Green Garden Royal Rumble: Squamish – Mountain Life – GWC Mag gwcmagFebruary 27, 2024061 views In the latest issue of ML Coast Mountains, the monsters are ready to rumble. First up: Squamish. Words :: Feet Banks. Squamish, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Mother of the Wind, Newport, Recreation Capital of Canada, Hardwired for Adventure, Squamptown, Squawsone, Squambodia, Squeamish or just plain Squam. ILLUSTRATION: STU MACKAY-SMITH Call it what you will, but the secret is out on the once-industry town slammed into the spot where the white-capped waters of Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound (North America’s southernmost fjord) meet the mountain-fed flows of no fewer than five regional rivers. With mountain views (and access), Canada’s most accessible big-wall (and small-wall) rock climbing and the third-highest waterfall in the province, the place is a veritable dream for adventure seekers (and real estate developers). But it wasn’t always so—thanks to unchecked industry on the Squamish estuary and the nearby Britannia Beach copper mine, the waters of the sound were essentially an ecological wasteland for decades. And thanks to the endless sulfur fumes pumping from the Woodfibre pulp mill, the whole place usually smelled like a thick, wet fart. Illustration: Stu Mackay-Smith This made for a tough—though tight-knit—working-class community of folks who were, until recently, a running joke for the fancy-pants drive-through crowds from Whistler and Vancouver. “She asked me to kiss her where it smells,” the old joke goes, “so I took her to Squamish.” But it wasn’t always so. The Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Stélmexw/Squamish People have been here since time immemorial, and an area this bountiful and exciting has a rich Indigenous history. There’s Say-noth-Ka, the giant two-headed serpent whose slithering route into the mountains formed Shannon Falls, or the time the Nation tied their canoes to the summit of Nch’kay/Mount Garibaldi to wait out the great flood. My favourite story comes from trapper/author Clarence “Hank” Tatlow, nicknamed Ta Kaya/Lone Wolfby the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nation. He arrived in the Squamish Valley in 1907 at the age of three, eventually becoming a close friend of the storied Chief Jimmy Jimmy and spending much of his life on the Squamish River. In his book I Remember, Hank recounts a story told to him about how, one summer, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh scouts rushed back to a midsummer fishing camp to report raiders from the Chilcotin tribes had crossed the glaciers to the north (the area now known as the Pemberton Icecap) and had stopped up river, fishing and resting, planning to attack the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh camp in the next few days. Related: Serendipitously, another group of scouts paddling in from the ocean had witnessed war canoes from up the coast gathered in Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound. With most of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh nation camped at villages far to the south in what’s now Vancouver, the chief at the midsummer fishing camp evacuated his people and hid all the valuables, leaving a few men behind to tend the fires all night and keep everything looking inhabited. As the chief expected, both raiding parties attacked at dawn and ended up battling each other! Not a single Sḵwx̱wú7mesh local was injured. In his book, Ta Kaya admits hearing all this thirdhand: “Even if it’s not true, it shows that someone had a gift for plotting a story.” Downtown Squamish, 1951. MORGAN COLLECTION / SQUAMISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY ARCHIVE In the mid-to-late 1800s, colonists and farmers began trickling into the area, followed by railway, logging and other industries. The construction of a road connecting the farms of Brackendale to the ferry terminus at Newport in 1892 set the mold for modern-day Squamish, which was incorporated in 1948—with the road to Vancouver finally punched in a decade later. Mountaineers had been accessing Coast Mountain peaks since the early 1900s, but with a serviceable road, the area’s mountains, rivers, rocks and winds were suddenly available to anyone wanting to tie their nerves to the short end of a hemp rope or venture into the icy waters of Squamish River estuaries like the Elaho or Ashlu. The place still smelled, but there was fun to be had. In 1993, skier/climber/Whistler kid Damian Kelly moved to town to pursue life as a climbing bum. “I lived at Psyche Ledge, a campground at the base of the Chief—it wasn’t a park yet back then so we had a camp overlooking Shannon Falls and a veggie garden for food. Squamish was this empty, lawless, depressed, super-cheap town back then. It attracted misfits and people who didn’t fit in anywhere else. And the natural environment was off the charts. It was paradise.” You might also like: At the same time, Squamish’s reputation as a roughneck mill town was well-earned. “We got along well with the working-class locals,” Kelly says. “The climbers were also loggers and railway guys and excavator operators. It was all blue-collar but there were tons of really talented athletes—kayakers, windsurfers, climbers, bikers later on, Olympians—but everyone was chill about it. For sure, though, if you