Lisa Richardson Bylines

Due to solar storms and planetary alignment, I somehow hit Revelstoke on assignment for SBC Skier magazine on G.N.A.R day.

My “welcome to Revy” banner was unfurled as I waited for our crew by the Revelation gondola: guys in smoking jackets, puffing on cigars, dragging a BBQ across the snow. (That was a #9 move executed with class, although I didn’t quite catch what they were cooking up.)

None of the tourists dropping their kids off to ski school had any idea what was going on, why one-piece suits were suddenly back in style, or why random guys were heckling them in the lift-line, all of which makes G.N.A.R day even funnier.

Standing in line for the Stoke Chair with Tatum Monod and Laura Ogden, (PS I can’t believe you girls are pro. I am totally better than you), we were “treated” to full-frontals from two buck naked skiers who had raced down the lift line wearing only their transceivers. One guy, feeling the exposure, with one hand cupped over his privates, mis-timed his attempt to duck the rope by the lift line and drop out of sight onto the run below. He garrotted himself, ending up splayed in the snow, to great acclaim, and surely, a points deduction.

By days’ end, we’d seen several buck-nakeds, plenty of pole whacking, many claims of being the best skier on the mountain, a couple of snowbladers, and lots of smack-talking and radness. We’d spent entire lift rides giggling our faces off at this grassroots, deeply felt, entirely viral and largely inexplicable celebration of radness and silly buggers.

The game of G.N.A.R. (Gaffney’s Numerical Assessment of Radness) was created by Shane McConkey and listed in the book “Squallywood” by Robb Gaffney. Based in Squaw Valley, California, the game was played for some time on a small scale among friends, until unofficialsquaw.com held a contest  where the game would be played over 2 weeks. Due to extreme amounts of radness and (mostly) nudity, Squaw Valley Ski Corp shut the contest down after 1 day. The crew didn’t give up and went on the best road trip ever, showing up at nearby mountains and reminding everyone to let go of their inhibitions, cut loose and most of all, have fun, which is what skiing is all about.

Losses have been mounting in the industry/community lately and our crew of athletes are all riding with little kernels of sorrow on their shoulders. The exuberance of GNAR day, as a way to remember Shane McConkey, was a little flash of good medicine and easy laughs.

As for me, I confess that I have not contributed to sending the Gnar off-the-charts.

I’m staying slopeside at the new Sutton Place Hotel, in a suite with my own bathroom, heated floors, a bed that I can roll over in 7 times before falling off the side (Izzy Lynch tested it in her own bed, because she’s hard-core like that), a bathtub deep enough to sink into up to my eyeballs and a kitchen so well equipped we were able to cook up a quinoa salad with toasted walnuts and a chocolate cake. (Because that’s what pro skier girls do when they’re not slaying it in the mountains.) And seriously, when was the last hotel room you stayed in equipped with glass mixing bowls, spatula, and baking dish? Awesome.

So, not gnar this weekend. Kinda pampered, actually. And I’m okay with that too. It’s all about fuelling the ski stoke – be that by nudity or bubble-baths, or both.

(Thanks to Sarah Windsor and the crew at Revelstoke Mountain Resort and Selkirk Tangiers Heliskiing for the hospitality over the past three days.)

Dave Clark is the organiser behind some of Whistler’s most significant fundraising events – the Balding for Dollars bash, the Dusty BBQ Championships Tasting Series, SWELL and the Whistler Half Marathon.

I interviewed him recently for an article about the sold-out-in-record-time Whistler Half Marathon and we got a little side-tracked. Here’s what I learned about Accidental Awesomeness from our long-and-winding conversation. It all began with a good head-shaving.

1. Do not look askance at a man with a handlebar moustache.

In 2002, I was working at the mountain. I saw a Balding for Dollars event in Squamish and thought, maybe I can get a couple friends on this… I mean, kids with cancer? It’s not what being a child is meant to be about. It’s so intrinsically wrong. So I thought, I’m going to go and shave my head and raise a hundred bucks. I put a note in the employee newsletter, thinking I could rally a few other people to get involved, we could all raise $100.  Then Mike Varrin phoned. He said, “I don’t think we’ve ever met before, but I’ve got this bad ass moustache, and I want to shave your head, and anyone else’s, in the bar.”

