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Boundless enthusiasm

Transforming ourselves and the skiing industry by stepping outside the boundaries. Lisa Richardson checks in on how Whistler Secondary keeps the love of alpine fresh in students through its outdoor rec leadership course.

Stuart Rempel has a sickness. The Senior VP of Marketing and Sales at Whistler-Blackcomb set an addiction in motion 137 months ago that he’s now powerless to stop.

Every month, every single month of the year, be it November or July, he goes skiing.

It started as a game. Back when he was working with K2, it was a joke among the boys, a friendly workplace competition. They’ve all since dropped out. Rempel is going strong.

"It requires a little ingenuity and some hiking a couple of months of the year to keep it going," he said. "It’s a sickness. I read of two guys in the States who have now skied for 218 months. Skistreak.com guy posts his stuff and he’s at 13 years. I’m not trying to break any record. I just go because I love skiing."

It’s a personal game, but one that gives a busy corporate executive an excuse to strap on his boards when there are deluging in-trays full of excuses not to. It’s a game that has injected a whole level of adventure into skiing, and kept his passion for the sport strong 35 years on.

Keeping "the stoke" of babyboomers, of teens, of everyone who tries the sport for a week or a weekend, is critical to the success of skiing and snowboarding as an industry, and to Whistler’s success as a resort. The moment skiing and riding become something people can take or leave is a capsize point that should send us all racing for the liferafts.

After all, sliding is so inherently addictive that an entire town has sprung up in Whistler made up of people who "came for a season," and found excuses to stay. From the mayor to Whistler-Blackcomb’s Senior Leadership Team to the President of Tourism Whistler, the village VIPs are regularly seen on the hill. Which gives us a common vernacular.

But do Whistler kids speak the same language? For every young local freerider or racer, there are plenty of Whistler teens who shrug off the mountain, happy to leave it lurking in the skyline. Happy to leave it, full stop.

Whistler Secondary School student Adam Woods, on skis since he could walk, admits, "I was getting bored there for a while with skiing. I got my ski instructors level 1 last year, and that didn’t really interest me."

Apathy isn’t so unusual for a teenager, but Whistler youth might be our canaries in the coal mine. Maybe their stoke isn’t being fuelled. Maybe, the Whistler-Blackcomb experience has become too packaged, too safe, too sterile for them.

And maybe, the couple of dozen kids enrolled in Whistler Secondary’s Outdoor Recreational Leadership course this semester have tapped into the solution.

They certainly fuelled their own stoke. And, for adolescents, they exhibited an incredible amount of motivation. Last semester, they started buying gym passes. Working out. Volunteering to walk the dogs. Doing the most energetic chores.

It was all in order to train for Outdoor Rec. A three-subject block that gives students a credit for English, PE and Outdoor Rec, the program requires students to coordinate two years of schooling and subject selection, in order to fit in their other academic course requirements. It demands commitment from the outset.

Explained Woods, "It really motivates you that you’re going skiing in school. Without this course, I wouldn’t be able to do that, unless I skipped a lot. So I trained."

Local teacher Mitch Sulkers conceived the program eight years ago in conversation with then-principal Rick Smith, based on a program Sulkers had taught on Vancouver Island.

"We felt it was a natural fit for Whistler," said Sulkers. "I had moved here in ’75. Most of us came here for the experience of being in the mountains. And here were these local kids saying, ‘There’s nothing to do here.’ We were like, ‘There’s more than we can do in a lifetime.’ So we wanted to connect them with this environment."

With 75 per cent of their semester dedicated to the program, the students are immersed in experiential education. However, Sulkers points out, they are introduced gradually to the backcountry, building their skills, knowledge-base and sense of team-play in the classroom. The classroom is the primer for where it really counts, on overnight winter camping trips to Marriott Basin and Oboe, a spring tour, a five-day tour in the Chilcotins, and spring rock climbing sessions.

In these uncontained environments, their leadership skills can truly develop, because, as Sulkers said, "the level of engagement is so much higher." The students’ decisions become critical. The consequences of their decisions become clear. They’re accountable for each other’s safety. There’s pressure to make it good.

