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UPDATE Jan 17, Robin O’Neill’s winning show:

Robin O’Neill – Deep Winter 2012 Winning Slideshow from Robin O'Neill on Vimeo.

On timing. (In which we argue that Deep Winter 2012 was a display of both exquisitely good and bad timing.) 

Deep Winter Photo Challenge returned last night, the cultural highlight of the New Year.

It couldn’t have come at a better time, socially.  We’ve recovered from the onslaught of Christmas parties, we’ve shaken off the New Year hangover, we’ve officially ditched the resolutions to be better people, to get drunk less.

It could have come at a better time, snowcially. Like now… with flurries forecast all week, 10-20cm expected on Thursday and 40-90cm expected by the middle of next week.  It might have been the most un-deep winter week ever. But Robin O’Neill was too tired to even contemplate the hypothetical offer on the table, to go back in time and reschedule for a different weather window, when compere Feet Banks offered to play Wizard.

Feet: “Would you rather we push back the event to next week so you can get all that snow in the forecast?”

Robin: “No. Too. Tired.”

"Big Night", photo by Jussi Grznar

On microphone management. (In which we argue that Feet Banks is the host-with-the-most, and we hope he went home with an Arc’teryx jacket for keepsies.) 

My vote for best performance of the night goes to Feet Banks, emcee extraordinaire,  for his sartorial class (vest and bow tie, quite the wardrobe upgrade since he debuted as host of the 72 Hour Filmmaker Showdown in his skivvies), his microphone management and commitment to keeping the show moving (“we’re just going to give you a second to all get off the stage and then we’ll roll tape”), his willingness to go woo-woo for a minute so we could send some white light to Sarah Burke and Rory Bushfield, and his quicker-than-a-40-year-old-virgin’s-orgasm wit. (“Did you bring the short guy into the mix so the snow would look deeper?”)

(Give the dude an Arc’teryx jacket. It’s hard to throw love all night to the sponsors, and not get any warm fuzzy affection back. I’ve got an idea, Feet. Ask Robin for a jacket. I think she might have a few extra…)

On being bold. (In which we commend the photographers for having the cajones to enter the Deep Winter challenge and for inspiring and entertaining us.) 

The stakes of this contest seem to have gotten so high that more established photographers are demurring the invitation to compete. All the more reason to give a shout-out to the six photographers who took up the challenge: Reuben Krabbe, Steve Lloyd, Mark Gribbon, Mason Mashon, Jussi Grznar and Robin O’Neill.

As Vince Shuley tweeted: “way to make hard snow look good.”

Their shows did not disappoint, although the line-up of fresh faces did come with a less intense, angsty vibe than last year‘s Deep Winter Photo Challenge, when Robin O’Neill stepped up for mountain women everywhere, competing alongside Blake Jorgenson, Ilja Herb, John Scarth, Tim Zimmerman and Andrew Strain.

Child prodigy, Reuben Krabbe, who has his sights set on breaking Jordan Manley’s “youngest photographer ever to win the Pro Photographer Showdown”, made an impressive debut, (ultimately coming in 3rd AND taking Best Photo) with an action-packed show jammed with “banger shots” captured with the help of Dan and Dave Treadway.

Utah native Steve Lloyd brought the fresh eyes of an outsider to the game – reminding us not to overlook the everyday beauty of the Canadian flags lined up at the top of Whistler gondy. Mark Gribbon brought the snowboarders into play. Mason Mashon (who proves his version of “lifestyle” means not taking your ADHD meds: “okay, we rode bikes to the hill, we’ve been skiing all day, who wants to go skate on the frozen pond?”) landed a shot of rime-encrusted bikes in the back of a pick-up truck that might be the Best Most Unlikely Cover for Bike Magazine.

2012 Deep Winter Photo Challenge. Day 2 with Mason Mashon from UnofficialNetworks.com on Vimeo.

Jussi Grznar put together an emotive show that started in bed and came full-circle for a 2nd place finish… And what says “and they all lived happily ever after” more powerfully than a guy and girl spooning in bed, with the dog booted to its rightful place on the floor.

