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Dear Editor,

I was perusing your articles and enjoyed the one from Loni Klettl about Marmot Basin. I am a fellow warden kid born in Banff and lived at the Healy Creek Warden Station (on the Sunshine Road) until moving to Jasper in August 1966, when my dad, Ole Hermanrude, got the assistant chief warden position. We lived at the west end of town where most of the mobile homes now are—the Klettls lived there later.

That used to be a large horse paddock for the mares and their colts in the spring.

Anyway, I started skiing in Banff—mainly because dad had to do ski patrol at Sunshine all the time—and carried on in Jasper. At that time the wardens and their families were blessed with free seasons passes and free transportation, so my costs were nil after buying skis and boots.

Marmot at that time had buses running from the Atha-B every hour. I was always on the early bus and came home on the late one—usually around 4 p.m.

Lifts were the T-bar and the chair—can’t remember the runs, but do have pretty good recollections of blasting past and through the beginners classes on the T-bar run, and also making a trail through the trees between the beginners run and the T-bar.

I only got hung up once, when the steel basket of my pole caught a branch stub on a hefty tree, resulting in me being yanked off my feet, stretched out and then stuck in the snow, after the tails of my skis dug straight in. I was staked out like a cowboy on an anthill. It took me a good 15 minutes to get untangled—maybe that’s why my shoulder hurts a little today.

At that time you hung your pack in the lodge and came back to it with nobody snitching anything.

I always skied the outrun at the end of the day.

When dad was sent to Mt. Revelstoke/Glacier Park as chief warden in October of ‘69, my skiing days were almost over. But around February of ‘72 we were back in Jasper, this time living out at the Palisades warden house, so I could no longer walk to the Atha-B.

The high school had a ski day just after I got back and up to Marmot I went—after more than two years without skiing.

The first couple of hours went great, but then as I was skiing the lift line, the mogul monster jumped out and swatted me. After the crash, I lifted my goggles to clear the packed snow from inside them. That’s when I saw the leading end of my ski—about six inches from the binding—wobble and fall off. The other ski had a crack in it, too.

That pretty much ended my skiing days, as I remember thinking my ankle and legs were awfully close to the break—that and I had no money to buy another set of skis.

But it was great fun overall and I sometimes wish I had continued—just sometimes.

Robert Hermanrude
Salmon Arm, BC