came from out of town your vehicle was gonna get broken into and you’d have sketchy interactions. It kept the American climbers away, though.” And then, in 2006, someone shut off the Woodfibre pulp mill and the heavy stench of an irresponsibly extractive era began to lift. At the same time, cleanup efforts at both the Britannia Mine site and the chemically poisoned Squamish Oceanfront industrial zone began. With human effort and natural revitalization aligned, the land and water rebounded and Squamish house prices began to rise as savvy adventurers from across the globe (and crusty Whistler locals who discovered their newborn kids weren’t chipping in on rent) realized, There’s an oceanfront mountain community an hour from Canada’s third-largest city and 40 minutes from North America’s greatest ski resort? Let’s go! Evan Stevens and Ross Mailloux discuss the day’s objectives and hazards in the Squamish backcountry. Photo: chris christie “Another big draw,” Kelly recalls, “was a decade prior they took down the ‘Don’t Meth Around’ sign on the side of the highway and put up one that said, ‘Come Grow With Us.’ That started the era of everyone growing really good weed here. You could rent a house for $700 bucks and light up the extra bedroom. There wasn’t much money for Sea to Sky locals in the ‘90s, so that was a real local industry. By then the mountain bikers had joined the fun—Al and Lorraine Ross from Tantalus Bikes, Dave Heisler and Sandra Brull from Corsa, the Test of Metal races, Ted Tempany building trails. Along with the old-school climbers like Hamish Fraser and Peter Ourum, everyone was just creating this incredible outdoor community.” And then the money came to town, thanks to the successful Whistler/Vancouver Winter Olympic bid, construction of a four-lane highway and a construction boom. After the world shut down for the Covid global pandemic, people began realizing the drawbacks of living piled on top of each other in an urban setting. By then it was all over for Squamish—or maybe it was all beginning anew? Or maybe two realities or ideas can exist simultaneously? Or maybe 2017 Downhill Mountain Bike World Champion and local hero Miranda Miller said it best: “Squamish sucks. Don’t go.” Squamish’s Toughest Gang: The Pocketknife Posse Famed warriors of justice (and accidental murder), The Squamish Five were not actually from Squamish (they just were apprehended here). And certainly, no gang of the modern era will ever be as tough (in a bad way) as a small subsection of 1990s Squamish youth who garnered much media attention for their beatings, intimidation, racism and even murder. But we like to keep things positive, so rather than focus on that stuff let’s instead shift our attention to the Pocketknife Posse. Less of a gang and more a collection of sensible friends, the Pocketknife Posse (PKP) is all-inclusive and (mostly) non-violent (don’t test them, though—they are armed). “Basically, it started back in 2006 when I found some 99-cent keychain pocketknives at Surplus Herby’s in Kamloops and gave them to all my friends,” says Squamish photographer and long-time Mountain Life contributor Mark Gribbon. “Pretty much immediately, we all realized how handy it was to have a blade on you at all times—except at the airport.” After losing too many keychain knives at airport security, most PKP members upgraded to knives that also included screwdrivers and other useful tools. And while people have been carrying pocketknives since the invention of pockets, the rise of the hipster in the 2010s saw a massive uptick in what the PKP (and Boy Scouts) have known all along—it’s nice to be prepared, to be utilitarian and be ready to fix what’s broken or help when needed. “It’s a tool above all,” Gribbon says. “It saves the day again and again. And none of us has stabbed anyone yet, though [Mountain Life editor] Feet Banks could snap at any time.” Squamish’s Scariest Moment: ‘Oh Crap…’ with Spencer Seabrooke As co-founder and leader of SlacklifeBC, Canada’s top slacklining gang, a one-time highline world record holder, a lover of huge pendulum jumps and a veteran of more than 350 BASE jumps off Siy̓ám̓ Smánit/Stawamus Chief, Spencer Seabrook is no stranger to air time. On a standard Siy̓ám Smánit jump one a sunny day in June of 2023, however, things didn’t go quite as planned. Spencer’s canopy didn’t open correctly, and he slammed into Squamish’s iconic granite wall, 150 to 200 metres above the ground. “My worst nightmare. My chute opened facing the cliff and I slammed into it. You think about it every time you do that hour hike up, about it not happening. And then it did—the worst-case scenario, just a bunch of small, little contributing factors: My body position was not perfect, and after so many jumps the lines on your canopy wear a bit and are slower to open. That made a bit of a twist and turned me to face the wall and that was it. I tried to reach up to steer the lines above my riser, but really it was all so fast. All I could do was kick my body around to face the rock so I would be able to grab something. It was pure luck on my end; I hit a ledge—Lucky Ledge—and was able to grab some bushes. Had I not hit in that spot, my canopy would have collapsed and I’d have slid down the face of the Chief. Spencer, on take off. Photo: jimmy martinello “First thing I did was get my phone and call my girlfriend; she was