But Robin O’Neill’s storytelling about Lifers was the most powerful. With stark portraiture, a few recurring motifs (back-to-back shots that pulled from shallow focus to long focus to tell instantaneous stories about movement and perspective, and triptychs that would fall away to reveal one full frame), and a confident delivery, O’Neill ((#robinneedstwitter) follows her Deep Summer win, deserving her title as All-Season Queen of the Lens.

On the Zeitgeist. (In which we try and read the tea-leaves.)

This year, there seemed to be more love in the air. (Is this a Zeitgeist thing?) There was more ice-skating than Deep Winter has ever seen. We also saw a preoccupation with injury, with the physical and emotional toll that a dedication to the mountains can exact. We saw bigger vistas, that only a stormless Deep Winter week can offer. We saw athletes working incredibly hard and bagging some stellar action shots. And we saw that what makes a photographer a cut above is more than technical proficiency and an eye for a well-composed shot, but the ability to create a mood, even without the moodiness of a storm.

On hard work. (In which we note the concentration of talented passionate hard-working people who make this place, as they say over at WIA, awesome.)

So here’s to hard-working mountain-loving people of Deep Winter. To the marketing and PR peeps at Whistler Blackcomb who work their asses off to come up with fresh and creative ways to engage people with the WB community, to bring people here, to represent this place as authentically as possible. To the athletes who, judging from the recurrence of images shot at the physiotherapist, are pushing themselves to the very edge. To the photographers who are brave enough to step up and showcase their work. (In a 72 hour time frame, the deadline bears down on you so hard, you don’t have time to think, to censor yourself, to second guess. Your naked work is up on the big screen.) So kudos to you all. Thanks for a great night.

Honest. I’m not an egomaniac. That’s why I thought it was so funny to tell Stella Harvey, the Whistler Writers Festival director that I would present a session called “Me! Me! Me! How to build your social media savvy for wanton self-promotion.” But now the gig is imminent, (and even has a presenting sponsor in Street to Peak) I’m starting to feel that skin-crawling feeling I get when I realise I’ve committed to make a presentation. Self-promotion? Good God. Well, here’s the USP: if I can do it, anyone can.

Excited to check out the other sessions tomorrow including Mike Berard and Allie Jenkinson on Twitter for Writers, and Brian Brett on Writing Your Life.

You can check out my cheatnotes on slideshare…

Spent Monday night chasing the light, working with photographer Robin O’Neill, to capture the second “story” for a campaign for the Pemberton & District Economic Development Commission. This shot of our kick-ass local models was eliminated from the final cut, mostly because of the vertical orientation, but it sure fit the branding requirements of showcasing Pemberton’s “natural beauty.”

A hippie-minded vegetarian goes to the local gun-club. Sounds like the opening line to a bad joke… or fodder for a limerick… but it was a Boxing Day deadline to write about the Pemberton Wildlife Association‘s shooting range. PWA members Clarke Gatehouse and Al McEwan were a little nervous when a city-bred vegetarian female journalist called up and asked to arrange a photo shoot, tour and interview during their annual Boxing Day Turkey Shoot.  I assume, as shooters, they’ve been burned before by mainstream prejudices… But they were gracious gentlemanly hosts.

Imagine my pride to be the talk of the HuntingBC.ca chatroom.

Now I’ve just got to follow through and take those pistol-shooting classes…

Verbal snapshot of One Mile Lake at 6pm on a Saturday:  a 6 year old boy casts for fish beside his dad off the floating dock. Half a dozen kayakers paddle across the lake. Dog-walkers enjoy the new boardwalk. A family gathers around a fire in the great metal fire-pit. Someone sits in meditation as the light over the mountains shifts and softens.

And I watch on as photographer Robin O’Neill shoots images for a campaign we’re creating for Pemberton’s Economic Development Commission.

The goal is to spread the word that Pemberton is a place worth investing your time, your money or your enterprise.

One of the community’s most outstanding assets is its social capital. It’s a hot-bed of creative, enterprising, fascinating folk. Home-based studios and cottage industries are producing some niche, but highly acclaimed products. A good number of these creative enterprising people just happen, simultaneously, to be ridiculously good-looking. So, we didn’t have too look too far for models to infuse the campaign with genuineness and local character.

