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Buyers Guide for alternative ski-freaks – a resurgence of hand-made skis?
In the corner of a house in Pemberton stands a 250cm tall pair of wooden skis. Naheed Henderson pulled them out of a burn pile in the Altai mountains – where people have been skiing as far back as memory goes, where skiing may, in fact, have originated, where skis are chopped from spruce in the forest and given traction with the skin of 6 horse legs, and where, when their lifespan ends, they are tossed on the burnpile, and someone will head out into the woods to make his next pair.
Just 10 km down the road from Naheed’s place, ski mountaineer John Chilton is in his basement workshop, running a hand-sander back and forth over 7 inch thick laminated conglomerations of locally harvested and milled Douglas fir.
Chilton has been a sponsored skier, a groomer and a trailbuilder and a film star and once upon a time, before he moved to Whistler to become a ski-bum, he spent 6 years as a cabinet maker. I interviewed Chilton about his new career move, an evolution into artisan ski-making, for the upcoming Kootenay Mountain Culture magazine.
Chilton’s Tyfoon skis are as deeply inspired by place as the Altai skis Naheed discovered.
When I interviewed Naheed about her trip to the Altai for The Ski Journal article, she commented that “their ski design – wide underfoot, narrower at the top and tail and really carved up – was just ideal for the snow there. The width allows the ski to stay on top of that wet, faceted snow and float. You could see they’d thought about their designs. They could point out what was wrong with our skis, that they were too light, too narrow for the conditions.”
Though Chilton’s hand-crafted skis require the killing of no horses, there’s a whisper of lineage when a mountain man, who has sought out peaks all around the world, starts with a piece of locally hewn wood and begins to make himself a pair of skis. (Foon has made half a dozen pair of skis – the national Rossi rep was given a pair for his 40th birthday.) “Over the years, it seemed like no-one was making the perfect ski for what we do out here. I’ve had the opportunity to ski all over the world, and I really do think for big mountain powder riding it doesn’t get any better than here.”
It’s as though he’s truly coming home.
Whistler’s Killer Highway is Born Again – The Kittens Are Safe Now.
It’s February 1996 and a high-pressure system has locked over Whistler and Squamish. My brother and I pile into my husband’s old Volvo and navigate the narrow winding highway for a day of down-clad rockclimbing. The highway’s canyon walls press so tightly against us that in places I suck in my breath.
I’m driving, which proves what a high capacity for adrenaline my brother has. A dented looking box suddenly appears in the middle of the road and I plough straight through it.
“Oooh, you don’t want to do that,” says my brother.
“Why not?”
“Well, you don’t know what’s in the box. It could be full of wood scraps and nails.”
“Uh-huh.” I’m non-plussed.
He changes tack. “Or, it could have been full of kittens.”
“Oh my god! I could have killed a boxful of kittens!”
This past weekend, the Globe and Mail announced “the end of the killer road”, calling the Sea to Sky highway’s facelift the “greatest legacy of the 2010 Olympic Games.”
Paul Mathews said the same thing when I interviewed him for this winter’s Kootenay Mountain Culture article on Olympic hangovers. Mathews is a mountain resort planner with extensive experience designing venues for Olympic Games and has been masterplanning for Whistler Blackcomb since 1975. He recently admitted to Pique’s Michel Beaudry that his company’s tactics helped “shrink the mountains”.
Those mountains have not just shrunk, but have bungeed closer to the city, with the five-year, $600 million highway upgrade speeding up the drive.
Mathews told me: “The highway is something we could never have gotten without the Olympics. People didn’t like Whistler because it was for the rich, but that road was getting slower and more dangerous. It took more than three hours to get to the airport. You can’t say enough to what it means to the tourism infrastructure of the future. We would never have gotten a new highway in Whistler. That’s the real legacy from these Games… and that we didn’t build anything stupid, like an open air sledge hockey arena in a town where it rains all winter.”
After talking to both Mathews and anti-Olympic activist Chris Shaw, it became obvious that the Olympics isn’t a sporting platform at all. It’s a catalyst for dramatic urban development, because the scale of the event and the pressure of the deadlines fast-track the approval and the financing for massive public infrastructure projects.
So we got a new highway. Which hopefully will be safer - for drivers and kittens.
Did the world owe Sarajevo?
- For Kootenay Mountain Culture’s Winter 2009 “Competition” issue, I investigated what an Olympic hangover looks like at altitude.
- Now, with just 78 days until the Winter Olympics rolls into Whistler, it seems fitting to look at what previous host mountain communities have gotten for their hospitality. Anyone who’s ever hosted a wicked party knows the morning after can be rough.
The big question is: can the Games be more than just a billion dollar party?
The recent resolution for an Olympic Truce seems a pretty blunt instrument for peace, given that Canada has no intention of pulling troops out of combat in Afghanistan during the Olympics. The Games had a real chance to put its money where its peace-proclaiming mouth is, in 2001, when the Bosnian Olympic Committee made a bold bid to bring the 2010 Games back to Sarajevo.
Bold, given that Sarejevo’s fifteen year old Olympic facilities were in ruins. Zetra Olympic Hall had been pulverised in mortar attacks during the siege, land mines prevent access to the Olympic bobsleigh run and the city still cannot afford the electricity to keep the skating rink open. Bid president, Bogic Bogisevic proposed a moral campaign to win the Games. He argued that the international community had stood by while the City of Sarejevo was devastated by civil war. That failure to act could be repaid by awarding the Games to the city as a stimulus to rebuilding.
But, as Olympic watchdog Chris Shaw told me in a later interview, the Olympics is not a moral event. It’s a business event. And the business case wasn’t there. The IOC visited Sarajevo as part of the 2001 bid process, but the city didn’t make the shortlist. Instead, the Games are coming to Whistler.