2. The universe responds to positive juju.

It wasn’t quite what Clark was planning. And it meant having to relinquish a degree of control over the program. But he went with the flow. The Hairfarmers were playing, the bar was packed, and a couple of guys in the corner getting their heads shaved turned into a movement. Guitar Doug and Grateful Greg shaved their decade-old beards. “People were like, ‘Where can I give my money?’ And we raised $6500. And that’s how it all got rolling. The next winter, Dusty’s called and said, ‘Do you want to do this fundraising thing at the BBQ Championships?’”

3. Your weakness is your strength.

Dave Clark’s vulnerability is his family’s battle with Inflammatory Bowel Disease. They could struggle in silence and shame, as many do. Or they could own it, claim it, try and make a difference. In August 2002, Taster passes were sold for the Canadian BBQ Championships, with proceeds benefiting the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of Canada, the organisation Clark believes is best positioned to find a cure for IBD in his lifetime. Last August alone, the sale of taster passes raised $9455. In October, Dave was recognised by the Foundation for his fundraising efforts, which have seen the Whistler Friends raise more than a quarter of a million dollars, and declared an Unsung Hero.

4. Listen up.

The #1 thing, if I had to put a sticky note on my laptop as a reminder of the key learning I’ve taken away from organising events, is to LISTEN. Listen to your partners, volunteers, athletes, the community, and ultimately collaborate with them to make it the best it can possibly be. If you surround yourself by people who are very good at what they do, and passionate, you’ll achieve great things.

5. Passion + People is a winning combination. 

I don’t think there’s anything stronger than your own personal convictions, and it’s proven over and over again. And a community of passionate people. Whether that’s two or six people, it just takes more than one person, with a shared passion, and a willingness to do things outside the box, to have the agility to say, hmm, that’s not what I was thinking, but we could chanage up the plan.

There’s no just-add-water formula for greatness. But Dave’s recipe strikes me as a pretty solid formula: take genuine passion, informed by your own vulnerability and hope, and put it out in the world to mix it up amongst good people. Then, don’t be surprised if help comes your way, in shapes and forms that you’re least expecting…

The 10th annual Whistler Balding for Dollars is just around the corner. The GLC’s Ultimate Hair-Farming Apres takes it down to bare skin for the BC Children’s Hospital, Saturday March 24 2012. Over the last decade, $153,000 has been raised by the Whistler event, in support of kids in Vancouver’s oncology wards.

40 days is a good amount of time to grow some hair and garner some pledges… don’t you think?

Fist-pump.

I’ve worked with most of the photographers who entered Whistler Blackcomb’s Deep Winter Photo Challenge and like and respect them all. So I wasn’t going to vote in the People’s Choice for Deep Winter. I hate giving my email to enter random contests. Everyone put on amazing shows. I was happy that Robin O’Neill won, because she blazed such a trail through my heart last year as the first she-photographer ever invited to compete. I had closure. I didn’t need to engage any further.

But when I chatted to Robin O’Neill yesterday, she told me that she’s just trailing behind Mason Mashon in the People’s Choice contest with one week of voting left, and she’s really hoping to win.

So she can take her athletes heliskiing.

I know Mason put his heart on the line too. And I’m sure he and his crew would love a day of heliskiing too.

But the Voleurz crew have, inshallah, next year.

Robin’s athletes are all over 75 years old. And they’re the people who built Whistler. Werner Himmelsbach. Peter Alder. Trudy Alder. Peter Morin. Betty Vogler.

So I voted. And I’m saying, why don’t you vote too? Send Karl Ricker heliskiing. How freaking cool.

Much as I love that any of the teams have a shot at a day heliskiing – they all deserve the playday,  after putting on such great shows – I get goosebumps thinking about those grey-haired Lifers, who have devoted their entire lives to this place, all hustling out of a helicopter, standing on top of a perfect peak as the bird flies away… with a pristine field of pow unrolling before them.

So that’s my pitch.

