I interviewed Scott Dickson by email last week for an artist profile for the Kokanee Crankworx Event Guide. Dickson’s art brings a vibrant and vivid energy to the 2011 event poster – it’s a refreshing alternative to the photo-heavy approach that event posters often resort to. Sometimes the freeride world with its gladiator vibe and…
Category: lisa richardson
Whistler Mountain Bike Park Opening Day means Crankworx is 53 days away
I recently pulled the dusty old hypewriter from the back of the closet, where it was languishing in semi-retirement, to crank out some verbiage for service as boilerplate and taglines for a somewhat large and kickass mountain bike festival known as the Kokanee Crankworx. (I thought I’d reformed my ways and sworn off hyperbole forever, but…
Freeride mountain biking’s game-changing moments
I’m working on a story for the Crankworx event guide that will attempt to map out the history of freeride mountain biking, to chart a “progression” that took us from the 1976 Repack bike race that burned through everyone’s brakepads, to Greg Watts’ backflip double tailwhip, in 35 years. In 1954, runner Roger Bannister broke the…
Confessions of a copywriter : a Bike ad for Tourism Whistler
Some days you discover that the bike rider and the copywriter are one and the same: just a girl in search of flow.
What would you blow off to ride? Confession-time.
The first time I rode A River Runs Through It (fist-pump! Cleared the bridge! Husband pushed his bike across… ), I should really have been somewhere else. I had blown off the second half of the Slow Food Cycle, an event I had organised, to switch the road cruiser for a squishy bike and go…
Heliskiing with Canadian Olympic decathlete, Mike Smith
The second most intimidating moment on a heliskiing trip, (after the Burning Walk of Scrutiny) is not actually watching the safety video, where all the perils that face you are articulated in graphic, litigation-proof detail, but the instant where, standing atop the untracked snow of your first run, the guide says, “Okay. Buddy up.” Having…
Choose Pemberton
Pemberton Feature Promo from Randy Lincks on Vimeo. From trailhead to tailgate, farmgate to dinner plate, a million adventures await. Choose Pemberton. It’s where your next adventure begins. Last summer, photographer Randy Lincks invited me to collaborate with him on a project for Tourism Pemberton, to storyboard a narrative arc and develop a script for…
Busting through heliskiing’s powder ceiling – chicks in the chopper
There’s nowhere else that men will look you over so aggressively, quite as overtly, as when you walk into a heliskiing operation. They are trying to suss out if you are one of the support staff – a cook, a massage therapist, an assistant – because that’s what most of the women are. (Of the…
A different way of looking: the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre
Without textbooks or diagrams, an oral culture shares technology by apprenticeship. Working alongside a master. A direct transmission of knowledge, person to person. It’s a slow-paced way to accumulate expertise, and vulnerable, but that sense of steadying slowness infuses the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre from the moment one pushes open the huge carved entry doors…
Releasing my inner Evil Knievel is as easy as lying down and letting go
One year after Jon Montgomery won his 2010 Olympic gold medal, I lower myself face-first onto a narrow metal toboggan. Called a skeleton because its 1892 prototype resembles a human bone-rack, the 80 pound frame is more like an exo-skeleton and I am counting on it to keep all my bits properly in place, as…
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