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Remembering Stuie: A mountain party for a fallen friend

Nineteen years. Amazing how quickly those years have passed. Amazing too, how profoundly we’ve changed. Back in 1989, Whistler was still a place where the mountain was big and the town small.
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Stuart Dickinson Photo by Brian Hyde-Smith

Nineteen years. Amazing how quickly those years have passed. Amazing too, how profoundly we’ve changed. Back in 1989, Whistler was still a place where the mountain was big and the town small. A place where the way you skied (and I mean of the two-planked variety) was a major indicator of your social status within the community.

Things were picking up, for sure. Whistler’s economic fortunes had finally turned and new businesses were beginning to flourish. Snowboarding was just about to seduce the masses. And of course, we’d had another great season of snow.

In short, we lived in big-mountain heaven. Same terrain, fewer locals, fewer guests and far fewer rules. Most of us thought we’d won some kind of celestial lottery (if we didn’t always voice those suspicions out loud). And so we lived at a pace that was both exuberant and woefully innocent. Few of us ever thought about death. We were so busy skiing and partying and exploring and feeling that the idea of shucking one’s mortal coil seemed almost absurd.

Yet one day in March, 19 years ago, death did come to visit. And it changed our perspective on life completely.

I wasn’t in Whistler that day. Not even close. Still enthralled with a career that paid me American dollars to write ski stories — imagine that — I was deep in the Kootenays working on a piece for Powder Magazine on the sublime pleasures of Rossland and Red Mountain. The story, which would eventually bear the title of “Steep, Deep And Cheap” had me following a merry band of neo-hillbilly patrollers as they imposed their brand of law on the wild slopes of this notoriously old-school locale.

In what can only be described as “heavenly convergence”, my visit had coincided with one of the biggest snowstorms of the season. Rossland had gotten plastered. And on this day, my patroller friends had drafted me to help them open up venerable Granite Mountain. I still remember standing atop the liftline, after having ploughed my way waist-deep across the crest of the slope, looking up at the patrol leader who was yelling at me and gesticulating like crazy. I couldn’t tell at first what he was saying…

“What are you waiting for?” He was nearly screaming by now, his whole body shaking with impatience. “You made your cut. Now get skiing! Or else move over and I’ll take first tracks.” That was it? One pass above this legendary slope and I was free to go? No way. But then it wasn’t up to me to question my hosts’ avalanche-control protocols. I was just a guest. And so I pointed my 210s down the fall line and ate serious snow while carving into some of the deepest Kootenay powder that I’d ever tasted.

It wasn’t until I’d gotten back to the hotel that night that I heard the news. Stuart Dickinson had died in an avalanche. And I still remember thinking about his son Matthew then. And how his first birthday was coming up in a day or two. And how we’d just celebrated our own daughter’s first birthday. And suddenly it hit me like a bag of wet cement to the back of the head. Stuie was dead…

It was Raymond Massey who first introduced Dickinson to the idea of Whistler. “He was on a skiing trip to New Zealand,” remembers his brother, Binty. “And I guess the two of them must have hit it off pretty good. Anyway, Raymond told him if he liked it there, he’d really love it at Whistler. And Stuie decided to check it out.”

Massey knew his man. Dickinson embraced Whistler like he was born to it. He immersed himself in our burgeoning mountain lifestyle here like a thirsty man in a raging creek. And the place loved him back.

You know the kind of person you phone up to find out what the adventure du jour is? You know, the kind whose imagination is always bubbling? Who has plans for new projects before others have even considered the feasibility of the idea? That was Stuart Dickinson.

“It wasn’t all about Whistler,” explains Binty. “For Stuie also brought New Zealand to us. His humour, his capacity for drink and his passion for sports — even his dirt biking — they were all part of his own particular brand of Kiwi culture.” He smiles. Brays out a quick Massey laugh. “He loved exploring, that guy. Stuie took me to places in this region that I’d never been to before. And that’s saying a lot. He wasn’t afraid of stepping off the beaten path, that’s for sure.”

Binty’s enduring image of his friend: “I’m walking down my street in Alpine Meadows and Stuie’s passing me on his bike, standing on his seat and doing a wheelie.” A pause. He sighs. “The day he died was the hardest of my life…”

It was a warm, sunny day that March 15 th . About a foot or two of snow had fallen over the last few nights. But all the good stuff in close had already been tracked out. So the boys had decided to take the old triple to the top of Whistler Peak and hike out to Flute.

Though not a particularly long walk away, Flute Peak was still considered “out-there” back then. But the foursome — Eric Crowe, Jim Wherin, Dave Demers and Stuart Dickinson — figured the fresh turns would be worth the hike. Besides, they had a new video camera they wanted to play with. They all agree that jumping off the Flute cornice would provide ideal material to test their new toy.

And everything went according to plan. At least at first. Their inaugural run was epic — deep and fluffy and totally untracked. They’d had such a great time, in fact, that they decided to do it again. Stuart volunteered to be the shooter this run. So he grabbed the camera and headed down to the moraine below them. From the bottom of the moraine, he figured, he had a great angle on the skiers’ leaps.

No one really knows why the second cornice jump triggered the massive avalanche that engulfed Flute Bowl the moment the boys dropped in. All anybody knows for sure, is that Stuart Dickinson was buried deep. Really deep. I still remember Cathy Jewett describing to me how the patrollers had to dig a near-squash-court-sized hole just to get down deep enough to reach him.

“I had the flu that day,” explains Binty. “Otherwise, I’m sure I would have been skiing with them too.” He pauses. Takes a deep breath. “It was also my first year with Search-and-Rescue, so when the call went out for help I dragged myself out of bed and rushed to the heli-pad. I got there just in time to greet the body.”

Binty then decided that Stuart’s wife, Lois, needed to hear the news from a friendly face. “I figured: better from me than from the police,” he says. “But it was way harder than I thought. I still remember standing in their driveway with Andrea Kaplan, bawling my eyes out, watching Lois singing inside the house, preparing for Matthew’s first birthday party. But we didn’t have to say a word. She knew right away. That was a brutal moment…”

Last Saturday evening, a group of us spent a few hours atop Whistler Mountain to honour the passing of a favoured friend. It’s become a tradition now, and varying members of his old tribe make the trek up every year to share Stuie memories while the late-winter sun still provides a few warming rays before setting off in the distant west.

This year’s event was a light-hearted affair — a toast-imbued memorial from his now-middle-aged buddies — that we knew our Kiwi friend would appreciate (or at least laugh with). “I often wonder what Stuie would be doing now,” muses Dave Patterson, who was holidaying on Maui on the fateful day, or else he too would have been on Flute. “I wonder if he’d still be here. Or back home. I wonder what he’d be like…”

I don’t know why it hit me so hard this year. Maybe it was the recent death of my friend and colleague, Kathy Barnett, in New Zealand. Maybe it was because my daughter turned 20 last week and I’m noticing how quickly time is passing. Maybe it was due to all the changes that have visited the valley in recent times. Who knows? Mostly it was the realization that for such a young community, we have already lost an inordinate number of wonderful, talented and generous people.

I’m not going to get maudlin and begin to address by name all the great Whistler people who have shucked their mortal coil prematurely. The list is too long to include them all — and invariably I would get chastised for omitting this person or that person. It’s enough for me that each of us grabs a quick moment from time-to-time to honour our favourite ones.

A community, I believe, is only as good as the memories it keeps, not only of its heroes and champions, but also of its everyday ordinary citizens who do extraordinary things as a matter of course. Stuart Dickinson considered himself just another ordinary guy with just another ordinary big love for Whistler. May we be blessed with many like him in the future…