After almost five decades, the man who has lived on, cared for and embodied Mt. Seymour’s family-run ethos perhaps more than anyone else has embarked on his final ski run.
Alex Douglas, affectionately known as Uncle Al, has officially retired.
Although he only ever worked seasonally at the North Vancouver mountain resort, he managed to encompass the full scope of what life on Mt. Seymour, as both an employee, recreationist and eventually, a resident, could entail.
“At Seymour you can ski in blue jeans, you can ski in a $1,000 ski jacket – we don’t care. You can come up and have fun,” says Douglas, reflecting on 45 years on the mountain. “Kids and skiing is so much fun. To me, Mt. Seymour supports that.”
Like any young person aspiring to live the life of a ski bum, Douglas made the wise decision to come to British Columbia in 1975, where he immediately took a job at Mt. Seymour.
His official role was as a lift operator, but especially back in those halcyon days everyone did a little bit of everything, he notes.
“It really was a group effort,” says Douglas, remembering days spent shovelling snow, manning the rope tow, and lending a hand at the rental shop.
On the latter task, for the past 35 years Douglas’s main role has been as the mountain’s rentals and retail manager, a role he’s taken pride in from the beginning, especially since Mt. Seymour used to have the country’s largest ski school and still maintains one of its most active.
“Other rental shop managers throughout B.C. would come and visit and go, ‘How do you do this?’” he says, referring to the gargantuan task of getting hundreds upon hundreds of red-faced youngsters into their skis and out onto the slopes to learn.
Eddie Wood, Mt. Seymour’s president and general manager, said in an emailed response that Uncle Al “will always be a member of our team” and that his “boundless energy and genuine passion for skiing and snowboarding was shared with hundreds of thousands of people during his years on the mountain."
Wood also noted that Douglas had a penchant for looking at new and innovative ways to do his job better, such as being the first rental shop manager to adopt a revolutionary binding and boot system produced by Head sports equipment that reduced ski fitting time in half.
But it’s perhaps what Douglas did for the mountain in his off-hours which he’ll be most remembered for.
A self-described collector, organizer and history-lover, over the years Douglas started to collect little items, memorabilia and other souvenirs from the mountain’s early ski pioneers of the 1930s and ’40s.
“I’ve got about 30 file boxes of newsletters, photographs, old ski catalogues, things like that,” Douglas told the North Shore News last year for a story about the final meeting of the North Shore Pioneer Skiers Reunion, which Douglas ran for decades in tandem with the Hollyburn Heritage Society. “I had been a collector all my life – I had stamp collections and badge collections and things like that, so I guess it’s just in my nature.”
Douglas found inspiration for his long-running Mount Seymour History Project in the very place he lived for years. For decades prior to his retirement, Douglas and his wife lived year-round in the two-storey log cabin overlooking the beginner ski area that was built by Ole Johansen, Seymour’s first official park ranger, in the early ’40s.
“You could always be accused of living too close to work,” he jokes, noting that when BC Parks took purview of the area they didn’t want anyone on top of the mountain itself, leaving the spot open for Douglas to eventually move in. “BC Parks still exist – but they exist at the bottom of the mountain.”
There used to be hundreds of similar cabins, built by the early ski pioneers, which dotted the landscape, notes Douglas. While only a handful of evidence now remains of the small wood structures, in his later years at Mt. Seymour Douglas took to offering tours of these slices of history through a guided walk he called Uncle Al’s Cabin Tours.
His legacy will literally be written into the mountain too. Mt. Seymour Resorts has confirmed that its naming a gladded ski run in Douglas’s honour, called it Uncle Al’s Glades.
“We look forward to skiing them with him,” notes Wood.
As Douglas reflects on his years at Mt. Seymour, he says he’ll miss the people he interacted with over the years most of all – whether it was his warm-hearted co-workers, families enjoying the mountain, or the loved ones of early ski pioneers he encountered when tracking down lost memories and found items.
“I’m looking forward to relaxing and going through nice walks through the snow – and just keeping the Mt. Seymour History Project going,” he says.
In fact, in a way Douglas is only partially retiring. He’s going to continue doing his history project and serve as the mountain’s resident historian, even if he won’t be in the rental shop any longer, he says.
“In a perfect world, at some point in time I’d love to write the book.”
