Tag Archives: Tryge Ellingsen

The 2024 Creative Spaces Garden and Studio Tour On Cortes Island

The Creative Spaces Garden and Studio Tour is Saturday June 22, from 10 am to 4 pm. This is an annual fundraiser for the Cortes Island Museum, as well as a showcase of some of the island’s hidden gems.  

“It’s a great opportunity to feature creative talents of people on the island, and it’s a self guided  tour of studios and gardens that takes you all the way around from Whaletown, down to Smelt Bay, and Cortes Bay. We’ve got painters, textile artists, weavers, spinners,  ceramicists .  We’ve got a number of potters and pottery studios that are participating. And then some beautiful spaces with gardens that range from low bluff to high bluff. You pick up a map, which includes a button, and you just go around the island visiting people with talents you may not have known about, or see spaces that you were curious about but never had an opportunity to actually walk into. Walk through the gates and see what people are growing there,” explained Melanie Boyle, Managing Director of the Cortes Island Museum.

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From The Ground Up: The Story Of Cortes Island Dwellings

A new exhibition in the Cortes Island Museum looks at the island’s housing from pre-colonial times up until the present. ‘From the Ground Up: Cortes Island Dwellings And Their Histories’ combines photographs and artifacts from the museum’s collections, stories and images from the community and a display from the Cortes Housing Society. Melanie Boyle, Managing Director of the Museum, took Cortes Currents on a tour of the exhibit. 

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Ellingsen Woods search for a value added market

“When I came to Cortes, I imagined just making boards is a great thing to do. I’ve had a number of years to assess and reassess that reality. It’s possible as a one man operation for me to do okay at that, but it’s a subsistence business not a business model. It’s not a business plan,” explained Aaron Ellingsen.

His company, Ellingsen Woods, is about to go through a relaunch. 

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Coming Home From Africa

“The Kingdom of Uganda is a fairy tale. The scenery is different, the climate is different and most of all, the people are different from anything elsewhere to be seen in the whole range of Africa … what message I bring back … concentrate on Uganda.” – Winston Churchill, My Africa Journey

A group of 23 Cortes residents just returned from Uganda and neighbouring Kenya. They decided to travel this year because the tour company owned by Chris Hartwick’s parents, is going out of business. Nobody anticipated there would be any complications coming home from Africa.

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