at the bottom and would have seen me hit. So I let her know I’m fine. Then I call my friends at the top—they thought I was dead. The next call was to Search and Rescue. They rappelled a tech down and lowered both of us to the ground. Shout out to Search and Rescue! For sure there’s fear—the thing I worry about happening, the worst-case scenario…It happened, but I am fine. So what did I learn? That has riddled my brain. I find myself being a bit more conservative, now I’m more concerned with finding new or interesting jumps rather than repeating the same jump over and over. This brought me back to square one a bit.” Squamish Random Measurements: Knots As the primary oceanfront community in the Sea to Sky (yes, Lions Bay and Britannia Beach, you count, too), Squamish is home to most of the region’s nautical enthusiasts—the sailors, kiters, Sea-Doo crews and general mariner types. Thankfully, few if any of them are using fathoms or leagues to measure distances and depths; yet on the water there persists a tendency to measure speed in knots. But what the heck is a knot anyway? “The quickest definition is that it’s short for one nautical mile per hour,” explains Mitch Mitchell, a 26-year Squamish resident and sailor who once helped team an 80-foot racing yacht (with an 11-storey mast) on an eight-day voyage from Sydney, Australia, to New Zealand. Set your phaser for 10 knots! Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound. Photo: chris christie “And a nautical mile is 1.15 regular miles [1.85 km]. Nautical miles break down like this: One degree of latitude on earth represents sixty nautical miles (NM) and there are 90 degrees of latitude from the equator to the pole, so 60 NM times 90 equals 5,400 NM,” he says. “Ancient sailors on open water only had the stars [and thus longitude and latitude] to base their measurements off, so the nautical mile became the standard.” That takes care of the distance aspect of a knot, but what about the time? Apparently, to gauge speed in the old days, sailors would throw a piece of wood overboard with a rope attached to it. The rope would have knots tied every 47 feet 3 inches (14.4 metres) and as the board floated away, the knots would slip through the fingers of a sailor holding the rope. Another sailor would use an hourglass to time how many knots passed through in 30 seconds. Using math more complicated than most Sea to Sky kids ever learned, the sailing master would use that number to determine the boat’s speed. Every knot that went through within the 30 seconds would equate to one nautical mile per hour. (These days the “hourglass” is globally standardized at 28 seconds.) “It’s confusing,” Mitch admits, “but just remember one knot is 1.85 km/h or 1.15 mph, and that’s all 99 per cent of people will ever need.” Squamish Blown Spot: Brohm Lake “It kinda feels like every lake in the Sea to Sky is blown out now,” says Cherry OnTop, burlesque performer/instructor, mother of two and Squamptonian since childhood. “But around here Brohm is the worst for sure. And I’ll never not be mad about it. Growing up in the ‘90s, Brohm was my pool. I could hop in my shitty old Mazda pickup and be there in ten minutes from Brackendale. We’d always bump into friends or people we knew, jump the cliffs together, party. It was a real community asset.” Cherry says she started to feel the masses flocking in post-2010 Olympics, after the highway upgrades made it easier for lower mainlanders to zip up for the day. “Instagram probably didn’t help either,” she says. “But Brohm is so accessible, so visible…When I try to go there and it’s lined up to the highway it gets intense with hot, impatient kids in the car. It is what it is but it doesn’t make for an enjoyable family trip. “We’d always bump into friends or people we knew, jump the cliffs together, party. It was a real community asset.” “These days Brohm is flooded with people who have driven up from Vancouver, which is funny because back in the old days all the city kids really looked down on us Squamish skids and they were pretty rude about it. But if they showed up to a party at the lake the locals might slash their tires, or worse. None of the lakes feel like a community spot anymore, but Brohm is the one I miss the most. But at least no one’s car is getting torched!” Nourished Community: Squamish Water Kefir Like so many good business endeavors, this one started with a shady transaction in a dimly lit parking lot. “I had heard of this centuries-old kefir culture that originated from the prickly pear cactus in Mexico,” explains Sabrina Horlyck, co-founder of Squamish Water Kefir. “But the only place I could find it was some dude online who I met down in Deep Cove in a parking lot. I gave him 20 bucks and he handed over a teaspoon of this crystal-y, opaque, granular stuff. It felt shady for sure.” But that “stuff” was exactly what Horlyck and her friend Kristin Campbell needed. Kefir (pronounced “kuh-feer”) is a colony of living bacteria and yeast that, when fed organic cane sugar, will produce digestive enzymes, amino acids, pre-digested nutrients, minerals and billions of probiotics. “Gut health and probiotics have been buzzwords for more than a couple years now,” Campbell says, “but when we first started cooking this up in Sabrina’s kitchen, we just wanted it for ourselves.” “I had nagging gut issues,” Horlyck says. “I had a