Grassroots Volunteerism in Terrace, BC

The line between apocryphal tale and legend can be a thin one. At Shames Mountain outside Terrace, BC, it’s about 13 feet wide. That’s the depth of new snow that the groomer famously buried itself in to delay the ski area’s inaugural opening in December 1990. A predilection for precipitation immediately became Shames’ calling card—a snow-globe shaken in lift line and skintrack conversations around the continent.

On a stormy January day, with snow seemingly filling tracks as fast as they’re cut, local photographer Mattias Fredriksson and I exit the T-bar at Shames to fall in with a group milling where bonsai snow-ghosts begin their march up a steep dome. Amid laughter and backslapping, a dozen packs that will be reclaimed for afternoon backcountry missions sit upright in the snow like stout, white-capped garden gnomes. A few hard-chargers are already peeling off for the easy-access glades that will cycle them back to the lift, while a hawk-eyed handful peer up the dome’s bootpack into the clouds. Still others, snow-dampened children tugging at their jackets, are headed back to the base and the panacea of hot chocolate. Yet despite the pervasive powder-day leitmotif, there’s little talk of skiing. Most of the chatter concerns kids and Christmas and snowmobiles and hockey—the kind of banter expected at a community event, for which any gathering at Shames appears to qualify. That’s because in 2013, bucking the trend of ownership by far-off corporate amalgamators, Shames Mountain became Canada’s first non-profit, community-service ski cooperative. As a unique ski hill in a very snowy Coast Range landscape, Shames remains a portrait of grassroots ski culture painted by the stalwarts who call it home.

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