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…

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…

“Celebrating” the one year anniversary of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games

This time last year I was cursing El Nino, stalking the Weasel Workers and realising why the world has such a crush on Lindsey Vonn as I donned my best “I’m a serious sports journalist” face and joined the online reporting team covering the Games for NBCOlympics.com. It was, in all likelihood, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity….

Shooting for stress relief, for vegetarians

I’m the only girl at shooting class. Actually, I’m the only person over 14. I think most people assume I’m a parent arriving to pick up my kid from the 7:40pm class, when I walk into the musty old classroom in Pemberton’s old community centre at 8:10pm, where 6 targets have been set up against…

Robin O’Neill goes deep for Deep Winter

Dear Robin, I was 100% in your corner last night at the Deep Winter Photo Challenge, but damn, was I nervous for you. “First woman competing for the King/Queen of Storms title.” Girlfriend, that’s a lot to carry on your shoulders. I love that you owned that, telling the Pique “I hope I can rock…

In Defence of App-less Skiing

I wrote a rant for Skier magazine recently, arguing that ski days should be app-less and device free. I wasn’t being deliberately provocative. I really do think that app-games, of which Vail’s new Epic Mix is the Grand Poobah, take away some fundamental aspect of the mountain experience. But as I wrote, If you need a…

Down the rabbithole – SBC SKIER magazine turns 10

A ski mag was my rabbithole… How else does a girl from Brisbane wind up in Whistler? I took the direct route, falling through a copy of some neon-flecked Australian ski magazine with Glen Plake on the cover, circa July 1994, to land in Whistler five months later into what would become a completely different…

Revisiting Revelstoke’s Boulder Mountain avalanche

“Why go over it again?” people asked, when I told them I was writing an article for KMC mag about the second biggest avalanche disaster in Canadian history. People died. There’d been enough finger-pointing. And there was enough media coverage at the time to wear everyone raw. But I’ve lived in a (distinctly non-morbid) house…