On the hiking trails that thread through the upper reaches of Vancouver’s North Shore mountains, you will sometimes stumble on the decaying traces left by the industrial activities of an earlier era: remnants of an old cedar skid road, the planks like weathered corduroy; rusted pieces from an old camp stove, long abandoned. Land now zoned for our recreation was once busy with logging camps and mine sites. The text of Holiday, 1909 (Garibaldi Publishing) comes from journals kept by Charles “Chappy” Chapman, his record of the two-week hiking and camping trip that he and three friends took that year, up into the mountains “north of Vancouver.” To start their trek, the four met up “in a tailor’s shop on Pender Street, Vancouver, B.C, and shouldering heavy and bulky packs, made their way to the ferry which crosses Burrard Inlet to North Vancouver.” On the other side of the inlet they caught the streetcar to the end of the line and started hiking, first following “the Burrard-Lillooet Trail, an old and rundown cattle trail,” then along trails and skid roads used mainly by those early loggers and miners. All four were members of the British Columbia Mountaineering Club (BCMC), founded just two years prior. Chappy lists their supplies, which included: “8 lbs Butter $2; One Ham (10 lbs); 20 lbs Sugar; 10 lbs Beans; Bottle of Vanilla Flavoring.” Also: “four billie cans, a Dutch oven, a frying pan, an axe, a rifle, two cameras.” Plus an entire fruit pie in “a plate [...] of graniteware,” the parting gift of “one of our lady friends.” The book includes a generous selection of Chappy’s photographs, plus a few hand-drawn maps showing their route, and some useful footnotes. During their mountain “holiday” the four friends: chatted with miners (working the Vancouver Group Copper Mine); fought off mosquitoes and sandflies; killed a young deer (out of season!); and made first ascents of Ben Lomond and Mount Shear/Sheer. It appears to have been a grand adventure, brought back to life from Chappy’s original notebooks, which had been tucked away and half-forgotten for more than a century. —Michael Hayward