Some 27km north of Trail on Hwy 22, CASTLEGAR is a strange diffuse place with no obvious centre, probably because roads and rivers – this is where the Kootenay meets the Columbia – make it more a transport hub than a community. In its time it was famous for its immigrant Doukhobor or “Spirit Wrestler” population, members of a Russian sect who fled religious persecution in 1899 from Russia and brought their pacifist-agrarian lifestyle to western Canada. By the 1920s BC had around ninety Doukhobor settlements, each with a co-operative, communal population of around sixty. They arrived in Castlegar in 1908, establishing at least 24 villages in the area, each with Russian names meaning things like “the beautiful”, “the blessed” or “consolation”. Accomplished farmers, they laboured under the motto “Toil and a Peaceful Life”, creating highly successful orchards, farms, sawmills and packing plants. Although their way of life waned after the death of their leader Peter Verigin in 1924, killed by a bomb planted in his railway carriage, the Doukhobors’ considerable industry and agricult-ural expertise transformed the Castlegar area; many locals still practise the old beliefs – Doukhobor numbers are around 5000 across the region – and Russian is still spoken. These days there’s also a breakaway radical sect, the Freedomites, or Sons of Freedom, infamous for their eye-catching demonstrations – of which fires and nude parades are just two – against materialism and other morally dubious values.