(L-R) Rudolph Verne, Ole Anderson, Oscar Pearson, Andrew Irving & Axel Sneis in front of the Hollyburn Ski Camp, 1927
(WV Archives)
Ski Jumping and Skating under Full Swing as Winter Lays Thick Mantle of Snow
on the Plateau of Hollyburn Ridge
Pollough Pogue
“The Daily Province” January 16th, 1927
Nestling 3,000 ft. above sea level on Hollyburn Ridge, West Vancouver, is Greater Vancouver’s own St. Moritz.
Up until this winter almost unnoticed but for its many scenic beauties, which were a powerful attraction to hikers, its admirable adaptability for winter sport has been recognized by an enterprising though small group of sportsmen and the Hollyburn plateau bids fair to become an exceedingly popular resort. Situated on the plateau is a string of six lakes, the largest of which is about 350 by 100 yards in dimension.
Last year, a group of four men first took over the old ski camp at the Nasmyth mill level on the ridge. About four months ago the move to the plateau was commenced. Plank by plank, as the building was demolished, was carried by the “pioneers” to the plateau one and half miles above. The bricks for the chimney were carried eight at a time. Every bit of material on the slope on the mill site was increased in value tenfold by the fact that it saved a trip down the ridge to the municipality. The skeleton of the old mill itself was taken down and the lumber used in the construction of the new building.
The camp building is 75 feet long and 25 feet in width and at present is the home of five men who are still working on improvements of the…. Although the ski trails have not all been completed, there are plenty of small slides and trails on which pleasure seekers can disport themselves.
It is planned to develop a number of small jumps, the largest of which will be fifty feet in length, providing thrills galore for the beginner in the sport. In time, excursion parties to various points on the plateau will be arranged while competitions over distances ranging from two miles to seven for both experts and beginners will be instituted as well
While the camp opens today, it is not expected to be in full swing for another two weeks when the surface of one of the lakes will be cleared of snow for skating and the jumps completed.
The altitude of the plateau is similar to popular winter sports resorts in Europe according to Mr. Verne, all of which foreshadows a future for the newborn camp on Hollyburn Ridge.
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The Ski-Runner
Pollogh Pogue
"The Daily Province" February 6th, 1927
The morning was cold and clear. Though dawn now came through the trees many strong stars still sharply sparkled. They were blue-white, like fragments of ice.
The porch floor boards snapped and crackled frostily under my weight as I shoveled from my door the fresh snow that had fallen during the night. Beginning the afternoon before, the snow had flurried down in a long slanting warp, a thick texture that almost filled the air. An hour or two before dawn, I think, the wind swung from east to west, the sky cleared and the temperature dropped quickly.
The damp snow on the surface had hardened into a firm mat.
The thatches of snow on the tree boughs were crusted with Christmas-tree frosting.
When the southeastern horizon is not hidden by cloud or haze, I can see from my cabin the sun roll up from behind the wide shoulder of Mount Baker.
Often I have seen, as on this particular morning, the first flashes of light from the sun touch suddenly the hemlock tops, bound in snow, with rich orange.
Above my cabin is a large clearing now covered by four feet of snow, which lies in great dimples on the slope where the cookhouse and bunkhouse stood before they were taken down to be reincarnated as a ski camp at First Lake.
Over this sweep of white the sunlight threw a soft glow, broken by the blue shadows of the trees through which the light came.
As the sun whee1ed higher the frosted snow on ground and trees flickered softly with rainbow hues.
As I gazed with admiration and wonder upon this sumptuous play of light and colour, a tall and flying figure shot through the opalescent dazzle, and shouting, passed me in blurred flight. Skidding around a sharp turn in the trail below me, he was gone, before the spray of snow tossed up by his long skis subsided.
It was a ski-runner from the ski-camp at First Lake. He had slid all the way down the snow-trail from the lake, and on the sharp slope above my cabin had gained the velocity with which he had rushed past me as I stood beside the trail.
The depth of snow, and the crust, would enable him to slide down to the 1000-foot level without a stop unless he was spilled on a turn.
From the ski camp at First Lake, at the 3000-foot level to the 1000-foot level, the trail, about an hour and a half long for a hiker, is steep enough to provide joyous momentum for the ski-rider. On curves his skis may skid into the banked snow and spill the slider, but there are long slopes down which he may glissade at the speed of a toboggan.
