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Pyjama Party in the Cove
The Seymour family of schools gears up for their 35th annual fundraiser with a more casual dress code.
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Discover Deep Cove
In our new outdoor recreation feature, a Mt. Seymour ski instructor gives us the slope scoop. February 2017
9900 Circulation East of the Seymour River
Ain’t no mountain high enough for historian by MARIA SPITALE-LEISK 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
Longtime Mt. Seymour employee and historian Alex Douglas stands outside an almost 80-yearold cabin on the mountain where he and his wife have lived for many years. PHOTO MIKE WAKEFIELD
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
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done at night using a four-pound jam can with a candle stuck in it. By scrimping and saving, Wood and his friends were see Douglas page 3
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