Manifesting 20

I stared in shock at the wreckage of my cooler. It resembled a crime scene of the sort that rattles veteran detectives. What was once a small, zippered vinyl cube was torn into shreds and covered in the blood-like juice and stringy remains of the steaks and bacon that used to be inside. My friends and I had hoisted it onto a tree branch the night before but evidently a raccoon or bear had found it.

Now we were out of food. Why had we packed nothing but meat?

We were on an impromptu backpacking trip on the Bruce Peninsula; over-planning was somehow uncool. I was 20 years old and had a lot to learn.

This summer, Mountain Life is also 20—and we aim to be better put-together than I was at that age. At 20, everything was in front of me and I knew roughly two things for sure: Childhood was over and adulthood hadn’t really started yet.

Today there’s more time behind me than in front, but that’s not as discouraging as it sounds. As I age, I recognize that humans can only refine their understanding of life—its successes to cultivate, its failures to avoid—as it accumulates in the rearview.

But is the past really behind us?

The Aymara people of the central Andes hold what seems to us an upside-down idea of time—they see the future as behind them, and the past in front. Though we’re conditioned to view time as one-way linear, the Aymaran perspective is nonetheless intuitive: Every day, in some form, we manifest our past. Everything we’ve learned (or failed to learn) is with us in the present. By contrast, and in spite of our inclination to grasp at it, the future isn’t in front of us like a trail marker. We plan for tomorrow and next week in the belief that those plans will transpire, but what feels like a true sightline into the future is merely our imagination at work.

If the prospect of the future is often frightening, it is also full of promise that humanity’s drive to innovate and our awareness of past missteps will help stave off the planetary meltdown that threatens everyone and everything we know.

We can all learn a little from the Aymara. Without the past in our sights, the present and future are meaningless. –Ned

Morgan

Starting with the Fall 2023 issue, I will be stepping down as editor. I welcome my indefatigable colleague Kristin Schnelten to the role. I plan to spend more time with my family and continue as digital and contributing editor.

words :: Colin Field

There’s no way to start a story about Mountain Life without publisher Glen Harris dominating the narrative. He started the magazine, continues to run it and is the Herculean myth behind the brand. So who is he, and how did he get here? It’s a long story full of powder turns, crimp holds and water starts.

Growing up in Thornbury, Harris went to public school at Beaver Valley Community School and spent his weekends skiing at Blue Mountain.

After graduation from high school, way back in 1988, he did what many young men with a penchant for skiing do: He headed west. He went to Whistler for a ski vacation and didn’t come back.

“I ran into a guy in Whistler that I used to work with and he asked if I wanted a job at a ski shop,” he recalls. “I stayed in Whistler on and off for the next 12 years.”

During those years he skied a ton. And he knew how to live frugally. His skis were old, complete with core shots, his gloves were duct-taped together and no one was wearing a helmet back then, so he didn’t even have one. His bike was an even sadder story. But he knew the culture. He knew what it took to prioritize a pow day. He knew which beach to head to when the wind was up. He knew singletrack was the future.

There was more to these years than just skiing bottomless pow. He learned to peel bark off logs for log homes and turned that ski hill into a bit of a career. And he kept exploring.

“I basically just kept saving up money and going on these awesome trips,” he says.

These trips included windsurfing trips to Maui, the Gorge and Baja. And rock climbing adventures in Egypt, Jordan, Thailand and Yosemite.

“I started writing a few articles. It was basically to legitimize all the trips.”

And slowly but surely, legitimizing those adventures became more and more realistic. So he attended the Western Academy of Photography, completing a diploma in photojournalism. He did two years of recreation management at Capilano College, which then led to internships with the legendary ski photographer Paul Morrison and influential filmmaker Christian Begin. He also interned at Blue, an outdoor magazine and media company based in Manhattan.

“It was one big room with editorial, advertising and circulation. That’s where I learned how to run a magazine and how a magazine works.”

After his time in Whistler he moved to Nelson for five years, where he started Kootenay Mountain Culture magazine. But then he got the call no one wants.

