Circle of Silver: Resilience
Words By: Elladee Brown
Images By: Anne Keller
To my younger self, Trout Lake wasn’t just a place—it was a world of its own.
Nestled in the southeastern corner of British Columbia, it felt like a secret realm, a magical intersection of towering forests, pristine lakes, mist-laden valleys, endless rivers and rugged peaks. Even now, years later, it holds the same allure. This is a land shaped by galactic glaciers and endless moisture brought over the Columbia mountains from the Pacific Ocean. It’s home to the world’s only inland temperate rainforest, where 3,000 + meter peaks frame valleys blanketed by colossal cedars and hemlocks.
Growing up in Nakusp, just an hour away, I used to drive to the Trout Lake area with my mom and brother to visit my dad in logging camps.
For a child in the late ’70s, Trout Lake was a haven of wonder. It wasn’t just the beauty of the place—it was the people. Eccentric, untamed, unforgettable characters like local legend, Minnie Marlow or Red Kelly, the camp cook whose sharp wit rivaled her culinary skills. I didn’t have the vocabulary then, but now I’d call them counterculture—trailblazers who defied convention and lived life on their own terms in a wild west beyond measure.
At its height of the gold rush
in the 1890s,
Trout Lake was a thriving mining town of over 2,000 people. It had everything: hotels, a hospital, a jail, even a skating rink and a women’s hockey team. Today, it’s a quiet place with no cell service and just under 40 full-time residents. But its history is etched into every trail in the area, and every building in town. And no story captivated me more than that of Alice Jowett, a woman whose life of mountain exploration intersected with my own more than a century later.
It was five years ago,
during a family trip to the area exploring on eMTB’s, that I reconnected with Trout Lake and Silvercup Ridge.
I felt immediate nostalgia being there – the challenge and beauty simultaneously pulls you in. The Silvercup trail is the longest ridge ride in the Kootenays. It runs approximately 26km northwest to southeast above Trout Lake. It’s home to several decaying mine sites, and at one time, claimed to have the largest percentage of gold than any silver-lead mine on the North American continent. It can be, and has been, ridden by acoustic bikes in the past, but it’s far more pushing than riding. The terrain is steep and punishing, and even the ridge itself rarely rides level.
There are no clear maps or trail apps
that link the various routes to each other. Trails often disappear into scree fields or dense overgrowth, but there’s always a way through, if you know which way to go. Multiple forest service roads lead you into the alpine from lower elevations, but nothing is clear or obvious unless you have local intel. The prospect of finding the route across the entirety of the ridge sparked an obsession. I wanted to explore and eventually connect the singletrack trails from one end of the Silvercup to the other.
Through further research, and with the help of the Arrow Lakes Historical Society, I learned that many of these trails were commissioned by Alice Jowett in the early 1900s. She had several mining claims in the Silvercup area, her favorite being the Foggy Day site where her memorial can be seen trailside.
Her story was one of resilience.
Widowed at 35, she left Yorkshire, England, with her three young children to carve out a life on a new continent. She learned the art of confectionary as a young woman in England, and deployed those skills out of necessity when she finally landed in Vancouver penniless.
She eventually opened the city’s first bake shop on Cordova Street, serving pies and bread to travelers passing through. But fines for selling food on Sundays, the sacred Sabbath, pushed her to seek a new frontier without big city beauracracy. She packed up her life after seven years in Vancouver, and moved to Trout Lake, where she ran a hostel to start, that later allowed her to purchase the Windsor Hotel—a grandiose three-story building that became her legacy.
The Windsor Hotel
still stands prominent today, close to the Lardeau River that flows into the 22km ribbon lake that the town is named after. Lovingly maintained by its current owners, Brian and Lisa, staying there feels like stepping back in time. The creak of the wooden floors, the scent of cedar in the air—it literally hums with Alice’s presence. Her spirit is everywhere, in the towering peaks beyond the windows and the history woven into the walls.
It’s common knowledge and well documented that certain rooms in the Windsor are haunted by Alice, but in a friendly way.
My friend from Nakusp, Nicole Daney, is the great great granddaughter of Alice. She used to work in the Windsor as a young girl, long after her Grandmother had passed. She recalls positive, cheeky ghost stories of her Granny within the walls of the Windsor; slamming doors, flickering lights and shaking beds and lamps.
This past July,
I returned to Trout Lake for an ambitious adventure: riding the entirety of the Silvercup Ridge route on e-MTB. Joining me on this journey were equally adventurous friends – as passionate as I about exploring the routes up here. Jen Zeuner and Anne Keller from Colorado made the journey north specifically for this trip. My friend Kim, originally from Quebec, was a strong experienced rider, but this would be her first big backcountry trip; and Chris Lawrence, also known as ‘Larry Lunchbox’, a dear friend from my freeride and racing days, was with me 5 years ago when we first got a taste of the Silvercup on e–bikes. He was just as smitten with the place as I was.
Planning a backcountry ride in any remote area requires a plan and support.
We had a ground crew of three in addition to our main riding group of five. Chris’ partner, Charity, my childhood mountain mentor and hero, Jen Stanger, who was also with Chris and I on the original nostalgia tour in 2019, and another adventurous friend and rider, Brenda McIntyre, from Vancouver Island.
Between planning sessions at the Windsor, we swam in Trout Lake, indulged in local ice cream, and paid a visit to the edge of town’s overgrown cemetery. Such insight into a rugged and harsh history that rests beneath weathered headstones overgrown by the forest. Life wasn’t easy here for anyone, and it particularly brutal for miners who met their fate simply by going to work.
I can’t help but marvel
how Alice navigated this rugged terrain over a century ago, without modern gear or any kind of communication device. Life here was a testament to courage and determination, even the remote towns around Trout Lake consider this place remote.
Despite its past, Trout Lake still has incredible charm and vibrancy with a small, but proud local community. Even though its unincorporated, it has some amazing amenities; the streets are paved, there’s a town water system, an ice cream shop, community hall, public marina and lakeside camping. There’s even the odd prospector still kicking around, hoping that maybe, just maybe, there’s still a chance to strike it rich.
This story keeps going,
hang tight for part two where our adventure team takes off for the Triune Mine, another century old historical mine site on the edge of the Silvercup – the perfect place to test the terrain, ourselves and our batteries.
What stands out most though,
is the seamless connection between past and present. Here we are, riding state-of-the-art bikes on trails carved out over a century ago for horses and hikers. And yet, 125 years later, the thrill and the challenge remain unchanged. Slightly different objectives, but it’s a fact that the spirit of adventure indeed transcends time.
