I believe that a field trip with Cole influenced my entire career. Made me understand what Geography really is and as importantly what it can be when taught “in the field”. One Friday morning, we all happily piled into a UBS fifteen passenger van and head off to the wilds of BC’s interior (I’d grown up in North Vancouver and anything eastbound was always considered “beyond Hope”) yet, as with other trips with Cole this one was fraught with a “situation”or two. These began within an hour, just east of Boundary Road, barely into Burnaby when we felt the flopflopflop of what was a flat tire. Cole conveyed to us, in his most polite manner, just what he thought of the UBC’s vehicle maintenance programme as a number of us helped change a front tire. It wasn’t auspicious beginning to our trip to the Harris Ranch in the Slocan Valley. No further calamitous events occurred as we drove, stopped and explored our our way eastward on the Hope-Princeton Highway, to the old gold mining town of Hedley, the fruit farms of Keremeos, passing through Osoyoos and a late afternoon arrival at the historic Grand Forks Hotel (that unfortunately burned down in March, 2012). There we had a classic Doukhobor dinner then it was off to our classic, old-time rooms – it was an experience Cole knew would help us better appreciate historical aspects of the Boundary Region and its mining and agricultural heritage. While that first day on the road was a lot of driving, Day Two saw us do much more personal investigations of historic landscapes of both he Boundary Country and the Slocan Valley. Our first major hike was up to abandoned mining machinery, up a mountainside near the town of Greenwood (photo attached) -- quite a hike but a good way to start our prime exploring day, then we were of to Sandon an abandoned mining town, built atop of a small river. But one of ts most intriguing aspect was that it only received an hour or two and often much less sunshine a day as it was situated at the north side of a rather steep and high mountain...but again we had a considerable walkabout and discussed the internment of Japanese Canadians here in World War Two . By late afternoon on Saturday we arrived at the Harris Ranch – what an amazing location, one that Cole was clearly both proud of and loved. The fact that he would share that with us and with man other students through the years is a testament to both his kindness and devotion to his devotion to his profession. I am still moved when I think of my visit. Cole encouraged us to have a relaxing evening, barbecue, even enjoy a beverage or two, but a few of the undergrads took that to mean party and by the evening one young man managed to tumble all the way down the indoor staircase and badly dislocated his shoulder. It was evident that Cole was somewhat perturbed yet he calmly loaded him into the van and off they went off to the New Denver hospital, returning well into the evening after all those who remained of us had retired. Cole’s even-handedness with the student testified to his patience and kindness, he did not berate the student but simply took him to where he could get attention, although one could tell he was a little perturbed. That was a trip that I shall always remember, both as it opened-up the Interior to me and showed me what a Geography course could and should be like. I’d like to think that since that time and throughout my classroom and field career that I have tried to emulate the manner that I saw Cole conduct himself during that trip. It led me to seek a career in Geography, to pursue a PhD and to always try and include a field trip of some duration...from a day to a month… in the courses that I taught. In short, Cole taught me to be a Geographer.

Cole’s field trips were legendary. Believing that “being there”, being on the land, was paramount to understanding it, to knowing something of the lives and travails of its former inhabitants, Cole thought it his obligation to take students, colleagues, visitors and friends into the field. As newbies to BC, we were initially invited to visit his family ranch in the Slocan, then later and separately to join his famously loosely organized fieldtrips. For Trevor, that was a three-day excursion to the headwaters of the Stein in July 1987. It was accessible via a logging road off the then unpaved Duffy Lake Road. We were a two-car convoy. Very gingerly we made our way along the uneven, rutted and slash-strewn logging road until we could go no farther. For reasons I’ve now forgotten, I rented a large Chevy sedan, one of the rental conditions being no off-road driving. Each time the car bottomed out, I winced. We parked literally at the end of the road and set up the first night’s camp in the clear cut. A fire was lit and after a dinner of pasta, Cole asked who wanted tea. I was desperate, parched. “Yes, please”, I said, although I had not seen a teapot, or a kettle, or for that matter a teacup. Cole began by heating water in the pasta pot, which, after it came to a boil, he poured into it an indeterminate amount of loose black tea. Some more boiling. Then he dipped a metal mug into the brew, and handing it to me said, “Here, a nice cup of tea”. I couldn’t handle it. I had just witnessed tea-making travesty. But I didn’t want to be outrightly rude. So, I said, “Have you read George Orwell’s Tribune essay on the twelve steps of making a perfect cup of tea?” It begins with taking fresh cold water from the tap, using a porcelain tea pot that is first scalded, with one teaspoon of tea for every person and one for the pot. “The controversial step,” I continued, “is whether you put the milk in first or the tea.” Then the denouement: “Cole, I am afraid you broke every one of Orwell’s twelve rules.” Thankfully Cole burst into laughter rather than pouring the cauldron of tea over my head. He loved that story and told it several times including on the last occasion we saw one another, about six weeks before he died when he and Muriel came over for lunch. We knew it would be the last time we would see each other. But the occasion was not mournful. It was about remembering, for retelling stories about a life lived “thoughtfully” and “gently”, his aspiration (The Resettlement of British Columbia, 1997, p. 275). For Joan, in May 1988 it was to go up the Fraser Valley with Cole along with a crew of grad students and interested parties - Bob Galois, Richard Mackie, Dan Clayton, Ed Higginbottom, and myself. There was no itinerary, beyond spending the first night at the Alexandria Hotel. We spent time in Lytton looking at remnants of pit houses and early Chinese mining, and then carried on to Lillooet to see the outcome of over-grazing. Cole directed us to the Oblate cemetery high above the confluence of the Bridge River and the Fraser, a breathtaking setting where he reflected the long reach of Christian missionizing among Indigenous people. The temperature rose, and Cole started to talk about maybe taking the reaction ferry across the Fraser to camp at Big Bar. We didn’t have a single piece of camping gear so we stopped in a Sally Ann to stock up – a beat-up fry pan and a coffee pot held together with duct tape. We reached Big Bar in the late afternoon, left the car, and were dropped on the left bank of the Fraser on the edge of a vast ranch. Cole suggested Dan and Bob might catch fish for dinner. Richard, Ed, and I went exploring, and eventually happened upon a soddy that housed a young cowboy working for the ranch. He invited us in. He was raising very young chicks crowded into his stifling hot kitchen. The mantel held tiny film canisters containing miniscule flakes of gold he had panned from the Fraser. When we told Cole about the still-in-use soddy, he determined to visit too. Cole took a house gift – our last remaining package of cookies. For dinner that night, we shared two small fish and Bob’s cache of whiskey. We slept on the ground, trying to avoid cow pies. In the morning we woke up to cattle inspecting us, this invasion of geographers. In those few days Cole opened the door to experiences that continue to furnish my imagination and feed my understanding of BC. Trevor Barnes and Joan Seidl