Said Swedish international student, Annika Andersen, whose participation in the program has left her with indelible impressions of Whistler, "Last month’s tour up Marriott was definitely a learning experience. We made some mistakes and the guides let us. Not that they let us put ourselves in danger, but we worked harder than we could have. We brought a bit more food than we needed. The second trip was better. We knew how the equipment worked and how to dig a snowcave. It was so much fun."

Three students building a snow cave as part of Whistler Secondary's outdoor rec leadership course. Photo by Deminica Toporowski

Sulkers explained, "We work a lot with perceived risk. It’s meant to be a transformational program. And they start to get the whole sense of leadership, and develop a decision-making framework that enables them to walk out of the school and not need us anymore."

Adam Woods signed up for the program because his older brother and sister had. "Ever since then I’ve always heard about how great this class is, and how it made their high school career," he said. For Woods, who will pay the price for his semester of ski-touring with a heavy academic load next year, it was all worth it. "My backyard is bigger now. It’s not just the valley, the ski hill. I’ve learned so much about the opportunities there are for recreation in this town."

Opportunities, like sleeping in self-dug snowcaves, meant that classroom learning was actually relevant to real life. Annika Andersen compared the two: "We learn the practical skills in the classroom – what we have to know when we get out there. But we learn so much out there. A snowcave looks so easy from the sketches in the book. But you start digging and it takes forever."

For every success, they have had to sweat. For Sulkers, a longtime member of the Alpine Club, this has always been part of the appeal of the backcountry. "The freedom to follow your inclinations is one of the draws," he said. "The motivation to see what’s around the next corner has always been big for me. When it’s human-powered, you can cover a tremendous amount of terrain and a day later, there’s no evidence you were there. It’s a truly sensory experience."

Part of the experience is also discovering self-reliance. Instead of building self-esteem, outdoor education builds character. The Self-Esteem movement, characterized by singalongs and "what I love about myself" sessions, has been criticized in recent years for encouraging lazy achievers, creating a culture in which we are praised as wonderful people in complete disconnection to our actual efforts and accomplishments. In the outdoors, success and accomplishment are tied directly to effort. And that’s why it’s addictive. To earn your turns, to skin or snowshoe up a hill, to read a map, to dig your own shelter, you feel a deep satisfaction at what you are accomplishing.

At 17, you don’t get many opportunities for that. Said Annika Andersen: "Since this term started, it’s opened up so many doors. Not just backcountry, but hiking, exploring nature that is untouched, and the kick that it gives you. I wouldn’t have gotten my eyes opened to it without this course."

Breathing new life and a sense of adventure into an industry that has spent that past two decades creating a standardized and sanitized experience might explain the new wave of backcountry popularity. "We’re definitely seeing more people out there," said Sulkers.

Stuart Rempel is seeing the data to back this up. "I absolutely do feel a resurgence in the backcountry scene. We see it in the industry figures on what’s being sold. A lot of experienced alpine skiers are putting touring bindings on their skis, and you see them in the lift line with a pack and a shovel. We think it’s great to have both experiences here, with the lift access into the alpine."

Jayson Faulkner, of Recreation Outfitters Inc, is the force behind the Backcountry Freeride Jam, the granola, sweat and skins component of this spring’s Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival. Twenty-three-thousand skiers went through the backcountry gate at Jackson Hole this winter, and Faulkner is seeing the same revitalization in the scene here, and the way it’s recharging the stoke of long-time expert skiers.

Last April, the winter we’d given up on arrived with mischief, sunshine, and 20 cm fresh. Faulkner played guide to a group of guys, old buddies, all good skiers, probing out the best powder stashes until the mountain was skied out. "And then we said, ‘Let’s go hike Flute,’" he recalled. "Only three out of eight had ever ski-toured, and there was bitching and whining about the hike, but we got to the top, passed around the water, and there was a dawning of ‘amazing’s. It was beautiful mid-calf pow in the sun, and these guys were skiing and hollering and proclaiming it their best day ever. It was like emerging from Plato’s cave."