The best argument of all comes from an email Robin received on Monday:

Having just got back from possibly my last downhill trip – thinking of giving it up due to age – I am re-invigorated by the dignified photos of elders. Your work was inspiring and I am thinking of maybe another trip this season – two trips in a season, I haven’t done that in 10 years

At some point in our lives, we are no longer in the realm of ticking firsts… We start inhabiting a place where each trip, each adventure, each farewell, could be our last. A different kind of pioneering mentality is required. And that’s something to honour.

Trailblazing is what these elders of ours have done. I’d like to pay a little something back.

If you feel the same way, vote here.

On Friday night, I ducked away early from a Christmas cocktail party, sucked my breath in at the cold, and hiked over to Muni Hall to present a seminar on media relations to the last ever class of interns to take LUNA’s remarkable Community Event Coordination training certificate program.

LUNA’s CEC certificate is a perfect case study in sustainable operations and innovative social programing.  A $55,000 municipal budget line-item is stretched like a magic bean into incredible low-cost programming offered all year long to Whistler’s most under-served population, the seasonal young adult workers that staff the town’s engine-rooms. It works thanks to a core group of ‘interns’ who are accepted into the program each year to learn events management in the most hands-on way, graduating from the program only once they have produced their own event. Given the economic importance of events to Whistler, it’s an incredible in-community training program braintrusted and run by the quiet creative talent, Kiran Pal-Pross.

Over the 7 years the program has run, that annual investment has yielded 51 graduates, 6000 volunteer hours, and over 250 events (including the iconic LUNAFliks), attended by 15,000 young adults. According to LUNA’s website, the program has contributed to a 20% reduction in alcohol-related calls to the RCMP. That’s a pretty good ROI.

“We proudly advertise and promote LUNA as a best practice.”  
Norm McPhail, Officer In Charge, Sea to Sky Regional Police Services for the RCMP

After attending my first LUNAflik this summer, and connecting with the smart dedicated women who are LUNA’s last ever interns, I have come to believe that LUNA’s Community Event Coordination program is one of the most remarkable innovations to have come out of Whistler in the last decade. It also offers a wealth of talent and creative thinking that Whistler’s tired [sic]-and-true events sector desperately needs a dose of.

Alas, bureacratic bean-counters don’t share my enthusiasm. They have identified LUNA (as well as the under-attended Youth Centre) as programs that are beyond the core services of a municipality. I’m guessing that the cost of hiring one single By-Law officer, should additional policing of the muni’s liquor laws be needed as this programming disappears, would be approximately $55,000, so the “savings” seems like dodgy math to me.

$127,500 will be saved in 2012 by reducing youth services from the youth centre and LUNA, according to the report.

That means 10% of the $1.2 million cuts recommended come from reducing services to the young (non-voting) residents of the community, the ones, let’s face it, least likely to call up their elected representatives and say, don’t take our programming away!

This year’s class of LUNA interns has shrunk down to just three keeners, hanging on despite the fact that municipal budget cuts will end the program prematurely, so that there’s no chance for them to graduate with the certificate.

They will rally for LUNA’s grand finale event, Hockey 101, on December 30. And then, an incredible social experiment will come to an end.

JP Auclair Street Segment (from All.I.Can.) from Sherpas Cinema on Vimeo.

Sherpas Cinema’s All.I.Can has been winning serious props since its premiere in the fall, but one segment of the film is making a profound impression. JP Auclair’s urban skiing sequence, shot in Rossland, Trail and Nelson BC, received more than 200,000 hits in 48 hours when it was released online.

Which makes me wonder about instant karma. Here’s a few things I discovered when I interviewed JP for  this story on the Sherpas for SBC Skier magazine that suggest guy has a pretty solid credit rating with the bank of Good Attitude.

1. He taught himself to edit, so he’d have better control over his stuff. He didn’t want to be that athlete walking out of the screening, bitter, because the segment that he had put his heart, soul and body on the line for, was disappointing.

It’s really hard for the production company to keep track of everyone, especially in a 2 year project, things get lost. So one year, 2003, I think, I decided, ‘I am going to go edit my part.’ I learned the software so I’d understand the whole editing part and wouldn’t annoy the editors knowing nothing, and then I asked Poor Bpyz to send me all my footage for editing to learn on. Next thing I knew, I had a finished product, because it’s super fun to edit.  My philosophy has always been, don’t bitch if you didn’t work hard.

