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…
Category: pemberton writer
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…
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…
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…
Scripting Pemberton’s siren-song – a Choose Pemberton story
Which is better? The bike-ride? Or the post bike-ride beer? Two epic rides are well-rooted in my memory of last summer – same collaborators, same formula – a grinding hike-a-bike up sandy, rarely-used trails that disintegrated beneath each foot-fall and sloughed into socks and shoes. Bike-frame pressing against knobby little verterbrae… Skittery thoughts, (what the…?),…
Chasing the light – shooting the Economic Development Commission campaign
Spent Monday night chasing the light, working with photographer Robin O’Neill, to capture the second “story” for a campaign for the Pemberton & District Economic Development Commission. This shot of our kick-ass local models was eliminated from the final cut, mostly because of the vertical orientation, but it sure fit the branding requirements of showcasing…
Lisa Richardson Bylines 