A story in The Register-Guard of Eugene, Oregon this month brands Kaslo an “alpine nirvana.”
The travel piece by John Gottberg Anderson says the Kootenay Lake village is “so much like the fictional Cicely, Alaska from the Northern Exposure television series, you’d swear the show must have been shot here.”
Kaslo is a “cultural capital that casts a shadow that belies its diminutive size,” the story reads.
Among the things rating mentions: the Kaslo Jazz Festival, the SS Moyie, the village hall, and the Langham Cultural Centre. Also highlighted are the local bear population and a woman known as the Raven Lady who feeds ducks and ravens.
Gottberg Anderson also spoke with two American ex-pats, John Eckland, who bought a run-down inn and turned it into the Kaslo Hotel. In past lives, Eckland established America’s first commercial wind farm and headed up alternative energy research for the CIA.
But it was Randy Morse, formerly of Eugene, who founded the Kaslo Institute who described Kaslo as an “alpine nirvana” where “you can try things out … and there’s little danger anyone will tell you you’re an idiot.”
There are a couple of errors — the Kootenay Lake ferry’s eastern terminal is at Kootenay Bay, not Crawford Bay, and the present village headquarters is in the Kemball building, not the 1898 city hall under renovation — but on the whole it’s an accurate and very flattering portrait.