“My mom got sick with cancer,” he recalls. “My family called me and said it was time to come home. She ended up living for four more years, and I’m thankful for that. It was also cool, because I rediscovered this area. It was nice to come back here 17 years later and just really fall in love with this place again.”

Realizing the potential for outdoor adventure in southern Georgian Bay, he saw a hole in the media landscape. The region needed a mountain culture magazine of its own. Mountain Life was born.

Rallying adventurous advertisers like Blue Mountain Resort, Talisman Resort, Sojourn, Kamikaze and Creemore Springs, he managed to publish the inaugural issue in the summer of 2003. He brought on old high school buddies to create content. Ned Morgan, Rob Buchanan, Jamie Green and Fly Gurlz founder Michelle Ward contributed. When it came back from the printer, the front cover was a shot of Sarah Mills riding singletrack, shot by Ward; the back cover was a pixelated mess of an ad for Squire John’s Ski Shop. It was 30 pages and more like a brochure than a magazine. But people loved it. Was it a financial success, though?

“No,” Harris laughs. “I didn’t make money with Mountain Life for a while. I was never really motivated to make money; it was just to see it in print. I was a dirtbag for so long, I just really didn’t care about money for quite a while. It’s kind of shocking, actually. I was in my early 30s when I started it. I milked the traveling and ski bum life for a long time.”

For the next three years, Harris continued publishing the magazine on a quarterly basis. Each season saw a fresh grip of content with new contributors, new advertisers and new stories being told for the first time ever. And the quality continued to progress. The photos got better, the stories more in-depth and the

With ten years of friendships in Whistler, it wasn’t long before Harris started looking for a reason to head west a couple times a year. And when his longtime buddy Jon Burak saw what Harris was up to, they partnered to create a Coast Mountains edition of the magazine. Focusing on Whistler and Squamish, they found legendary gonzo journalist, horror filmmaker and all-round character Feet Banks as editor. In the winter of 2006 the premiere issue of Mountain Life Coast Mountains dropped.

“I had zero editing experience,” says Banks. “Just a weekly movie column and a handful of stories placed in Freeze, SBC Skier and—thankfully—Beautiful British Columbia magazine, which was edited at the time by Anita Willis and Shanna Baker. The notes they gave me on my work made perfect sense. I’d never even seen comments or tracked changes in a Word document so I just used their editing style as a foundation and figured it out as we went. Jon and Glen were pumped on the new mag and their enthusiasm carried over. Fortune favours the bold, but we worked our asses off too. We learned by doing, made mistakes, pushed on and found a groove."

Photojournalist Todd Lawson joined the crew in the fall of that year and MLCM has been printing three issues per year ever since.

In 2007 Amelie Légaré joined the team as creative director and has been a tireless force to be reckoned with ever since. She currently designs all of ML’s titles. And she kills it.

"The core team came together pretty naturally and quickly. We still fight like siblings about the cover sometimes, but it mostly feels like a pretty tight band or a family,” Feet says.

Starting any magazine back in the summer of 2003 wasn’t something your guidance counselor would have suggested. It was the beginning of the digital age. While print is the backbone of Mountain Life, the magazine wasn’t immune to the lure of zeros and ones. The first mention of a website appeared in the Fall 2007 issue when an advertisement asked, “Got a Minute?” imploring readers to fill out an online survey with a weekend at Blue as a prize.

Any record of that early site is long gone, but ML’s print journalists attempted to navigate their way through the early days of content creation, social media and an increasingly short attention span. For years the east and west sites were kept separate with wacky web addresses like www.gb.mountainlifemag.ca and www. cm.mountainlifemag.ca, but they stuck to it. Eventually ML’s Facebook and Instagram audiences grew and Harris found the right team to manage it all with Sarah Bulford at the helm. Now digital offerings are a complement to ML’s print offerings; in 2022 the website garnered 2.34 million impressions and social media channels another 7.9 million.