We walked across an abandoned industrial site toward a pile of rocks beside the Fraser River, and Cole showed us what had been a placer mining operation during the gold rush. He talked as if he had known the miners - as if he had been there. He helped us see the place and imagine the people who had shaped it. This was one of many field trips that we took in the late eighties and early nineties with Cole Harris. We’d pull off the highway in unremarkable locations, scrambling after him into rough patches of land. Once, most memorably, we came across uneven ground that turned out to be some remains of house pits - the site of a winter village. This has stayed with us - we’re still friends and we’re together writing this - now older than Cole was when this picture was taken. Richard teaches field classes with students from England and has written books on fieldwork. Yasmeen has worked with First Nations as an ethnohistorical researcher, visiting sites and hearing stories of the cultural landscape. We’re remembering Cole - feeling so grateful to have fallen into his orbit - through what he taught us to do: our own fieldwork. - Yasmeen Qureshi and Richard Phillips, pictured with Cole Harris and Katie Pickles

After crashing through scrubby bush and down an embankment (Cole nearly losing his footing in the process), our group stood over what was, for all intents and purposes, a sinkhole in the ground. This, Cole informed us, was an archaelogical site: the remnants of a Halkomelem pithouse, evidence of Indigenous occupancy of the Fraser Valley stretching back millennia. Back up the bank and beside a rickety sawmill, an overgrown graveyard with mainly Indigenous occupants testified to the impacts of introduced diseases and religion both. These deeply poignant sites formed part of Cole's legendary Fraser River field trips, where he modeled the connections between field observations and historical-geographical insight for students and guests. For Cole, the landscape always spoke, of matters both large and small, intimate and panoramic: a child's death by disease, a community chased from the river edge by gold miners, the lengthening reach of colonial administration in British Columbia. Uncannily orderly piles of stones along river flats illustrated the industry and suffering of Chinese miners who worked the uplands behind the panned-out river bars; across the reaction ferry at Lilloet, wedged between two settler farmsteads, a tiny outcrop of land that served as an "Indian reserve" fishing site, indexical of the geography of dispossession in BC. As a graduate student and settler British Columbian, Cole's field teachings (not to mention his classroom teaching) proved deeply formative. I learned more about BC in a few days along the Fraser than most of my previous education--a master's in history included! For me, the lasting impact (as I have moved on to become a teaching and research professor myself) was a deeper appreciation for fieldwork as both method and experience--one that is shared and collective, as the Fraser River trips were. To this day, I work to integrate place and field experiences into graduate and undergraduate teaching, and see with my student's eyes the particular insight and feeling for place it generates. I'm also still assigning Cole's reflections on fieldwork to my students as well!

Cole Harris’s field trips were legendary; it was his infectious enthusiasm (“Garsh, would you look at that!”) and profound knowledge of the BC landscape that made them so. No trip was more memorable for me than the winter outing for graduate students that took place in the winter of 1974. Our destination was the west coast of Vancouver Island during an extended super-soaker storm. The weather was atrocious, days of downpour with a strong, cold westerly wind. Wet snow at higher elevations and away from the coast was also part of the mix. As we toured Nitinat, Port Alberni and Tofino-Ucluelet we hunkered behind one another in our rain gear, shoulders hunched, faces away from the wind, seeking the least bit of protection. All the while Cole reminded us just how fortunate we were to have caught the West Coast in such conditions. The weather couldn’t have been more perfect if he had ordered it up himself. Nothing should satisfy us more, he insisted, than experiencing the coast in the most miserable storm of the season, a true West Coast experience. Loved the man and still miss him even though I only saw him infrequently after I left UBC. The world was a better place with Cole Harris in it.