The Flute "sidecountry" experience allows this tasting. Before a skier or rider commits to buying the gear and taking the avalanche courses, they can get a sense of the sweating, the earning of turns, the solitude. The whole package, unpacked.

Faulkner’s Backcountry Freeride Jam will take that tasting experience and turn it into a smorgasboard April 21-23 on Whistler Mountain, with a snowcave village, free clinics for telemarkers, backcountry snowboarders, and kite-boarders, slide-shows and movie nights, and a veritable outdoors expo of demos.

Faulkner is frank about wanting to reach into the alpine skier market and turn them on to the backcountry. But his real agenda is more left-field. As the Development Coordinator for the International Ski Mountaineering Council, the governing body for ski mountaineering racing, Faulkner wants to use Whistler and the Backcountry Freeride Jam to raise the profile of ski mountaineering racing to have it included in the 2014 Olympics.

"The first three Olympic ski events were ski mountaineering," Faulkner said. "It’s the roots of the modern ski competition. There’s a growing tour in Europe, and it’s just emerging in North America with the Randonee Rally."

The problem with Whistler’s LifeLink Randonee Rally is that it takes place in January. In the middle of winter. On terrain that no one can see. Which doesn’t help raise the profile of the sport, at all.

Faulkner, as a long-time Whistler skier, wants Whistler to become ground zero for the revival of ski mountaineering racing. "I like the idea that we are establishing ourselves with a real leadership role in North America for promoting backcountry skiing," he said.

Whistler’s truly "long-time skiers" – the soul-men of Alta Lake history – all belong to that lineage. A resurgence of backcountry skiing takes us back to our roots, back to Stefan Ples and Seppo Makinnen skinning up Franz’s Creek in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Back even further to Pip Brock.

Brock is Whistler’s least known icon. A frequent companion of B.C. mountaineering lions Don and Phyllis Munday, Pip Brock was venturing up to his family’s cottage on Alta Lake from 1927, walking the 38 miles along the tracks whenever there wasn’t a train. A ten-hour jaunt.

In the 1930s, ski mountaineering was in its infancy on the Coast. Pip Brock, who had joined the B.C. Mountaineering Club and the Alpine Club of Canada, was one of its pioneers. "In the thirties," he wrote to the Whistler Museum, "most mountaineers thought that skiing was impure and indecent. But a few of us being frivolous, realized the fun and value of skis for winter touring."

Seventy-three years ago, this spring, Pip Brock, then 19 years old, strapped on his Woodward’s store-bought skis, and set off to summit Whistler Mountain. It was Easter. April 16, 1933.

Rainbow Lodge’s Alex Philip had been guiding hiking groups to the summit of Whistler for several summers, but Whistler had never been skied before. So the locals were understandably dubious of Brock’s claim when he returned that evening. Until he pointed out his ski tracks, through the binoculars.

The following year, Brock recorded five first ascents in the Mount Waddington region. He also spent a week in the Black Tusk area skiing on the Sphinx, Helm and Sentinel glaciers with the Mundays. In spring of 1936, he ski-summited Wedge. In 1937, he made the first ascent, again on skis and again in company of the Mundays, of Garibaldi Park’s Mount Sir Richard. The Brock cottage on Alta Lake was the reconnaissance point for these trips, and each adventure began or ended with a day ski to the top of Whistler. His accomplishments are the least celebrated amongst the Whistler annals. But perhaps the time has come.

Held under the umbrella of the daddy-o of mountain sports festivals, the Backcountry Freeride Jam will be one helluva party. But it’s also a call to return to the roots of skiing. A return to the self-propelled, self-reliant, and deeply satisfying experience of re-creating yourself in the mountains. A return to the days of humble, incredible accomplishment.

Said Mitch Sulkers: "I think the backcountry experience is intrinsically transformative. There’s something compelling people to get there. What’s the compulsion? I think we’re all trying to figure out what our place is. And out there, you can ask, what am I doing here? What made all this? That’s a bigger question than this teacher will take on. But it’s there. And that’s good enough."



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