Bob Harris
authored 75 articles for BC Outdoors magazine
from 1974-1986, and another 23 trails were published in BC Historical News from 1978-1989. Twenty of his articles for BC Outdoors were compiled in a volume,
entitled The Best of BC Hiking Trails: 20
Great Hikes (McLean Hunter, 1986) which is now out of print. This book was
meant to be part of a series, but due to lack of funds by the VNHS, it remains
the only one. Apart from a few minor changes, most of the trails are still up
to date; Bob’s rigorous historical research and hand-drawn maps can be seen in this
book, which is included in the RBSC R.C. Harris fonds.
His last contribution to
Canadian natural history is a database of maps: this was to be Bob Harris’s
final contribution to BC history. From over two thousand maps in his
collection, one hundred of these were to be selected in a comprehensive
historical atlas of British Columbia, up to the year 1871. The remainder of
these maps were to be produced in a compendium; but this never made it to
print. Instead, Secretary of the Historical Map Society of British Columbia,
Bruce Ward, took over the project.
This is now
publicly available online, and can be accessed at the Historical Map Society of British Columbia Online Database.
The database is currently
overseen by Derek Hayes, author of numerous historical atlases of Canada,
including British Columbia: A New Historical Atlas and Historical Atlas of Vancouver and the Lower Fraser Valley, both
of which made use of the materials in the R.C. Harris fonds.