Undeterred by the doom and gloom attitude surrounding print, the ML team pressed on with the first issue of the Mountain Life Annual in 2013. This gathering of the country’s best images and stories was more coffee table book than magazine. With an MSRP of

$12.95 on the newsstand, these gorgeously curated publications were masterfully edited by the legendary ski journalist Leslie Anthony.

“The idea was to give all these amazing things that were happening out there more space and highlight not just what and where the story was set, but the motivations behind things—which were coincidentally a great way to connect people to the outdoor world and progressive initiatives within it,” says Anthony. “And the way we did this was to open up the design a bit, run more and larger photos, and have timeless, not newsy, stories with a really long shelf life. Something you could go back to again and again and never want to throw out. So even the advertisers who came on board were really partners in this giant, long-lasting outdoor hug.”

Running for seven years, the project was a resounding success. And while the Annual hasn’t returned since Covid, it isn’t dead.

“We’ve been chatting about bringing it back,” says Harris. “We have a formula. It’s not on the radar for 2023, but we’re talking about it for 2024.” called next season? Here’s the dirt behind the variations.

With many proclaiming “Print is dead,” as early as 1984 (Harold Ramis playing Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters is credited with the first usage), the number of magazines that have folded in the past couple of decades are like nails hammered into a coffin.

“Our name changed several times because of a minor identity crisis of our own making,” says editor Ned Morgan. “After ML launched the B.C. edition (Mountain Life Coast Mountains), the Ontario edition suddenly needed a qualifier. We cycled through several. Mountain Life Georgian Bay was an attempt to incorporate the body of water we know and love, but we were clearly not a publication all about water. Mountain Life Georgian Bay Escarpment was a clunky and fortunately short-lived attempt to join up the regions we were most invested in. Mountain Life East was us trying to encompass the adventure geography we covered throughout Ontario and into Quebec and Vermont. After some feedback, we realized we couldn’t call ourselves an authority on the “East”—a word that signaled far too much. Mountain Life Ontario was a way of pulling back from “East” while acknowledging that our content often covered topics outside our Blue Mountains backyard. But finally we settled on Mountain Life Blue Mountains—at this point, we figured everyone understood we covered both regional and national/international topics and adventures. One thing is almost certain: As our Coast Mountains editor Feet Banks once pointed out, we’re probably the only magazine with ‘mountain’ in its name twice.”

The winter of 2015 saw the last issue of Quebec’s Ski Presse on the newstands of Tremblant and beyond. In July of that same year, SBC Media filed for bankruptcy and laid off its staff; SBC Skier, Snowboard Canada, SBC Surf and SBC Skateboard all ceased publication.

SKIING magazine ceased publication in 2017 after nearly 70 years. Canada’s Pedal magazine and SkiTrax stopped printing in August of 2019 after a 30-year run. 2019 saw the end of Transworld Skateboarding.

In 2020 one of the inspirations for the creation of Mountain Life, Powder magazine, was “suspended indefinitely.” Other titles under the same umbrella that also inspired ML’s contributors, including Bike and Surfer, were also put on hold.

So when it comes to the bottom line, starting magazine titles in this digital age

“No one’s getting rich in the outdoor media industry,” says Harris. “It’s about the lifestyle and creating opportunities to go do fun stuff and just get yourself out in the elements. That was the whole motivator before Mountain Life and well into Mountain Life. It has always been about lifestyle.”

And it continues to succeed. Despite the warnings, and as Harris watches other magazines fall by the wayside, he continues to introduce new titles.

When he met former Ski Presse publisher Pat Wells during a Tremblant ski trip in 2019, another title was born.

“I just kind of hit it off with him and realized we should launch a mag in Quebec. It was just Blue Mountains and Coast for so many years.” says Harris. “I realized that, if we had a Quebec mag, we’d be more attractive to national outdoor advertisers. We launched Vie en montagne and later found Frédérique Sauvée for the editor position.”

Then he found another kindred spirit in Kristy Davison out in Canmore, Alberta.

