North & South of the Border:
Two B&Bs to enjoy...

By Jack Kintner


NORTH:

Betty Anne Pretty Faulkner tees up her ball on the short par three 12th hole and whacks it to the green a football field away. “I like to play at least once a week, more often if I can,” she says, “and I always walk.”

The 73-year-old is as fit and trim as someone half her age, eagerly dragging a full set of clubs the nearly four miles (6,500 yards) around the Russ Olsen championship course that’s the heart of the Sandpiper Golf Resort she owns as a part of the Pretty Estates complex in Harrison Mills, B.C. Everyone calls her Betty Anne, and the name fits her well as the last surviving child of the estate’s builders, Charles and Rowena Pretty.

It’s carved out of a 160 acre tract that she once played on as a child, near another tract twice the size her father played on when he was a kid. “It’s not been easy keeping it in the family,” she said, “but it’s been important to us to do that.” Her mother is the namesake for Rowena’s Inn bed and breakfast she’s made out of the family home.
Her ancestors moved to the area for their health, and succeeding generations have found it captivating. Betty Anne doesn’t like to call the place magical or mystical, but she’s clearly as attached to it as Scarlett O’Hara was to Tara. In building her golf resort, restaurant and bed and breakfast businesses she’s been able to share that attachment with a growing clientele, and she loves the whole scene enough to live literally right in the middle of the busiest part of the whole complex, in a new wing off the main house (now the Rowena’s Inn B&B) and the swimming pool, one of the few left that still has a diving board.

And indeed the first impression one gets coming down the parkway-like drive is of an incandescent isolation, a place to relax apart from urban noise and be inspired. It’s hard not to get caught up in the enthusiasm most seem to feel just for the ambience felt on entering the grounds, a place of sun and light and surprise one encounters after driving through some dense woods.

The setting alone is magnificent, on north side of the short (10 miles) but wide and shallow Harrison River, which is filled with fish in the fall, this year’s abundant pink salmon run yielding individuals that run up to eight pounds. It’s prime habitat for spawning chinook and chum, and in good sockeye years masses of them flow by headed for Harrison Lake since sockeye always spawn through a lake somewhere in their journey from the sea. There’s also the Chehalis River hatchery not far to the east where wintering eagles can easily be seen feasting on harvested salmon.

The salmon runs support legendary numbers of bald eagles, at times numbering in the thousands when the fish are running. As it is, the trees around the golf course are favored as night roosts for many of the birds who can be heard happily chirping away at dusk and dawn as they come and go all year long.

The golf course is a rolling challenge of gentle ups and downs on moderately narrow fairways divided by tall timber that’s been trimmed a hundred feet or so up to let light in and reduce the sail area of the trees to keep them from being blown down. The effect is a little like a cathedral’s tall columns. Green fees run from $25 to $85 depending on the day and time.

Play begins on a massive 567-yard par five that’s often played into an up-river wind. The course has two par fives and two par threes on each nine, and the signature hole is 15, where the green is guarded by the giant sasquatch footprint, a complex of sand traps that if accurate means that Bigfoot has really massive feet. Along the 17th hole the resort has a very good all-weather 2,000 foot airstrip; if you drive a ball onto that you’re allowed a free drop no closer to the hole, and told to be very careful of approaching aircraft.

After a round there’s fine dining in the River’s Edge Restaurant in a durable but appealing wooden building designed by Betty Anne’s husband, Vancouver architect Doug Faulkner. “Here it’s not the trees falling that will get you but the branches that blow off them, some of which are as big as trees themselves,” he said, and he’s designed the restaurant and pro shop accordingly.

He also designed a number of small cabins for couples consistent with publicity that describes the complex as devoted to adult oriented romantic getaways. The cabins are built of logs pre-cut to Faulkner’s design with massive stone fireplaces built out of river rock, heated slate floors in the bathrooms and springy wood floors that are suspended.

The bed and breakfast has beautiful rooms on the second floor that look out into a thick stand of cedars behind the house or out across the pool, grounds and golf course to the river. The house is filled with antiques dating back to the 1700s, including a dining room table that once served King George in the 1930s. Outside the pleasant walks are punctuated here and there with bronzes and koi ponds.
Betty Anne’s had her tussles with otters and herons going after her fish, but she points out one huge goldfish, probably close to three feet long, that she calls “my Big Bertha. Any heron who thinks he can fly off with her is welcome to do so.”

The place is kept ship shape by a large staff drawn from area towns, including the quaint railroad town of Agassiz. Possible side trips would include the restored river town of Kilby a mile or so away across the Highway 7 bridge, or Harrison Hot Springs.

Betty Anne’s grandfather first came to the area before the turn of the last century for his health, and his son Charles, Betty Anne’s dad, bought the land the golf course sits on in 1924 from a family of homesteaders named Jackson. The house he built in the ‘20s is the core of what now looks just like a well-preserved English country estate. For a time he raised silver foxes, bartering their pelts for supplies with the Hudson’s Bay Company during the depression, and also ran it as a dairy farm, but the family’s primary income continued to be timber, either logging it nearby Agassiz Mountain or trading it in downtown Vancouver.