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Hollyburn Ski Camp -1928 (West Vancouver Memorial Library)
The Ski Hill
Pollough Pogue
“The Province” February 9, 1927
The hikers who climb the Hollyburn trail to the ski camp now show the real spirit of outdoor sport; the snow lies deep on the trail and the hiking is not easy. Hundreds of enthusiasts, mushing in single file have ploughed a narrow furrow difficult to walk in.
But after three hours of slipping and staggering up the trail, healthy exertion that is a very wholesome thing for a white-collar man, you arrive at last on the top of the mountain, a very beautiful and fascinating place.
You will admit that the grandeur and of the great evergreen forest muffled and cloaked in snow, compensates you for the labor of the climb.
Before you teach the ski camp you hear wild yells and loud laughter ringing through the sedate fir woods. This hilarity tells you that the ski hill is not far away. A beginner on skis, in the gyrational spasms of a spill, is an object of mirth. When a skier takes a spill, the most sedate spectators laugh, and the skier who has tumbled must laugh too, to show that he is a good sportsman.
The ski camp at First Lake, the 3000-foot level, is a big two-storey cabin on the shore of the lake, on the edge of the great Hollyburn plateau. The dark snow-trimmed masses of the heavy forest surround the small lake; the ski camp with its high-pitched roof of shakes, harmonizes with the woods. If you would like to dwell for a while in a solitude of hemlock, cypress and fir, to recuperate your health, or cure any of the maladies Of high-speed civilization, you could not go to a better place. Except for the cheerful vociferations of the skiers, there is primieval stillness up there.
On the opposite side of the lake from the camp there is a steep sidehill, and this has been cleared of timber for the necessary width to make a snow slope down which ski-runners may glissade.
This is a thrilling sport, closely akin to tobogganing. The six-foot skis harnessed to your feet are not as easily controlled as a toboggan, of course, and you are standing erect. From my own experience I can say that the speed, the velocity of skis on a hill, is about the same as that of a toboggan on a slide.
Until you have had some practice and have developed a kind of instinct you are helpless and the long narrow boards, the most vindictive of all inanimate things, do what they please with you.
You start from the top of the hill with a nervous feeling but In a mood of reckless desperation. Soon you are travelling fifty miles an hour, or it seems like that. Then, in an immeasurably short space of time comes the inevitable spill.
If you are a beginner there is no possible way to avoid it. When you are near the bottom of the hill and passing the considerable gallery which is all ready to laugh at you the skis, by a fiendish quirk, hurl you headlong. After a few giddy spins you drop on the back of your neck in the snow with your skis waving in the air. You are lucky if the next glissader does not dash into you in his meteoric flight.
The shock of your, gyrations and impact with the hardened snow is considerable, but you must not get irritated when you hear the immoderate laughter of the large gallery.
You must laugh also, though you are suffering pain and distress.
If you don’t you are a poor sport.
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Skiers on the 'Popfly' hill on the east side of First Lake, 1928
“Sunday, February 6th”
Pollough Pogue
“The Province” February 11, 1928
On Sunday, in a totally different climate from that of sea level, about four hundred men and women who had hiked up the long and steep trails to the Hollyburn ski camp at First Lake, three thousand feet above the city, ski-ed and tobogganed in clear sunshine and the strong pure mountain air. The snow at First Lake is seven feet deep.
The gloomy forest through which the trail ascends is dressed with snow above the one thousand-foot level. In sharp contrast to the bare ground below that level, the snow-caparisoned woods, the dark trees with boughs bent low under the weight of their heavy trappings of snow, suggest a sub-arctic forest.
To most of the enthusiasts who climbed to the ski camp on Sunday the snowy forest was a playground; the deep snow had a ‘festive’ aspect of carnival. In a frolicsome spirit they tumbled on skis and snowshoes and were pitched off the slewing toboggans, sprawling in the snow, with joyous yells and happy laughter.
The wintry sunshine with its magic currents of vitality stirred the blood.
The crowding trees around First Lake, standing solemn and dignified in the snow, never before heard such merry-making. All day the ski-runners shot down the sharp slopes on the high south bank of First Lake, tobogganers dropped in swift flight down the slide, hikers ate and drank strong Swedish coffee and danced to phonograph music in the big ski camp. It was an animated and colourful scene.
Beyond the ski camp lay the wide Gambier white meadows of the Hollyburn plateau, great snowfields just now the home of beautiful desolation, primeval silence and mystery.