2. He got his part because he lived next door to the Sherpas in Whistler one summer. (Casting call happened in the backyard.)

I met the Sherpas last year on this cat ski trip with Fresh Sports Calgary. Mica had hired Dave to shoot it. One night we all started talking about the environment and the movie and I just thought it was a great project. By coincidence, we met again in Alaska. I was still shooting for PoorBoyz, but all my crew had burned out and left, so I was by myself. Chad Sayers got hurt on their first day, they were looking to fill a seat on the helicopter and I was looking for people to ski with and film, so we agreed to trade. Then, last summer I was working on a PoorBoyz segment, next door to Dave’s house. He was cutting the teaser for All.I.Can and wanted to revist the dialogue we’d had at Mica, the whole “do more, not less” thing that I’m pretty passionate about. It had resonated for Dave and he wanted to include it in the trailer.

3. He can’t fake it.

I’ve had to find new ways to get inspired, because ‘ski-porn’ can get old. I don’t really work until I find something that drives me, and this film, I was like, oh my god, I’ve got to be part of this. Dave had seen my urban segment for Revolver and was like, you’ve got to be that guy for my movie. I was like, no way. I didn’t have the drive to do that. No way, I’m finished with that. But I thought about it later on, and thought, if it’s Dave, he probably has got some insane thing in mind and I can’t pass on that. He wants to do what I do, so I was like, okay, let’s try and do something.

4. Complete strangers trust him.

We’d knock on people’s doors because we were in their backyards, jumpbing over their cars. We’d feel like little kids, “uh, can we build a jump in your backyward?” One lady, we asked, “Can we jump on your driveway?” Dave was like, “I swear, he’s really good, he won’t land on the car.”

5. He starts things, because risk-taking and passion are part of the make-up of mountain people.

Auclair helped launch the 1080 ski for Salomon in 1998, founded Armada skis in 2002, and founded Alpine Initiatives in 2008.

Our whole take at Alpine Initiatives is you can’t really have a healthy environment without having healthy commmunities, and vice versa. It’s about trying to make the snowsport community stronger, so we can reach out and embrace the global community and people who are wanting to uplift their own community, no matter where in the world they are. We call ourselves mountain lovers, winter enthusiasts, people who love to explore, have drive and passion, risk taking people, and that can make a community really dynamic. We all get our inspiration pretty much from being in the mountains and hanging out with beauty, basically. If we had the resources we wanted, we’d be all around the world. But we’re super committed to doing every project really well and not having loose ends.

All of which makes me think, JP Auclair deserves every “like” he gets.

Skiing The Edge is now available for download on amazon.com and via iTunes.

Deploy today’s coffee budget in favour of story! Just $3.99.

In July, Dave Fonda invited me to judge awards recognising the best feature ski writing of the year.

I said yes because:

1. he promised me a coffee mug,
2. he also promised there would be no more than ten entries,
3. finally, he promised to buy me several fine microbrews if I go skiing in Quebec and I like being owed beer by quality people in groovy locations around the world.

(I subsequently found out he’s in advertising. Tread carefully when being seduced by a professional copywriter.)

I also agreed because:

4. my ego voted YEA, inflating immediately at the prospect, and

5. it seemed like the perfect way to settle in with a glass of wine and the best published ski writing of the year, to learn a thing or two about the craft of narrative, ski and lifestyle journalism, which is kinda my thing.

As it turned out, the best ski writing isn’t getting published.

Whatever is happening out there in Media Land is shrivelling up the market for long form work, and the world of ski storytelling is no different. So what began as a full body immersion in the best ski writing of the year became a glimpse at the declining opportunities for ski writers to tell stories beyond schilling resorts in buffed up service pieces masquerading as features.

Chapter Two. Fast forward to October. Another email pings into the in-box. Jules Older, my one-time editor of the now defunct Ski Press has an idea. (The four most thrilling and dangerous words in the English language: I have an idea.)

Jules has not taken the demise of print lightly. He took to hanging around the Apple store in San Fran, taking free seminars in shooting and editing video, he wrote an app reviewing San Francisco restaurants, and began to maintain an informal e-newsletter connecting an A-list of writers and journalists. Still a reliable arbiter of topnotch work, Jules was receiving (in addition to the bad jokes and tales of woe from his circle of Jokers) the occasional long-form email, outpourings and ventings from long-form journalists with no real forum left.

