Tag: Glen Creelman

Before Personal Locator Beacons and Cell Phones: SPOT the DifferenceBefore Personal Locator Beacons and Cell Phones: SPOT the Difference

January 3, 2023 Whistler Museum 0 Comments

Personal locator beacons and cell phones have completely changed the face of adventure in only 20 years. If you are prepared and have the right equipment it is possible to be rescued in a matter hours, sometimes less, in an emergency situation. Before satellite technology and cell phones it was a different story.

Whistler Search and Rescue (WSAR) formed in 1972 after the tragic avalanche that killed four people on Whistler’s Back Bowl. The subsequent search highlighted the need for search coordination and WSAR was born.

*Whistler Search and Rescue on Blackcomb Glacier in 1983. Photo courtesy of Cliff Jennings.*

Brad Sills joined shortly after WSAR formed and is now in his 47th year volunteering. He recalled the process of responding to search and rescue calls in the 1970s, which would come via the RCMP in Squamish or Pemberton before Whistler had local dispatch. “The call would come to Dave [Cathers] and he would tear his hair out because almost all of his capacity for mountain rescue were hippies living in the woods without telephones. I remember him getting really mad one night going, ‘What the hell do you think I’m supposed to do? Send you losers smoke signals or something?’ We were all laughing. We taunted him a lot about being uptight and responsible.”

Despite much of the team squatting off-grid, the community was small and the ‘jungle telephone’ quite effective. It helped that everyone could usually be found in the Boot Pub each afternoon.

It also took far longer to get messages out from those in need. When someone was injured others in the party would have to get to the nearest town or house before help could be called. Typically this meant that those missing or injured spent more time in the elements, unfortunately leading to more body recovery than rescue.

In July 1979, one person of a two person climbing group fell down a crevasse on Wedge Mountain. The safe party had to mark the spot and hike to Creekside to alert the RCMP. The Local Search and Rescue who relied on personal equipment at the time, alerted Comox Search and Rescue who sent a helicopter to assist with the rescue. Whistler Question Collection.

Arriving in Whistler as the first lifts were being built, Cliff Jennings went on to become one of the first heli-ski guides in Whistler with Pacific Ski Air when it started the winter of 1967/68. Helicopters did not have the same power that they do today. After picking guests up, Pacific Ski Air would have to slowly make their way up the mountain using the available thermals.

Knowing that they had no way to send for help and that rescue could take a very long time, Cliff Jennings and Glenn Creelman tried walking out from Decker Glacier like they would have to if the helicopter broke down. (This is long before Blackcomb was developed.) Cliff is a lifetime member of WSAR, and, using the same unreliable headlamps that search and rescue used, they traversed for 13 hours, skiing the whole time until they crossed the frozen Green Lake and reached houses to make a phone call.

*Pacific Ski Air at the base of Decker Glacier. Photo courtesy of Cliff Jennings.*

“We said, ‘Well, if we break down we are in trouble!’ Because we’d never get regular clients out that way. They would have to say, ‘Oh I wonder where they are?’ and go looking for us, for which they would have to get another helicopter because there wasn’t another helicopter in the Valley.”

*Cliff Jennings during the traverse out from Decker Glacier. Photo courtesy of Cliff Jennings.*

Even the first radios that WSAR had were huge, heavy and basically line of sight. Discussing change, Vincent Massey, also a lifetime member of WSAR said, “Everyone has a cell phone now and if they have reception it is pretty easy to either call or we can ping their phone to find out. And then the people who are going way out there, who are really qualified, have a SAT phone or a SPOT beacon and they can call for help. So things have changed, and now we know what to bring and we know what the scenario is because we can either text them or call them.”

Of course, it is still imperative that everyone travels prepared and knows how to use their equipment.

Fire at Alta LakeFire at Alta Lake

February 11, 2020 Whistler Museum 2 Comments

Prior to the formation of the Alta Lake Volunteer Fire Department (ALVFD), the Alta Lake area had no official response to fires – they were put out by the small community. But after two large fires in the early 1960s, some residents decided to form their own fire department.

