Ever since Whistler Blackcomb introduced free wifi to their on-mountain lodges and an app that allows skiers to track runs and share speed, vertical and bragging rights, the connection between real life and the on-mountain escape has gotten stronger. Personally, I go to the mountain to unplug. But, something happened in the fifteen years I’ve…
Category: lisa richardson
Advice to Aspiring Writers (or why it doesn’t matter that my parents weren’t Rilke)
When I told my parents that I wanted to be a writer, they didn’t really know what to do with that. They said, “Nice. That’s nice. Just get a back-up career. Like law. Or medicine.” (I think that’s why I, like most teenagers, fell in love with Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.) If I…
Ebbs and flows
A few years ago, Gerhard Gross wrote the best article I’ve ever read in a snowboard magazine, The Science of Stoke, digging in to explain what one of the most over-used word in our mountain culture actually means, endocrinologically-speaking. His revelations about the ebb and flow of the chemical high that keeps us so addicted…
Live well in your places
I rediscovered a favourite journalist/writer this week, in the kind of happy happenstance that doesn’t occur for Presidents, when a rain day cut climbing short and led us to the Squamish library for an afternoon at the magazine stacks with the latest issue of Vanity Fair and a profile of Barack Obama. Prior to snagging…
If I had no name but hands, this is how you’d know me.
These are my hands. They grip handlebars, they ferret out invasive grass in my gardenbed, they manhandle seedlings a little more roughly than is ideal, they have callouses from gripping pencils too hard, and they tend to leave dirty fingerprints on keyboards. They reach for wine or coffee reflexively before water, they clap themselves together…
The wisdom of the snaggle-tooth: Put your worst foot forward. (No one will even notice.)
I have a crooked tooth. My left lateral incisor, to be precise, is raked on an angle that makes it seem like that friend who never stands normally in photos but twists herself into some Victoria Beckham “look, my waist is only 3 inches wide!” pose. My dad once told me he found the tooth…
Will the Ohming Instinct Lead Even Yoga Slackers to Whistler for Wanderlust?
I think of myself as a yoga-slacker. Headstands intimidate me, yoga wear makes me self-conscious of how anti-fashion my sweat-drenched wife-beater tank top is, and I’m not a big fan of the full length mirror scene either. Despite this, I hope to be sitting, as lotus-like as I can, on the grass at Whistler Olympic…
The Velocity Project winds down
For the last two years, I’ve been on a mission to Slow the Fuck Down. Now, the mission is winding down. Am I cured of my squeeze-too-much-in, take-too-much-on, work-like-a-maniac ways? No. The desire to have it all and have it all now is the root cause of me being overworked, overprogrammed and overcommitted. And it’s…
In Memory of Doug Deeks
On the corner of my desk is a pile of borrowed books. I leave them there, taking up valuable real estate, to remind me to return them. Some day. Preferably soon. One, Ski Faster, by Lisa Feinboer Densmore, sits in a manilla envelope with Doug Deeks’ name pencilled on the label. I’ve been meaning to…
Riding the Digital Curve with Blake Jorgenson
When I sat down this spring for brunch with Blake Jorgenson at Alpine Café, around the corner from his office, he was about to hit the road… Sea Otter, Nepal to shoot for Red Bull on Freeride’s new mountain bike film and then on to Utah. In addition to owning a worn-out passport, I discovered…
Lisa Richardson Bylines 