While the kids stole our hearts during the shoot, the silent star of the session was Andy Lambrecht’s hand-crafted custom stand-up paddleboard.

Photo by Robin O'Neill

A surfer and a wood-worker, Andy has brought his passions into alignment in a way that also serves his values – to tread lightly, to do no harm, to liberate the inherent value in material things by not casting away what is still valuable, to have, as William Morris famously proclaimed, nothing in life that is not both both beautiful and useful.

All Andy’s hollow wood surfboards are built with reclaimed wood.

Andy built a custom board for Norm Hann, who is paddling an epic 300km stand-up paddle journey in the Great Bear Rainforest to protect the region from a proposed oil pipeline. With BP still spewing 40,000+ barrels of oil a day into the ocean, the potential risk of running pipelines and supertankers into pristine environments is apparent to everyone.

The board has already had its first magazine cover – it can be spied in Masa Takei‘s May 2010 cover story in Explore magazine, Riding the New Wave.

Tyler Schramm is a quiet guy.  When you take the tour of the world’s only certified organic potato vodka distillery, located in a non-descript building at the back of Pemberton’s Industrial Park, you get a sense that public speaking is his least favourite gig. But the master distiller has created a product that he’s proud to stand behind, no matter how many microphones that puts in his face.

“Does organic vodka make for a kinder, gentler hangover?” I prod.

“Well, the science of hangovers…” he starts, careful, factual, precise.

“… is that there is no kinder, gentler option?” I cut him off, satisifed that he has passed the first test. He’s no snake-oil salesman.

In its first year of operation, Schramm Vodka won Double Gold for vodka and Spirit of the Year Awards (in the clear spirit category) at the 2010 World Spirit Awards in Klagenfurt Austria in March 2010.

“That seems pretty phenomenal, right out the gate?” I ask.

“That was as good as we could have done.”

The second test is aced in flying colours: the humility of a true craftsman.

The inner-workings of the distillery reveal copper-pot stills, with vaporising columns and submarine-like peepholes. Alas, there are no Oompa Loompas to help run the shop. This is a family-run artisan distillery. Tyler, his brothers and brothers’ wives, his partner Lorien, and their parents, show up once a month to help hand-bottle 1500 bottles.

“Do they get paid in vodka?” I ask.

“They don’t get paid at all.”

I’m touring the distillery with Seattle writer, Maria Dolan, who asks Tyler what he had originally planned to be when he grew up.

His undergraduate degree from U.Vic is in geography and environmental studies. “I considered going into environmental law,” he admits.

Maria and I think that a Masters of Science in Brewing and Distilling was a much better choice.

His thesis at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh set out to prove that vodka, considered by many of his university colleagues and professors to be an indistinct and tasteless spirit – could be just as rich and complex as a single malt scotch.

“I’m quite glad I didn’t [go into law],” says Schramm. “I think maybe I can have more of a positive impact on the environment now.”

While the hangover from over-indulging on organic vodka isn’t kinder and gentler, the footprint of this spirit is.

Brewed from five varieties of organic potatoes grown 15km up the road by Bruce Miller of Across the Creek Organics, the process isn’t diverting food-grade potatoes from the system. Schramm Vodka takes Miller’s “culls” – potatoes that are too small to be sold as table potatoes. The vodka is distilled one batch at a time, a distinct process from that which creates most industrial vodkas which are triple distilled to remove any flavour or character in rectified columns that run non-stop and require no real craftsmanship.

Schramm Vodka, which is pure alcohol distilled from organic potatoes, in blended simply with water from the wild, mountain-fed Birkenhead River.

“A lot of people come in to the distillery and end up trying an organic food item, which they wouldn’t necessarily seek out. They wouldn’t necessarily have thought about the environmental impact of what they drink, or what it took to make it,” explains Schramm.

Test three: the man is awakening consciousness through alcohol. It doesn’t get any better than that.

The final test is the taste-test.

Distillery visitors are poured a cocktail – the glass becomes a keepsake that more than justifies the $6 tour investment.

