Five US WINTER SPORTS
This is the piece with the greatest immediate historical significance, as it suggests and describes an origin for the introduction of skiing to the Banff area. This new winter sport and the facilities it spawned radically changed Banff from the summer resort that it had remained until well into the middle years of the twentieth century: the Banff Springs Hotel and Chateau Lake Louise simply shut down in winter. Before that, wealthy tourists who arrived by sleeper car on the toney CPR Trans-Canada, a stainless-steel rhapsody of Art Deco design, took the hot mineral waters at the Cave and Basin, walked or went out hunting or fishing—in summer. Here, Tex comically refers to the founding of the Skoki Lodge by the Ski Club of the Canadian Rockies near Banff in 1931. Skoki Lodge was (and remains) a back-country skiing destination three years before Tex’s first boss, Jim Brewster, made Sunshine Village into the first ski resort in the Rockies. Skiing turned Banff into a year-round tourist destination. Tex refers to the anonymous inventor as “some yahoo” who “got to ghost dancing,” a reference to the ghost dance of the Plains Indians. The reference is apt: diverse Native groups adopted the ghost dance as a mystical way to bring back the buffalo herds and become prosperous once again, much as (in Tex’s eyes) the Banff area was looking for more ways to bring in tourist dollars.
The popularization of the automobile and therefore of cheap mass travel made resort skiing wildly popular after the First and Second World Wars, but Tex’s stories had all been written before that time—one can only imagine what he would have made of skiing day-trippers from Calgary and bus-loads of Japanese tourists. Tex’s self-mockery about his clumsy and amateurish use of skis is a winning counterpoint to his slightly grudging appreciation of Cliff White’s visionary introduction of skiing to the area. His point about the money to be earned guiding or teaching skiers was in a minor way prophetic, as his own son and daughter-in-law (Bill and Choukie Vernon-Wood) would run a small ski-hill nearVernon, and his grandson John Cow would start out as a ski instructor at Sunshine Village and finish as its general manager, before taking over and building up, in partnership, Silver Star Resort near Vernon, thus mirroring Tex’s own trajectory in the tourist business from Banff into British Columbia.
—AG and JR