Sporting a standard issue Mt. Seymour fleece, Alex Douglas is bent over shovelling snow outside the rental shop on a bluebird day in late January.
Uncle Al, as he’s affectionately known, is preparing to welcome somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500 school-aged skiers and snowboarders who will eagerly bound off buses in Seymour’s main parking lot throughout the afternoon.
Douglas doesn’t flinch. This isn’t his first rodeo. Rather it’s his 42nd ski season as a Seymour employee.
He walks through the rental shop, which Douglas has managed for 30 years, and up a steep staircase, along the side of which the veteran staff member has set up a makeshift memorabilia gallery.
Ski jumping trophies, a pair of cross country boots and Olympic racer Stein Eriksen’s skis are counted among the collection, which pays tribute to Seymour’s past.
For Douglas, these past 42 winters atop the mountain have been more than just a job for him. It’s a passion.
“Because I live here, this is my life,” says a jolly Douglas, who has a short and scenic commute to work.
Douglas and his wife live year-round in a two-storey log cabin overlooking the beginner ski area and built by Seymour’s first park ranger, Ole Johansen, in the early ’40s.
These days, it’s safe to say Douglas is Mt. Seymour’s unofficial custodian.
“I like to take care of it (the mountain). I feel an awful lot of pride in it,” he says.
Somewhere along the way Douglas started collecting stories and relics from early Seymour pioneers and has since amassed 30 boxes filled with souvenirs. He has spent the last 20 years archiving photographs, interviews and documents relating to cabin life, as part of his ongoing Mount Seymour History Project.
Douglas is also an amateur archeologist of sorts who combs Seymour’s backcountry for long-forgotten cabin sites.
“And as you look around the sites you start to see little bits of broken glass and then once you go behind the trees you find the old cook stove,” says Douglas. “Then as you are walking back you find the old trail and there’s a rusted winch way up in the tree.”
The winch would have been used to manually lift logs to assemble a cabin, explains Douglas. During its heyday, in the years after the Second World War, he estimates up to 300 rustic log cabins dotted the side of the mountain. Today, approximately 15 cabins are still standing. Of those, just a handful are being well cared for by owners who lease the land from B.C. Parks for $550 a year.
Two summers ago Douglas began leading Uncle Al’s Cabin Tours, showing hikers a side of Mount Seymour from an early pioneer’s perspective.
Douglas shared some Mount Seymour stories Feb. 2 at the AGM for the Deep Cove Heritage Society, which Douglas is expected be named president of. For the longtime Seymour resident and member of an international federation of ski historians, the role is a perfect fit.
Douglas’ main hobby is tracking down descendants of former cabin owners, making connections with people who once frequented the ski hills and hiking trails, and gathering information about each and every cabin that ever stood.
“What I have is more the stories of the cabin owners and people who lived in Deep Cove that used the Old Buck logging trail to get up to Mount Seymour,” explains Douglas.
One such subject is George Wood, who called Seymour the stomping grounds of his adolescence and said exploring the mountain became “an extreme obsession” for him.
It started in the winter of 1933 for Wood, when he was about 12 years old and lived on the Vancouver side of Burrard Inlet. Getting to the mountain involved taking multiple streetcars, ferry rides and a strenuous hike.
“I became aware of that different world of deep snow, log cabins, skiing, ski jumping and hot chocolate when I could afford it,” reads an excerpt from Wood’s interview with Douglas.
Wood and his friends covered a lot of ground on Seymour, exploring the lower slopes of the west side where there were many cabins. Later on, while cycling up Indian River Road, they discovered the Buck Logging Road, which gave the pioneers access to the east side of Mount Seymour.
The majority of trips up the Buck were done at night using a four-pound jam can with a candle stuck in it. By scrimping and saving, Wood and his friends were able to pool their money for tools to build a shack in the area.
Though it was “a drag” to traverse the steep hillside between Buck and the shack, Wood and his friends were happy with their humble outpost. It beat camping out in the freezing cold under a verandah of a random cabin, like the friends once did to buy themselves an extra day to explore the mountain.
As part of the Mount Seymour History Project, Douglas organizes with the Hollyburn Heritage Society to have the early North Shore mountain pioneers get together every September to trade stories.
“Twenty years ago it was 250 people, now we are very lucky if we get 50 people because they are all getting older,” says Douglas.
His lofty goal is to have a mini Mount Seymour museum with vestiges of ski bumming through the decades. In Seymour’s cafeteria Douglas has added temporary memorabilia installations, which have piqued people’s interest.
The missing link from Douglas’ collection and which he is trying to get his hands on, besides a neon onesie ski suit, are Super 8 movies of Mount Seymour.
“I know someone in Vancouver somewhere has some Super 8 movies of Mount Seymour that we should get onto a digital format,” says Douglas.
Looking ahead to his new role with the DCHS, Douglas said he is excited for Deep Cove’s “electronic museum,” referring to a digital photo archive project the heritage society recently undertook.
“They have a very active website of Deep Cove’s history. So I hope to help with that,” says Douglas.
The lifelong skier also hopes to hit the slopes for the first time this year.
“It’s just you get so busy working and we’ve had a good year,” he says.
Douglas first strapped on a pair of skis at age four in southern Ontario.
“So the hills were 150 vertical (feet),” he says with a laugh. “I just loved skiing, I did it every weekend.”
Douglas moved to B.C. in 1975, with ski bum aspirations in tow. He almost immediately started working at Seymour, as a liftie, but not exclusively.
“In the early days you did everything, you ran the lifts, you helped out in rentals, I was a Level Two ski instructor, I was a ski patroller, I was a first aid attendant at one point,” recalls Douglas.
The latter role lead him to his wife, Noelette.
“I saved her life,” says Douglas. “She was a young girl at the summer camp and I was a patroller. And she went unconscious. She bumped her head one too many times in the race. So I had to give her mouth-to-mouth before the helicopter arrived, to keep her going. And the rest is history.”
The couple has been married for 26 years and wake up every morning in their cosy cabin on the mountain. A wonderful love story just time in for Valentine’s Day.
“We literally have won the lottery because of where we live and the lifestyle we’ve managed to eke out,” says Douglas.
– with files from Christine Lyon
