Cottage Life

New CL homepage Here at Cottage Life HQ, we’ve been redesigning the homepage of cottagelife.com. With a new and improved reader experience, you can stay up-to-date on cottage news, easily manage your subscriptions, and watch the newest Q&A videos. See it in May! LISTEN UP! Just in time for your cottage drive, a new season of the Cottage Life Podcast launches on June 29 and episodes will be released every Thursday. Michelle Kelly, editor of Cottage Life, is back in the hosting chair and diving deep into the cottage topics you care about. Subscribe on your favourite podcasting platform or listen on cottagelife.com/podcast. Fresh episodes dropping now Coming July 4, a new season of Merchants of the Wild. Six Indigenous adventurers are dropped deep into the rugged Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec. Watch as they spend…

Masa Takei Freelance writer Masa Takei made a 180-degree turn when he pivoted from management consulting to writing and teaching full-time. “All I ever wanted to do was work outside,” he says. Masa lives in a small cabin in Haida Gwaii, B.C., where he serves on a search and rescue team and spends his free time tooling around on off-road motorcycles. “What I like to do is kind of what I find myself writing about.” In this issue, Masa ventured out to Ucluelet, B.C., to interview fellow artist Kamil Bialous about his off-grid retreat for “Between the Cedars” (p. 60). “I loved reconnecting with Kamil. We worked together on a CL story about surfing in Haida Gwaii in 2016,” recalls Masa, “but this time, he was my subject.” You can read…

IT FEELS LIKE Christmas morning when longtime CL photographer Kamil Bialous’s images arrive at the magazine. We gather around the desk of our art director, Taylor Kristan, as they scroll through picture after stunning picture, each one looking like it’s been plucked from the land before time (see above for the beautiful proof). Kamil’s work has a magical quality, taking viewers through his lens to another world, a place where the vegetation is soft and thick and fifty different shades of mossy green; where the light flows over his subjects like oozy maple syrup on hot pancakes, adding a golden hue to each frame. When Kamil told us that he and his partner, Urszula Lipsztajn, were building a cabin on the edge of Vancouver Island, near Ucluelet, we knew immediately that…

We stand with the loons Thank you for putting the loon on the cover of the March/April ’23 issue and for sharing “Death of an Icon?” by documentary filmmaker Julia Nunes. CL is leading the way in opening what I hope will become a larger discussion on how we can protect the loon from disappearing on Canadian lakes. The article notes that declines in the loon population have been observed all over Canada, and the steepest decline is in the Atlantic provinces, where we have just finished a five-year project building a cottage in Nova Scotia. I believe the loons there have been markedly threatened by PWCs. These little machines are swamping loon babies and flooding nests. They are undoubtedly great fun for their human owners. But, if anywhere, they belong on…

LOVERS OF LIVE music, take note: Gravenhurst, Ont.’s Tall Pines Music & Arts Festival is back! Taking place June 16–17 against the stunning backdrop of Lake Muskoka, the festival features some of Canada’s most celebrated bands—Blue Rodeo, Tokyo Police Club, and Serena Ryder are headliners—as well as live art installations, a local vendor village, food trucks, canoeing, and a kids’ zone. It gets better: we’re offering the Cottage Life community a 15 per cent discount on Tall Pines tickets. Visit tallpinesfestival.com, click “Get Tickets,” and use code cottagelife15 at checkout. Rock on!…

THROUGHOUT THE WINTER of 2020–2021, conservation photographer Carla Rhodes positioned a DSLR camera trap underneath her bird feeder. The result: delightful close-up shots of various furred and feathered friends, including the ones you see here—not to mention countless interesting observations about the creatures who roam the grounds of her Catskills, N.Y., home. “When the sun went down, deer mice would gather the dropped seeds, caching them in a stone wall near the bird feeder,” says Rhodes. “When day broke, an assortment of looters, from birds to squirrels, would raid the cached bounty.” The photos are part of a project called “Beneath the Bird Feeder,” which Rhodes hopes will inspire others to explore their backyards too. You can find it at carlarhodes.com…