences of five years of English and Psychology studies at university and lengthy European and Mexican travels during the 1950s and 1960s.

The last thing on her mind was to become a rancher. But with her husband, Henry, who had practiced Architecture in Vancouver for ten years, she was convinced during that 'back-to the-landers 1970s movement, that an experience beyond city living had its appeal for her and their 12 year old son Eric. The rebuilding of a late 1800s historical ranch and learning how to run a large ranch seemed a challenging reason to leave their rainy, wet city life behind.

For unexpected financial reasons she became an agricultural journalist in the 1980s and continued working in that direction for 10 years. Along with this was the crushing need to anticipate and work in her ongoing ranch duties, which had to include learning the ropes of doing small subdivisions of their extensive Oliver, British Columbia ranch lands.

The author still continues, in a lesser way, with agricultural articles, sits as a director of the B.C. Farm Women's Network which she helped form 20 years ago, and will soon publish an historical ranch novel, which fictionalized, follows the two, early northern Okanagan Valley ranches through four generations from 1870 to 1985.