Up there one feels the spell of the high and lonely snows. As you push along on snowshoes or skis you will see great peaks which seem to be sculptured from snow, silvered by the sunlight and sharply shaded with pure blue.
The aspect of the scene is both lovely and a fierce and wild.
The big plateau has a mother-forgotten, and sheltered look and the north wind cuts through the sun warmth with a frosty edge.
The snow has transformed the plateau; the lakes and much of the topography is lost in its depths.
In summer you would say that this plateau needed no added charms to make it the perfection of natural beauty. In winter, without such a variety of delightful features, it keeps your interest by its simple grandeur.
Bending on our snowshoes we mushed down the big sidehill from the plateau to the old Naismith sawmill clearing.
The sun, completing its winter path, dropped behind the Vancouver Island mountains and soon became a pure Antwerp blue, with a sharp profile against a darkening sky. There was a small moon like a crust of greenish ice, and faint stars soon shivered among the tree tops black as if drawn in charcoal. As moonlight and starlight bright and the air grew colder and the whole aspect of the forest night was that of ages before man.
An owl, in the black solitude of the woods, like a muffled bell, began tolling, whoo-whoo, whoo, hoo!”
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"George at work", Hollyburn Ski Camp rental cabin, Hollyburn Ridge, March 11, 1934 (Brownie Morris Collection)
Ski Wax
Pollough Pogue
“The Province” December 1, 1928
I sat by the fire in the ski camp at First Lake, watching Oscar waxing skis. There were no hikers or skiers at the camp that night, but we were not lonesome. Ole had built in the big fireplace such a bright blaze of yellow cedar that no other light was needed in the room.
The dry cypress burned with a continual pleasant snapping, and the firelight washed like a silent intangible immaterial surf across the floor and against the walls of the big room, and sent the shadows climbing and running like scared pixies over the great smoke-brown ceiling beams.
Oscar held the runner of an eight-foot ski in the heat of the fire, warming the black wax he had applied to the shellacked smoothness of the runner. The grooved undersides of skis are resurfaced now and then by massaging them with fine sandpaper, shellacking them, rubbing down the shellac and applying ski wax, which should be burned in, by heating the skis. A coating of wax, properly applied, makes the skis the slickest things on earth
You can buy several kinds of ski wax, some imported from Europe. The Swedes at the ski camp make their own wax.
The real purpose wax is not to make the ski slide more swiftly, as many people suppose, but to make them run better on soft snow. The slicker the runners are the more freely they glide over damp snow, of course.
But all ski-riders now grease their skis with wax whether the snow is soft or not; naturally the wooden blades move faster over any kind of snow if they are greased. It takes a lot of wax and as the best wax is sold at rather high prices, the thrifty ski-runner soon finds out how to make his own. It is rather easily made.
As I sat there idly watching Oscar slicking his skis I decided that the characteristic smell of the ski camp is the odour of hot wax.
If ever I leave Hollyburn Mountain and the ski camp and wish to conjure up memory pictures of the winters up there, it will only be necessary for me to take the lid off a can of ski wax and warm it a little.
Then I shall see the big room at the camp full of skiers waxing their skis before daylight on a winter morning, some heating their skis at the fireplace, some using gas cooking lamps, some carbide trail lamps, and others lighted candles.
Tar is the chief ingredient of most kinds of ski wax, so that its aroma is balsamic and agreeable. Many kinds of gums are used, and so is paraffin. Some skiers glaze their runners with candle wax smoothed on with a hot iron.
Some kinds of ski wax compounds are intended to make hill-climbing, herring-boning upgrade. easier by making the runners stick on a snow slope. All the ski-rider needs is frosty snow, a downward slope and well-greased ski to attain the highest speed possible to man on his feet with mechanical aid.
If you are on the Hollyburn trail in winter, when the trail is a trench with breast-high walls of snow, owing to hikers walking single file, you may hear a distant shout: “Alley-oop-oop! This is the ski rider’s warning cry, something like the golfer’s “fore!” But there is a more definite urgency in the tone, and you immediately step out of the track, perch up on the side of the trail. There is a sudden whizzing crescendo, like the swift approach of something that makes little sound, but is travelling at a speed of greased lightning. A shriek of ski blades grinding on hard snow, and a blur of color, a wild yell, and it is gone.
A ski rider has passed you, coasting down the trail, sliding perhaps two miles down the mountainside.