We swirl our glasses of vodka and inhale. I smell the cedar tang of a West Coast rainforest, shadow-dappled and run through with glacier-fed creek.  We sip. The spirit is smooth and powerful. I think: this is the taste of my home. Cheers to that.

I took a cruise once. I needed to interview the ship’s doctor for a travel article I was writing for a lifestyle magazine for physicians. He dodged me. He demurred. He point-blank refused.

I persisted. For days. I thought about feigning illness. Or poisoning my mother. But eventually, I prevailed upon him to speak to me, sans recorder, off the record, deep background.

And the stories he told, as if he’d been waiting, all this time, for someone to pull the stopper out of his mouth… Stories of staff members falling overboard, of dead bodies stored in the freezer until the boat got back to port, of family members who would check their elderly ailing parents onto back-to-back cruises as a sort of subsidised assisted living. 

Of course, they didn’t make the article.

As Porter Fox, a writer who has contributed to The New York Times magazine and Salon, laments, real narrative is disappearing from travel journalism, replaced with top ten lists and spa service beta.  

So, Fox is dishing up an alternative.  Nowhere magazine is about getting lost, about disappearing and discovering a real sense of place – places as uncensored as the anonymous co-pilot who reveals just what pilots and flight attendants get up to with all that duty free liquor.

Places like my favourite little patch of nowhere, Pemberton BC… which our feisty mayor defends in this month’s British Columbia magazine.  The highway doesn’t end in Whistler, he pronounces. Whistler is tinsel. In Pemberton, the adventure really begins.

Uncensored.

When Bob and Sue Adams were told they were the 2009 Lifetime Members of the Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers, they had to take each other’s pulses. “Life membership?” they joked. “Are we that old?” “I guess it’s the end of the road…”

I sat down with them this summer for a hilarious tag-team conversation, which served as the basis of a profile about them for Grocer Today magazine.

1. At the end of the day, (once you’ve learned the acronyms) any business is about people. “A good grocery store in a small community can be the cornerstone of the community, and we knew that’s what we wanted to be,” they recounted, of the opportunity to open the Pemberton Valley Grocery Store, otherwise known in P-ton as ‘where the beautiful people shop.’  Partners Mark and Carolyne Blundell say of the Adamses: “Selling groceries is not the hardest thing to do. The hard thing is managing people. For Bob and Sue, people are never just a number.”

2. Give your staff the freedom to grow and they will flourish. For Tanya Ewasiuk Goertzen (who is running in the torch relay next week), the manager for the Adamses’ Upper Village Market, that meant selling her the business when she felt she could go no further as an employee. “They just want to see everyone succeed,” said Ewasiuk Goertzen.

3. When you get to the top, make sure you keep sending the elevator back down. “We’ve been very successful because of the resort and the local community,” said Sue, “and I think we have a corporate responsibility to give back.”  The couple have contributed to too many community causes to count.

4. Being small means being flexible and able to experiment. “That is why independents get into business in the first place,” said Bob. “To be independent. And creative. And enterprising.”

5. Think partnerships. You can achieve more, and don’t have to do everything yourself. And have the confidence to ask dumb questions. “I’ve never had trouble asking people for help,” said Sue. “And offering to help other people. It’s all a people business.”

We were eight hours and counting into a gnarly drive from Nelson to Pemberton – extreme weather warnings were issuing up and down the province. Freezing rain dominated the forecast. Suddenly the radio crackled with familiar voices – CBC’s On the Coast broadcasting live from the Whistler Brewhouse, with Trish Jamieson playing her original tunes, including my personal favourite, Dirt on My Carrots, a song she composed specifically for a movie I wrote in 2006 about Slow Food Cycle Sunday called Eating Myself Local.  So amazing to hear her throwing props to Pemby farmers from the heart of a Whistler apres! Trish, you killed it. Thanks for singing me home.

Innovation is about synthesis, and imagineer Mike Douglas has upped the ante again, mashing up a Hawaiian surf Mecca with two boards… Hmm, if surfing inspired snowboarding, is skiing about to start a salt water revolution? Says Douglas, “If you never try things, if you never put yourself out there and try something new, then you never know what’s possible.”  Take the blue pill and drop into the green room:¡Viva  la Revolucion!