The trigger event: an email from Gerry Wingenbach, author of the 100 Best Ski Resorts in the World, veteran journalist and disenchanted correspondent with Outside magazine’s Away blog, about spending a night in the Whistler jailhouse.

Jules now had 3 killer stories cooking up his in-box – stories that hadn’t otherwise seen the light of day and had no real prospect of airing.

So he embraced the first tenet of the e-revolution: DO IT YOURSELF.

“Thinkin’ bout an ebook,” went his email. “Are you in?”

20 writers, whose names you’d recognise if you’ve picked up a ski magazine any time in the last decade, said yes.

Leslie Anthony, Michel Beaudry, Michael Finkel, Dave Fonda, David Goodman, Beth Jahnigen, Lori Knowles, Steven Kotler, Skip King, GD Maxwell, Moira McCarthy, Roger Moss, Effin Older, Peggy Shinn, Roger Toll, Kristen Ulmer, Jenn Weede, Gerry Wingenbach, and me.

Skiing The Edge, the collection of tall tales and true does for ski writing what #longreads is doing for long form journalism, what Utne Reader is doing for the alternative press, what Dave Eggers is doing for contemporary writing with his annual Best American Non Required Reading – it culls through all the bullshit and hands you the good stuff on a silver platter. Compiled and edited by a pro, it compiles the best stuff you’ll be glad to sit down with, sometime this winter, with a steaming mug of cocoa/gluhwein/french-pressed coffee in one hand, and your e-reader in the other. (Which I am about to do. With a special sneak preview. To finally immerse myself in the best ski feature writing of 2011.)

Skiing The Edge will be available on 1 December, for less than the price of a ski magazine (or a latte in a ski town.) $3.99. But it will be juicier. Way way juicier. So plan to take a bite. And rediscover what you’ve been missing.

It’s not quite as weird as David Lynch (but then, who is?), but Choose Pemberton, which launched 18 months ago, was my own version of The Interview Project.

Officially, it was the content command centre for a summer campaign geared at promoting Pemberton.

Unofficially, it was a chance to ask local people, the ones who don’t sit on the sidelines and rattle their fists, but who roll up their sleeves and jump into the business of growing, making, moving and shaking, what inspires them.

At almost 15,000 hits, 74 posts and more than 30 profiles, the end of the year and the onset of winter seemed a good time to wander back through the archives and revisit the 5 most popular interviews so far.

1. Handcrafted food for the People! Western Promises Food Promises A Revolution of Taste.

Western Promises celebrated its one year anniversary this November as quietly as it opened, but its fans aren’t known to be too shy about shouting their praises for the funky little restaurant. One lunch, a customer left with a shout-out to the kitchen, “Thanks, Michael. My mouth just had an orgasm.”

Michael Guy’s passion for hard-working food shines through in every bite. But I loved his commitment to his adopted home the most:

“Why Pemberton?  There is no place I would rather be…in 50 years I hope to have my last breath somewhere here staring at the mountains and thinking about what a decent life I’ve had.”

2. Laying hands at Kula Wellness Centre.

When Percy Abraham and Corinne Von Dehn set up a home massage studio last summer, named “Kula” for “community” I got a sneak peak into their philosophy on wellness and work-life balance, and got the chance to ask Percy something that had long been on my mind, “How much does it weird people out to have a male massage therapist?”

A reasonably large percentage of female massage recipients are not entirely comfortable being touched by a man and a probably even bigger percentage of male recipients are the same. While respecting everyone’s choices, I try not to let gender interfere with what’s really at stake here : healing.

3. How to become a potter with Sunna Studio’s Amy Hazeldine.

Before Amy Hazeldine was the feature artist in Mountain Life magazine, she was the feature artist on Choose Pemberton, revealing her perfectionist tendencies, her Icelandic inspiration, how much she geeks out on glazes, and how, after plenty of creative trial and error, she’s finally found her path.

I’ve worked as an environmental educator, spent four summers in Nunavut in diamond exploration camps as the cook, worked on the assembly line making tire parts, and I’ve done my Whistler time as a bartender and server. Out of all the hats I’ve worn, the potter’s hat is my favourite fit.

