Lisa Richardson Bylines

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.

The blueberries are just coming in at North Arm Farm. My friends braved the “little flies” with their fiendish blood-sucking ways, to pick and pose last night for the final shoot in our Choose Pemberton campaign.  They were more intent on picking than posing, so the photographer had to keep yelling at them to stop stripping their bushes clean. You can probably tell from this shot how intimidating Robin O’Neill is. We got our shot. And 13 pounds of blueberries. Sweetness all around.

Spent the week in the laboratory, cooking up a little creative campaign, alongside some of my favourite collaborators, photographer Robin O’Neill, designer Lisa Komuro, and the gorgeous Megeney/Lambrecht clan.

The creative will roll out this summer and is anchored by a website showcasing the Potato Nation, and all its growers, makers, movers and shakers.

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.