My first Turkey Diary isn’t really meant to be a tidy story, but here’s what comes to mind right away. There’s a question I often ask new people I meet who have been living here for some time, originally from far away places. I’m always fascinated by their answers. The question is this. What led you here to this little out of the way town of Rossland, of all places? The answer, almost invariably, of course involves a love of skiing and or mountains in general and the people you find when you seek solace in such places.
The story of my journey here is more a collection of rambling thoughts you might hear from me over coffee or a beer, and why, after spending most of my life in Vancouver, this place so quickly became the home I had always been looking for. There will be a fair bit about skiing, mountains and construction, because I guess those are the landmarks I use to measure my life. I may wander off course a few times along the way, but in hindsight the trail that brought me here is surprisingly easy to follow.
Photo Credit: Pat Mulrooney
For me, the road to Rossland goes back a bit further than Shauna’s, rooted in decades of chasing snow and dirt across British Columbia. My youth and adult life were spent woven into the rhythm of the coast. I spent thirty plus years working mostly in residential construction in Vancouver. I was very lucky to have had the privilege of working on many amazing and very demanding projects with some incredible people, but by the end, the urban pressure and relentless scale of it all had worn me out, even when life on paper was good.
When I wasn’t on a job site, I was outside. I grew up skiing the North Shore mountains and was lucky enough to have spent the 1980s and 90s skiing Whistler-Blackcomb before it transformed from a legendary local hill into a global machine. As Whistler got busier and more corporate in the late 90s, my own relationship with the mountains shifted somewhat. For the next twenty years, I traded lift lines for the quiet backcountry of the South Coast mountains, ski touring and mountain biking, almost never riding a lift.
A note from Shauna: I just spent a few hours going through Pat Mulrooney’s blog and Flickr, and honestly, it was hard to stop. These photos of Mike and friends, from 2005 onward, are just a glimpse of countless adventures on skis and bikes. Pat, a talented photographer from Squamish, had the dedication to document it all, carrying a camera into extraordinary places most of us will never see. I love the huge mountain landscapes, but also the little moments in between: the friends, the dogs, the snack breaks. What a gift to have this record. Thank you, Pat, for letting us share it.
I first met Shauna in 2012. She had lived and worked all over the world, while I had spent my entire life in Vancouver. I think some of her wandering spirit rubbed off on me, or at least made me trust that leaving home didn’t have to mean losing it.
By the time we started seriously talking about leaving Vancouver, our version of the good life had begun to feel a little like a pair of golden handcuffs. That was a phrase I’d heard her use more than once when talking about places she had loved but eventually knew it was time to move on from. We wouldn’t be running away from a bad life by any means. Once she convinced me to leave, we began to untangle ourselves from the coast and figure out what would come next.
We spent a couple of years searching for a mountain town where the community actually seemed to scale down to human size. We looked closely at a few places that we considered to be the “heavy hitters,” so to speak.
We considered Revelstoke, knowing its massive terrain and the legendary snowfall of Rogers Pass well from past ski touring trips. We looked at Fernie, with its stunning valley, dramatic peaks, and that beautiful, historic main street. We spent time looking at Nelson, captivated by its vibrant, creative arts and culture scene draped along the arm of Kootenay Lake.
Each one had an undeniable pull. But when we came and stayed here for a few days in early 2019 Rossland very quickly won our hearts as we rediscovered the mountain and a real feel for the town.
That trip reminded me of an early fall mountain bike trip a number of years earlier with a group of friends to ride the Seven Summits trail. I remember walking into Ferraro’s after the ride to grab some food for our camp supper that night. Stepping back outside into the evening light and looking up and down Columbia Avenue and at the surrounding mountains, I remember pausing by my truck, struck by the beauty of the town and wondering... Could I actually earn a living here and make a life? This would be a very cool place to live. I guess I had already been yearning for an exit from the big city for some time! It’s a strange and satisfying thing looking back now, realizing that a fleeting thought on a street corner a decade ago was actually a seed taking root.
We didn’t come here just to escape Vancouver and in retrospect, Rossland has given each of us different things, I think. For Shauna, it seems to be the latitude to follow whatever catches her attention next, whether that means wandering off with her camera, disappearing into some new project, making art, or heading out with a dog or two in tow. There’s room here for her curiosity to wander.
For me, first and foremost, it was this feeling that I had found my people. Interestingly, there is one other pretty significant thing that has changed in my life as a result of moving here. That, however, is for a future Turkey Diary entry… not today.
So these days, instead of managing coastal job sites, I’m doing many different things. I’m enjoying working around town as a finish carpenter; I am continually amazed by how many talented tradespeople there are here in Rossland … what a community!
I am also really loving how Rossland has brought me back to that same skiing stoke I had in my late teens and twenties in Whistler. To be able to just show up at the base of the hill on a powder day and immediately have a posse there ready and waiting to rip laps through the trees is such an incredible feeling.
Between local carpentry gigs, we’re also coaxing an 1899 Victorian house back to its original glory, hopefully better than ever. In some cases, we’re quite literally peeling back the many decades and building a place where people can drop their gear, pull up a chair, and experience the exact kind of town that caught my eye all those years ago. More on that undertaking in the future as well.
The town I once stood looking at and wondering about from beside my truck is now the place where I work in people’s homes, ski with friends, can’t get through the grocery store without stopping to talk countless times, and spend my spare time trying to keep this 127 year old house standing.
Funny enough, both my kids seem to have inherited a similar love of outdoors... Elise, after well over a decade of living in Toronto has, as of last June moved back to BC, choosing to live right here in Rossland. Eric moves between Squamish and Golden with the seasons and passes through here regularly.
Apparently none of us is particularly good at living very far from the mountains. What could be better than that!