4. Spotlighting Pemberton’s most prolific graphic designer, Sumire Design.

Lisa Komuro Ankeny does so much work behind the scenes to make Pemberton a better-looking place, it was great to spin the karmic wheel back in her direction. Her enthusiasm for Pemberton is inspiring (“Pemberton is amazing,” she told Choose Pemberton, “It seems like this little town is bubbling over with creatives. It’s as if everyone here makes something, has a garden and is an incredible athlete. It’s a beautiful place to be.”) but I most loved her insight on how to juggle life as a graphic designer, a mother, and an artist:

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I’ve never been able to juggle – not even the scarves back in P.E.

3 days a week of daycare, coffee and some late nights do the trick. I wouldn’t change a thing.

5. Time for a new set of skis? Think Tyfoon.

What do legendary ski mountaineers do when they grow up and have a family? Why, they keep skiing, attend the Youtube School of Artisan Ski-Making and begin handcrafting wood skis from the Coast Mountains’ forests. Is there a top secret formula?

No, no secrecy in the process. Just a crazy old ski bum with his head down in the basement, breathing sawdust and trying to come up with a ski that will suit.

And that’s just a sampling of the amazing growers, makers, movers and shakers of Pemberton.

My passion for the project was fuelled by a conviction that if you want to live somewhere amazing, then you have to support the people who are trying to do amazing things.

But the project also reiterated for me that my favourite writing projects are often pure portraiture, simply letting people tell their stories, in their own words. It helped me to discover that the art of great storytelling really grows out of the art of listening. And it reinforced, without a doubt, that when I landed in Pemberton, I had truly come home.

No, really. Take me seriously. I’m a serious journalist.

Actually, yes, I do tend to bite off more than I can chew.

Thank you Feet Banks. I can always count on you to keep me company out in WeirdoLand.

Local honey, a bag of fresh greens and peppery little radishes – that was my haul from the first Pemberton Farmers Market for the season. (Wednesday nights, 4pm-7pm, outside the Pemberton Valley Grocery store.)

So, now we’re fully stocked on salad greens – exposing the joy and the challenge of eating locally, in season – the tomatoes are still weeks away from being ready. But if refraining from eating tomatoes out of season will keep the polar bears alive, I can suck it up. Michael Pollan backs the eat-local-for-climate-change call up with an invitation to also “Eat your View” – to preserve agricultural landscapes by eating from local farms.

As a soft-core locavore, I have been gradually eating myself local for a while now. Which is why it’s so exciting to see Pemberton’s food ecosystem flourishing with local restaurants like Western Promises, Mt Currie Coffee Co, The FoodLovers Bistro, the Pony and Mile One Cafe popping up, sourcing produce from new farmers like Ice Cap Organics, Rootdown Organic Farm, Riverlands Market Garden, Skipping Rooster Organic Farm, the Bathtub Gardens (joining the local stalwarts Helmers, Across the Creek, North Arm Farm, and Pemberton Meadows Natural Beef) and from local food producers like Blackbird Bakery, Bubbees Honey, the Flour Pot and Schramm Vodka. Especially when all of those new growers, makers, movers and shakers are under forty years old.

When Feet Banks, editor for the award-winning Mountain Life magazine, asked me to do a summer write-up of cool local foodstuffs, I was stoked. I love turning the spotlight on these passionate producers. The hardest part was deciding what to leave out. So I focussed on smugglable foodstuffs – the stuff you could take with you if you’re visiting family or friends this summer. The angle was inspired by an old ski client who seriously had smuggled 1kg of English breakfast sausage into Canada, because he did not believe that Canadians could make sausage good enough to fuel his skiing’s caloric requirements.

I’m going to Australia for a visit in the fall, so I began to wonder what will I be stuffing in the pockets and crevices of my pack? I imagine me and the Customs dude at our inevitable encounter: “Ma’am, do you have anything to declare?”

Innocent face: “No.”

“Well, why is your bag clinking?”

Break out the dumb and confused face.

“How about I ask you again? Do you have anything to declare?”

“Actually, I do. I’m a locavore.”