[UPDATE: Aw man, the photos I intended to go with this post didn't load for some reason. I've now put them in.]

There are three ways to get to Bella Coola. You can fly in, which takes about an hour and a half. You can take the ferry up from Vancouver, which takes anywhere from 13 hours to 24 hours. You can drive in, which is what we did, in the trusty but mileage-compiling Subaru. (You can also, apparently, ride your bike in, but I’m not that tough.)

The nearest big town—the closest place to find your GiantMarts and Builders Bazaars—is Williams Lake. To get from Williams Lake to Bella Coola you drive four hours on a two-lane paved highway through a sort of high forest—now dying, incidentally, from pine-beetle infestation—before heading down a dirt, sometimes one-lane road known as the Hill, with no guard rails that drops from 5,000 feet to sea level in about 20 minutes of oh-sh*t, first-gear driving. We were cool in the Sub, but it’s nothing I’d want to take, say, an 18-wheeler down. Yet somehow all kinds of stuff gets shipped to Bella Coola: furniture, fuel, booze. The supermarket sells kiwi and mangoes, fake Crocs made in China.

On one of our last nights in Bella Coola—I’m writing this from the Red Coach Inn in lovely 100 Mile House, B.C.—we met some locals and invited them over for dinner. Dig our green meal: we ate salmon from the Bella Coola River and pasta with tomatoes and basil from our rental’s greenhouse.

Anyway, she’s an artist, he’s a builder, contracting on local remodels and second-home upgrades. Like the one he did for a couple from Quebec. They had bought a 1920s or 1890s farmhouse (can’t remember which; I blame the B.C. wine). One of the big tasks was replacing the wood floors, which the Quebec couple did by shipping reclaimed planks from Quebec, a three-day drive away. To their house in one of the capitals of logging in North America.

In addition to the Douglas fir and giant cottonwoods, the valley is full of western red cedar. Bella Coola’s true natives, the Nuxalk people, built their homes out of cedar planks. Apparently, they cut planks from existing cedars, one at a time. The locals got their boards and boats, but the trees were able to keep growing. Some of the protected old-growth cedars are hundreds and hundreds of years old; you can see planking on a number of them in Walker Island Park.

I didn’t get the chance to see any cedar plank houses, but I did see another green building approach locally: cordwood building.

In cordwood building, short pieces of wood—about a foot long each—are stacked together and bonded with mortar at either end. Insulation—anything from sawdust to spray foam—is poured in between. Crazy thermal mass, crazy thick insulation, and a pretty clever use of locally grown and harvested building materials. Certainly much more clever than trucking a bunch of planks over the mountain in a honking semi.