The first fire is still a little mysterious. One a reportedly beautiful morning in April, a single passenger got off the Budd car at the Alta Lake Station. His outfit, a trench coat and dress shoes, drew the notice of everyone at the station as he asked Don Cruickshank, the station agent, how to get to the other side of the lake.

Waiting for the train at Alta Lake station, 1937. Left to right: Bill Bailiff, Mr and Mrs Racey, Ed Droll, Betty Woollard, Larry, Flo and Bob Williamson.

Later that same day, Dick Fairhurst received a call from Cruickshank to check on smoke coming from the area of an old empty lodge. Fairhurst and Louis White grabbed a small fire extinguisher and a bucket each and ran to Fairhurst’s boat. When they arrived at the lodge, they found that the fire had taken hold in some piles of lumber inside the three-storey building and that their buckets and extinguisher would be of no use. They also found a piece of candle at the back of the lodge, and footprints from dress shoes in the soggy ground.

By the time the evening train arrived, two RCMP officers from Pemberton were aboard and waiting to arrest the stranger in the trench coat, who had been pacing in the station while waiting for the train. Though we don’t know what happened to this mysterious man after his arrest, we do know that the date of the trial was set for June 6, 1962, the date of the second fire.

Cypress Lodge as seen from the lake. Fairhurst Collection.

This second fire appears to have been far more accidental than the first. The provincial government was building a new highway to connect old logging roads, small community roads, and the Pemberton Trail. The surveyors and their families were staying in cabins and lodges throughout Alta Lake.

One couple, Bruce and Anne Robinson, were staying in a cabin at Cypress Lodge, owned by Dick and Kelly Fairhurst. Anne chose June 6, a warm day with no wind, to make bread in the old Kootenay Range in the cabin. Dick was at the trial in Vancouver and Kelly had gone to vote at the Community Hall (it’s not entirely clear what the vote was for, but it is likely it was for the federal election). She and her children had just arrived home when Bruce arrived at Cypress Lodge to discover the roof of his cabin on fire. Kelly got on the party line, interrupting Alec Greenwood’s call to his mother-in-low to announce the fire.

Bert Harrop built cedar-bark furniture that was used in Harrop’s Tea Room, later the site of Cypress Lodge. The museum has some of his creations in our collection, but most were destroyed in a fire. Philip Collection.

Luckily, Bill and Joan Green and a group of loggers were hanging out at Rainbow Lodge after voting. Bill radioed to the Van West logging operation to bring their fire pump, and Alex loaded his pump onto his tractor. Soon everyone in the area know about the fire, and many of them came to help.

The fire, which had started from smouldering sparks in needles on the shake roof, had spread to a storage shed, but the lack of wind prevented it from spreading further. Someone moved Dick’s truck onto the road, but other vehicles, piles of dry wood, and cans of gasoline, paint, diesel and propane were still around the property.

The two pumps were used to get the fire under control, and then to keep wetting everything down. The Robinsons lost almost everything in the cabin, and many pieces of Bert Harrop’s cedar-bark furniture that were stored in the shed were lost, along with the two-rope for skiing on Mount Sproatt.

Alex Philip spent the night patrolling the area for sparks, but the fire was truly out by the time Dick arrived home the next day. The community came together again to help with the clean up.

Dick Fairhurst, Stefan Ples and Doug Mansell rafting the fire shelter and its contents across the lake to Alta Vista, 1967. Petersen Collection

When the ALVFD was formed later in 1962, its members were Dick Fairhurst, Doug Mansell, Stefan Ples, and Glen Creelman. They held regular practises and, until the formation of the Resort Municipality of Whistler in 1975, relied on fundraisers such as the Ice Break-Up Raffle and the Fireman’s Ball to buy supplies. The residents of the valley relied on them in case of emergencies.