“Right away it was like I was working with a sister,” says Harris. So in 2021, during the height of the pandemic, with sporadic lockdowns and financial uncertainties, the team launched the Rocky Mountains edition of the magazine with Davison as editor.

So what does the future hold for Mountain Life?

“More of the same,” says Harris. “Keeping the lifestyle going. Lots of family lifestyle now, which is awesome. Hanging out with the kids and ripping with the kids. We’re just gonna keep on going.”

That determination has always been part of the magazine. A dedication to lifestyle over profit has always worked.

“I just decided this is what I wanted to do and I was ignorant enough to think I could do it,” he says.

Of course Harris isn’t oblivious to the role others have played in his success.

“I just feel really lucky, I’ve surrounded myself with good people. I’m friends with everyone I work with. It’s always been that way. I feel so fortunate to have solid people around and really appreciate all our contributors and readers and followers. I just feel very thankful for that. I hope to keep everyone’s stoke up.”

WINTER 2009 ML publishes an exposé of water-bottling companies in the Blue Mountains region, written by Paul Wilson.

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SUMMER 2004

Lynn Derrick is art director. A map of the Blue Mountains region drawn by artist John Haines appears in the magazine for the first time and reappears in numerous issues over the next decade-plus.

Median price of a single family home in Canada in 2003.

2004 Blue Mountain Early Bird 5x7 pass is $149.

2011 As the first of many awards under our belt, it felt very special when ML Coast Mountains took home the Magazine of the Year award for the Olympic issue at the Western Magazine Awards.

SPRING 2009 ML features an e-bike review for the first time—a Giant Twist Freedom DX. With a 300-watt motor in the front hub, the list price is $2,399.

2010

FALL 2010 ML publishes the cover story “Shades of Blue,” a dip into Blue Mountain Resort’s deep’80s archive with photos by Henri Georgi and Rob Buchanan. The verdict? “Pink Ditrani one-piece fart sacks, outrageous Carrera sunglasses and uberlong straight skis are pretty damn ridiculous.”

2004 2011

SUMMER 2009 ML Coast Mountains publishes the River issue, highlighting the Ashlu, Chilcotin and Colorado, plus an investigation of a mysterious rock carving near Mount Currie.

2009

WINTER 2010 Mountain Life joins 1% For the Planet, donating one per cent of its annual sales to the global movement dedicated to building and supporting an alliance of businesses financially committed to creating a healthy planet.

WINTER 2011 Melanie Chambers flings a bra onto the infamous Blue Mountain Bra Tree.

FALL 2011 Contributing Editor Allison Kennedy Davies pens her first piece, “16 in 1: The Sunrise to Sunset Multisport Challenge.”

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FALL 2005 ML puts a price of $3.95 on the cover of this issue and this issue only. Susan Meingast is the art director.

2006 Collingwood’s population is 17,290; Town of The Blue Mountains is 6,460.

WINTER 2006 First issue of Coast Mountains (B.C.) is published.

SUMMER 2008

Melanie Chambers writes her first piece for ML, “Eden Revisited.”

SPRING 2008: Colin Field becomes editor and Leslie Anthony writes his first piece for Mountain Life.

SUMMER 2007

Cindy Schultz is the creative director.

2005 2006 2007 2008

WINTER 2012 Amelie Legare comes on as creative director, initially at ML Coast Mountains. Soon she will be designing all ML editions.

SEPTEMBER 2012

Mountain Life gets an Instagram account.

2012 All ML publications are printed on paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

2012 2013

WINTER 2013 The first Mountain Life Annual prints. One of the features is “A Failure of Reason,” a critical examination of the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline proposal in B.C. The Canadian government cancelled the pipeline in 2016.

SUMMER 2013

Ned Morgan takes over as editor.

FALL 2006 ML runs a feature on Blue Mountain Resort’s 65th anniversary, penned by the founder’s son, George Weider.

FALL 2007: ML puts a price of $4.95 on the cover. Gerad Treanor is the creative director.

