A hippie-minded vegetarian goes to the local gun-club. Sounds like the opening line to a bad joke… or fodder for a limerick… but it was a Boxing Day deadline to write about the Pemberton Wildlife Association‘s shooting range. PWA members Clarke Gatehouse and Al McEwan were a little nervous when a city-bred vegetarian female journalist called…
Tag: lisa richardson
Outstanding on his board
Verbal snapshot of One Mile Lake at 6pm on a Saturday: a 6 year old boy casts for fish beside his dad off the floating dock. Half a dozen kayakers paddle across the lake. Dog-walkers enjoy the new boardwalk. A family gathers around a fire in the great metal fire-pit. Someone sits in meditation as…
Master of the Still Waters – Touring the Schramm Vodka Distillery
Tyler Schramm is a quiet guy. When you take the tour of the world’s only certified organic potato vodka distillery, located in a non-descript building at the back of Pemberton’s Industrial Park, you get a sense that public speaking is his least favourite gig. But the master distiller has created a product that he’s proud…
The Road to Nowhere
I took a cruise once. I needed to interview the ship’s doctor for a travel article I was writing for a lifestyle magazine for physicians. He dodged me. He demurred. He point-blank refused. I persisted. For days. I thought about feigning illness. Or poisoning my mother. But eventually, I prevailed upon him to speak to…
5 things I learned from Bob and Sue Adams about the entrepreneurial spirit
When Bob and Sue Adams were told they were the 2009 Lifetime Members of the Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers, they had to take each other’s pulses. “Life membership?” they joked. “Are we that old?” “I guess it’s the end of the road…” I sat down with them this summer for a hilarious tag-team conversation,…
Trish Jamieson dishes musical dirt on CBC
We were eight hours and counting into a gnarly drive from Nelson to Pemberton – extreme weather warnings were issuing up and down the province. Freezing rain dominated the forecast. Suddenly the radio crackled with familiar voices – CBC’s On the Coast broadcasting live from the Whistler Brewhouse, with Trish Jamieson playing her original tunes,…
Freeskier Mike Douglas hangs five in Hawaii… on skis.
Innovation is about synthesis, and imagineer Mike Douglas has upped the ante again, mashing up a Hawaiian surf Mecca with two boards… Hmm, if surfing inspired snowboarding, is skiing about to start a salt water revolution? Says Douglas, “If you never try things, if you never put yourself out there and try something new, then…
Local Beta on Whistler Gives The Inside Scoop
Travellers’ Law number 2 : “Get the scoop from locals” comes close second in global-hobo advice lore after Rule #1 : trust the universe. Or as Robin Esrock leads off, in his rules for the Gonzo Traveller – Never turn down a free drink. Everyone who has been either a traveller, a guest or a local knows that the…
Canadian Olympic athlete doping ring exposed
When my brother and I were kids, we weren’t ever given cold and flu medication. Our dad was a pharmacist… a pharmacist who pimped litres of sugar syrup during cold and flu season believing it was the biggest rort on the planet. It drove him nuts to be asked by earnest customers, “Well, which of those 60 different cough…
Whistler’s Killer Highway is Born Again – The Kittens Are Safe Now.
It’s February 1996 and a high-pressure system has locked over Whistler and Squamish. My brother and I pile into my husband’s old Volvo and navigate the narrow winding highway for a day of down-clad rockclimbing. The highway’s canyon walls press so tightly against us that in places I suck in my breath. I’m driving, which proves what a high…