I didn’t decide to wrap up my 4 year tenure as the Communications Director of the TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival because PR is dead. (Although Mat Wilcox closing down her firm rang like a bell from the heart of Vancouver : ding, dong, the the game is forever changed. Start over. Start over.)…
Category: mountain culture
Writer, unplugged
Three weeks just spent reconnecting with my inner feral at Yosemite’s historic Camp 4 helped me pinpoint the three most important ingredients for a happy life: 1. shelter from the storm, 2. good company, 3. quality coffee to ease the morning into its groove. Added bonus? A down puffy jacket and hot running water. Those…
How to collaborate (or My Secret Crush on Graphic Designers)
I’m a word-nerd. Words are my fancy and my fetish… but working with illustrators, art directors and graphic designers over the years continues to supersize my respect for their ability to turn words (be it a tagline, a 2 page creative brief, or a 2000 word story) into pictures. I’m not sure if the 1000…
Buyers Guide for alternative ski-freaks – a resurgence of hand-made skis?
In the corner of a house in Pemberton stands a 250cm tall pair of wooden skis. Naheed Henderson pulled them out of a burn pile in the Altai mountains – where people have been skiing as far back as memory goes, where skiing may, in fact, have originated, where skis are chopped from spruce in the…
The Art of Losing
William Roberts had asked me to talk about the writer who had most profoundly shaped my understanding of the environment. But I couldn’t stop thinking about loss. I had just finished reading Brian Brett’s Trauma Farm. A farm is both theory and worms. But his essay Tasting My Father kept shuffling its way to the…
Home-remedies from a viral life and nature-deficit disorder
I meet a colleague who refuses to shake my hand or kiss me hello. She has been body-checked by the dreaded lurgy… falling victim to the massive human petri dish that is the PNE. “But it’s okay, I’m not contagious anymore,” she assures me. My immune response is less assured. In a feverish sleep the next…
You’re never too old to paraglide…
I celebrated turning thirty by throwing myself off a cliff. I was in good company – Pemberton paraglide guru, Jim Orava, was strapped to my back. Photographer MC Bourgie shared the thermals to my left, shooting so intently through her lens that she landed with a nasty bout of motion sickness. I wrote a story…
Revealing the secret ingredients of Pemberton’s Slow Food Cycle
Why was it so successful, people asked, when 400 cyclists wheeled into Pemberton in 2005 for the first Slow Food Cycle. They asked again the next year, when 1000 people came. And the third, when the event had begun to spawn spin-offs, into other valleys, like the first Slow Food Cycle Agassiz. The ingredients are…
Through the looking glass : manifesting Whistler’s many faces
This video, produced by Lilli Clark and Thomas Balzer, got a lot of airplay at the TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival in April. It was built around a manifesto I wrote for the Festival the previous year, and was a chance to turn the spotlight on some of the people who make up the…
Blueberry bribes
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…
Lisa Richardson Bylines 