Hacker News Reader

Comment by patentatt | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity I looked it up on a map [1]. It appears two of the closest settlements [2],[3] are also ghost towns or otherwise pretty much abandoned. Kind of nice to know there are habitable but uninhabited places left in the world.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Kitsault+%2C+BC&ia=web&iaxm...

[2] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Arm,_British_Columbia

[3] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyox

View on HN

If you follow the inlet back to the ocean a short ways, you reach Gingolx (Kincolith) [1] which has < 400 people. It would be a fairly unremarkable place except they randomly started having a big festival called crabfest, which has brought bands such as Trooper, Tom Cochrane, and Nazareth to this tiny village.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ging%CC%B1olx

To be fair at this point Nazareth would be willing to perform in exchange for dinner at the Old Country Buffet

If one looks at the area of the Discovery Islands and other places in BC there is a lot of uninhabited area. If you go north on the island highway from Nanaimo BC on Vancouver Island the population density and town size starts getting small pretty quick. BC is huge.

Hell, go take a look at the Northern Territories and almost all of Northern Canada. You can even Street View the entire drive from Dawson City in the Yukon to Tukoyatuk, basically as far north as you can go. It's beautiful and eeeeeeempty.

Edit: I suppose I missed the part about a locale being "habitable but uninhabited". The Northern Territories aren't very inhabitable, but I still find the vastness absolutely fascinating at any rate.

There were plenty of towns set up purely for ruthlessly exploiting resources and then when the resources were gone the town closed up. On the coast these were often whaling towns or salmon fishing canning towns. In the interior it was mining.

Barkerville is an extremely well preserved olde gold rush mining town and well worth a visit if one visits the interior of BC. https://www.barkerville.ca/

I live in Iowa. Moved out here because I wanted to see what sorts of uninhabited-but-habitable places I could move to. The US Midwest has a lot of them if you're willing to poke around LandWatch.

The DDG map link for Kitsault seems pretty off. It shows me a nearby location called "Alice Arm", instead of actual Kitsault.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com