“Dad always said he’d only allow this to become a golf course over his dead body,” Betty Anne laughed, and sure enough, on other land that once belonged to her grandfather there is a family plot.

Her childhood was filled with wild experiences known only to native kids or others who were lucky enough to live so far from civilization. “I once came face to face with a big wolf,” she said, “while riding my arabian I called Zippy. Nothing happened, and I noticed that he was missing a paw, as if he’d chewed it off to get out of a trap.” Their life in the woods was balanced with nautical adventures in a wooden cruiser they would take out to the Fraser and downstream and out to the Gulf Islands, a trip of better than 100 miles.

Life has had its twists and turns for Betty Anne, which is why she loves the place and why she’s happy to share it with her guests. Rates drop dramatically mid-week during the shoulder seasons from mid-September through Halloween and April through mid-June, and even lower in the November through March winter season, when skiing is available at nearby Hemlock Valley.

Pretty Estates are at 14282 Morris Valley Road, Harrison Mills, B.C. at the junction of Morris Valley Road and Highway 7 that runs along the north side of the Fraser, straight north of Chilliwack. For more information on Pretty Estates, including the Sandpiper Golf Resort, Rowena’s Inn Bed and Breakfast, and the River’s Edge Restaurant, call toll free 877/796-1001 or go to www.rowenasinn.com.

SOUTH:

One of the most elegant bed and breakfast experiences available along the Highway 542 corridor is at Carole MacDonald’s Inn at Mt. Baker, on the left just west of milepost 28 between Maple Falls and Glacier.

Their perch on a 600-foot knoll about two-thirds of a mile up a winding driveway off the highway gives them a view of Mt. Baker up the winding North Fork valley that’s unsurpassed. It looks at terrain that runs from a few hundred to more than ten thousand feet in elevation, letting them watch the colors and moods of the seasons as if on a large living tapestry. In the fall season the color begins at the higher elevations and works its way down the mountain, while in the spring the first evidence is way down low and works its way up.

MacDonald, from upper New York state, said that “the color’s pretty good here, even for an easterner like me. And, of course, there’s nothing like a 10,000-foot volcano in front of your house to add to the ambience,” she laughed.

The five rooms, two on the third level and three more plus a guest day room on the ground floor, all have that same view. Baker’s top was wearing a cloud cap that sagged around the peak like an overgrown hat the day we visited, but with so much to see it didn’t detract at all from the grandeur of the sight. It’s impossible to forget you’re in the company of some large-scale wilderness while staying here.

MacDonald has all the enthusiasm of a true convert for her work. MacDonald and her Husband Bill Snyder marked the new millennium by building their large three-story European style bed and breakfast on acreage just west of Boulder Creek. This was after swearing for some years that she’d never open a bed and breakfast. But with two years of research into the process she decided to go ahead after all and opened seven years ago last Memorial Day.
“I like to cook, and I really like being able to work at home,” she said, adding that another satisfaction is in how her place has become a gathering spot for local friends. New customers are often referred by long-time North Fork residents, and the Mt. Baker Foothills Chamber of Commerce (of which MacDonald is president) not only meets there but also have day-long retreats and workshops. It truly is a welcoming place that helps people relax and loosen up.

As chamber president, MacDonald also realizes how much more room is available for businesses in the area, including other up-scale B&Bs. “I’d welcome more of them, because together they’ll generate a synergy that will attract a growing clientele,” she said.

The house itself looks like a cross between a large craftsman bungalow and a Swiss chalet, especially with snow on the ground. The common areas are large and the bedrooms are spacious, each with queen doubles or one with twins that combine to make a king.

The beds feature feather mattresses and down-filled duvets to put you to sleep in the clean and bracing mountain air. Each room has its own washroom with a six-foot soaking tub and comes with thick terrycloth robes and slippers that can be worn out to a hot tub that has one of the best views in the state.

“The last touch is always a rose on the bathroom counter,” she said as she placed one in each room. “Another full house tonight!”

Each room as well as the common day lounge has a TV with VCR, and the lounge also has a small refrigerator, popcorn popper, toaster and ways of making tea, coffee and hot chocolate. Telephone, fax, photocopy and internet services are available on request.

Mornings are for a big hearty mountain-style breakfast served on a large harvest table in the dining room and, if weather permits, outside on the adjacent deck.

With a 3,000-foot driveway that climbs the hill like a mountain goat, MacDonald said that she asks guests to park down below when there’s snow.

“We went three winters with almost no snow down here,” she said, “but in the fourth year we had a real dump, so I put truck chains on my Suburban and just ran a shuttle up and down the hill. It worked out fine.”

For more information go to www.theinnatmtbaker.com, write to P.O. Box 5150, Glacier, WA 98244 or call toll-free 877/567-5526.