Juicy Details The East Kootenay's improbable first apple tree would not be swallowed by distance, probability, nor time. w: Sarah Stupar
~1~ Hot Hot Spot When the City of Kimberley set up data loggers in 2008 to measure sunlight hours in preparation for a potential solar array on Fertilizer Hill, science told them what local Ktunaxa people have known forever: the East Kootenay gets a whole lot of natanik̓, Sun. In fact, Kimberley sees the sun for more than 2,150 hours per year, with nearly 320 days of sunny weather. The sunniest spot in Canada is the Hamlet of Manyberries, Alberta, with over 2,500 sunlit hours, and 350 days with sun.
from seed to superseded — The Newtown Pippin is one of the oldest apple varieties in North America, introduced from England in the 1750s. While commercially important in the 19th century, it’s since been eclipsed by the modern Granny Smith. Yet, its crisp and complex flavours live on in a hidden grove near an East Kootenay ghost town. — Diana Dearden Photo LOCATED on a sunny expanse of land on Aq̓am — the Ktunaxa community in the Rocky Mountain Trench alongside the St. Mary River — a native plant nursery is working to protect the plants and stories of the Ktunaxa Traditional Territory, and planting seeds for their protection in the future. The nursery is operated by Nupqu, a Ktunaxa-owned land and resource management company. Nupqu tends to the plants most-often indigenous to ʔamakʔis Ktunaxa, the traditional territory of the Ktunaxa peoples, which includes much of the East Kootenay. But some of the Nupqu’s efforts focus on plants that came from far away, adding a hidden fold to the region’s historic horticultural fabric. This includes the Newtown Pippin apple. According to an archived 1872 issue of The Prospector newspaper, the man responsible for bringing
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the nowadays ubiquitous apple to this part of the province hailed from Wales, and he would go on to become a legendary East Kootenay pioneer. “David Griffith brought in this week a sample of apples grown on his place at Wild Horse,” The Prospector editor wrote. “It is a large and handsome specimen of the green Pippin variety, showing the excellent quality of the fruit that can be raised here.” Fact is, Griffith’s journey to Wild Horse Canyon, 25 kilometres northeast of Cranbrook, was, well… pretty wild. Born in Swansea, Wales in 1834, Griffith was at the forefront of the California-emigrant wave of the 1850’s gold rush. He’d travelled to North America by ship, sailing from the United Kingdom south around Chile’s Cape Horn, then back up the Pacific to San Francisco. SEE CAME VIA CALIFORNIA ON PAGE 37