nutrition background, and I was looking for anything that didn’t require a commute to the city. So we made some water kefir and sold it at the farmer’s market. Sold 60 bottles the first week, out of a red wagon with a kid in it.” To make a business work, you need (healthy) guts. Photo: Anastasia Chomlack Eight years later, Squamish Water Kefir has a 2,500-square-foot facility in the industrial park, fermenting eight different flavours of sparkling probiotic soda (including Blood Orange and Root Beer!) and four types of frozen probiotic popsicles that ship across Canada. “The flavours are derived from a mix of essential oils and extracts,” Campbell says. “The sodas have four ingredients—water, organic cane sugar, kefir culture and flavour. That’s it. Through the fermentation process, the culture reduces the sugar content to just a few teaspoons per litre, and the sugar arrives in your gut ‘pre-digested,’ making it more bioavailable. We don’t add any additional sugar beyond what the culture requires to work its magic. Each can boasts more than 2.5 billion living, vegan probiotics.” While scaling up any small business is a challenge, both Horlyck and Campbell say perseverance and stubbornness is their biggest trade secret. “Whatever is in the way, is the way,” Campbell says. “Everything is figure-outable; you just need to believe somehow it is gonna work.” “All over the world now, people view Squamish as a place connected to a healthy, outdoor lifestyle.” Community support and a hot name/head office location helps, too. “People in Squamish are awesome,” Horlyck says. “And all over the world now, people view Squamish as a place connected to a healthy, outdoor lifestyle. Sometimes we get so caught up in running the business we forget why we started this—the health benefits—but then we get emails saying, ‘I have less anxiety, am sleeping better, have more regular bowel movements and a stronger immune system…’ We’ve even had people email saying, ‘Drinking this stuff has saved my life.’” “Pretty much every traditional culture has some form of fermented drink or food as a staple to their diets,” Campbell says. “Now Squamish has one, too.” Squamish Perfect Day: Rock and Chop with T-Mac Trevor McDonald, aka T-Mac, is a climber, skier, paddler and stone mason who moved to Whistler at age 18. “My second day there, my buddy Dave and I were so broke and hungry—waiting for our tree-planting checks to come in—and we saw this dude grilling steaks in his backyard in Brio. Dave went and knocked on his front door and when the dude went to answer I ripped into his backyard and grabbed the steaks right off his grill. We hid in the woods and ate these steaks—they were only cooked on one side, but man, we were starving and they were good.” T-Mac on the climb. Photo: jimmy martinello Employed shortly after, T-Mac spent the next eight years ski-bumming—crime free—before moving to Mount Currie for a few years. He’s called Squamish home since the calendar rolled over into the year 2000. “I came because Pemby was too expensive to buy a house back then,” he says. “I lived downtown with the crackheads and one night they stole a Hibachi BBQ from my backyard. I guess I deserved it though, didn’t I?” Squamish has changed over the years, but one thing that remains the same, the thing T-Mac likes the most, is the sense of community and camaraderie here. “I have the same friends I’ve had since I showed up in this area, we are still tight, we laugh, and we’re still enthusiastic about what we love doing. We’re still finding new places to go and new ways to have fun. It feels pretty much the same as it always has.” Related: Well there are many, but one that really stands out is one nice day in April, Naomi [Allard] and I paddled [on SUPs] out across from the spit to access those big cliffs on the west side of the sound, just south of where the river comes in. It was cool because we had to thread our way through all the kiters and navigate the river mouth to get over to this climbing route Jimmy Martinello and I had put up a few years earlier. At a little cleft in the cliff with a small forested ledge, we stashed the boards and started climbing. “Paddleboards are the only way to access this spot; you can’t leave a boat there unmanned. And climbing over the ocean, there’s just something about combining those elements. Maybe it does something to your vision but it adds an edge to everything, a bit more excitement. It’s a bit similar to climbing in the desert, this stark vastness below you. This route is mixed climbing, four pitches of 5.11+ with an Arbutus tree on a ledge at the top, a really great perch and kind of a perfect Squamish spot. T-Mac on the Sound. Photo: jimmy martinello “The trip home: We had this big tide drop so the Squamish river was just flying out into the sound creating these standing waves out on the sandbar. The kiters were everywhere, too—it was a bit of a wild scene. Naomi is a great paddler so we just had fun with it and ended the day with tacos and beer by the outdoor fire pit at A-Frame. I think that’s one of my favourite things about Squamish, on those multisport mission days there’s an added romance or an extra feel to it. You’re testing yourself on multiple skill sets and enjoying the feel of two totally different things you love. Plus, paddling is a great warm-up for climbing.” You might also like: Check the ML Podcast!