FALL 2012 ML publishes the 50 Classics special issue, featuring hikes, climbs, bike and paddle routes and more, complete with custom maps and sage advice. (Six years later ML publishes a sequel, the Trippy 50 issue, focusing on local trips of various lengths and levels of difficulty.)

JUNE 2013 The Mountain Life Facebook page is created.

WINTER 2013 Mountain Life hosts the first ever MULTIPLICITY event at the Telus Ski & Snowboard Festival in Whistler.

SUMMER 2014

Snowboard and skateboard pioneer Willi Winkels takes the cover posthumously.

WINTER 2014 ML publishes a piece about weed, “Growing Peacefully,” way before legalization.

2015 Mountain Life takes home Silver at the Canadian Printing Awards, three years before winning Gold.

2015 2014

WINTER 2019 ML profiles the work of wildlife photographer Maxime Légaré-Vézina, who will go on to contribute to several ML editions.

2019 ML joins the PrintReleaf program, which measures paper consumption and calculates the forest impact. ML’s paper footprint is automatically reforested at planting sites in Canada.

2019 The second issue of Below Zero hits the stands.

SPRING 2021 Scott Parent debates the impact of tourism on the Bruce Peninsula in “Peninsula Pressure.”

OCTOBER 2021

Mountain Life Rocky Mountains publishes its first issue.

2019

WINTER 2020 ML’s Quebec edition Vie en montagne publishes its first issue.

FALL 2014 Outdoor enthusiast, world traveller and ML Financial Controller Krista Currie joins the team. She keeps the whole ship afloat and on course. 2020

$355,000

Median price of a single family home in Collingwood in 2015.

WINTER-SPRING 2019 For its Time Travel issue, ML Coast Mountains publishes one of its most acclaimed covers, featuring composite images of athlete Brett Tippie from several decades, in a photo illustration by Stu MacKay-Smith.

2020 Creative Director Amélie virtually accepts the Gold prize for best Art Direction for the ML Annual feature “Treeline.”

2020 ML publishes the Camping issue, including pro kayaker Benny Marr’s “Top 5 Favourite Remote Campsites.”

2021

SUMMER 2021 ML profiles Collingwood pilot Annie Rusinowski, whose photo of her Cessna Bird Dog—taken with a wingmounted camera—graces the cover.

JULY 2021 Feet Banks drops the first episode of the “Live It Up with Mountain Life” podcast.

2016 Collingwood’s population is 21,793; Town of The Blue Mountains is 7,025.

WINTER 2016 ML publishes the story “Ice Breakers,” an in-depth look into the culture and people of Great Lakes surfing.

FALL 2018

Contributing Editor Kristin

Schnelten writes and shoots her first piece for ML.

2018

SUMMER 2016 ML publishes “Sisterhood of the Wake,” about the women’s wakeboarding scene in Ontario.

2023

2022

WINTER 2023 ML

Contributing Editor, photographer, filmmaker and all-around waterman

Scott Parent bags his first cover shot.

2016 2017

ML drops the first issue of Mountain Life Resort Guide

2016

2017 The ML Coast Mountains team wins the Arts & Culture category at the Whistler Excellence Awards, as voted by locals.

SUMMER 2022 ML Coast Mountains publishes the feature article “Wisdom of the Watchmen,” about Indigenous guardianship in Gwaii Haanas, B.C.

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2017

WINTER 2017 ML teams up with Georgian Bay Community School to launch the Pursuits Film Festival in Meaford, Ontario.

2022 Population of Collingwood reaches 26,352; Town of The Blue Mountains is 9,390.

Median price of a single family home in Collingwood in 2022.

2023

MARCH 2023 ML Rocky Mountains receives 7 nominations at the 2023 AMPA Awards. In 2022, MLRM took home the Best Landscape Photograph award for a shot by Steve Ogle in the inaugural issue.

2023 After a Covid-related slowdown, ML print page counts are back up to pre-pandemic levels. And with higher traffic on www.mountainlifemedia.ca, we’re sharing our love of the outdoors with more people than ever. And it’s all thanks to our advertisers and readership. Here’s to the next 20 years.