Cypress Mountain adds nine new runs, keeps old trees

The hills of Cypress Provincial Park in West Vancouver are alive with the sound of cowbells–or soon will be. It's not that Cypress has suddenly been transferred into the Agricultural Land Reserve. Far from it, but stranger things have happened in this controversial 3,000-hectare site's history since a park was created there in 1975.

The large, ornately decorated Austrian cowbell in question accompanies the Doppelmayr Lions Express chair lift installed over the summer on the slopes of Mount Strachan, which, together with Black and Hollyburn mountains, makes up Cypress Bowl, or Cypress Mountain as it was rebranded in 1998. Tradition holds that bells are rung to celebrate the opening of a new chair lift. In this case, the person granted the honour will be Linda Swain, general manager of Cypress Mountain, home to the 2010 Olympic Winter Games ski and snowboard venues on Black Mountain as well as the Hollyburn Ridge Nordic ski centre. She'll likely do this in December when there is enough snow to warrant running the new lift.

When interviewed recently by the Georgia Straight by phone, Swain admitted that helming the 2010 project has been the "biggest challenge" of her career. "I'm very hands-on and have been out there on the mountain a lot," she said.

During the 1990s, a conservation group called Friends of Cypress Provincial Park had a stormy relationship with the former operator of the ski hill over its expansion plans, which included building a restaurant on top of Mount Strachan. However, as the Olympics approach, the conservationists are working cooperatively with the current operator. The only serious concern appears to be the state of the trails.

As Swain spoke to the Georgia Straight, helicopters were flying the last towers into place for the new chair lift as well as for the repositioned lift that formerly ran on Mount Strachan and now sits on Black Mountain's eastern slope. Renamed the Raven Ridge, the chair lift services nine new intermediate and expert runs to the east, the first ones cut in the park in 20 years. "We're just getting in under the wire and highballing to finish," she said. "We've got three weeks to button things up with the light towers and snowmaking. We could be making snow by early December."

Snowmaking is symbolic of several forces at play in Cypress Park over the past six years. The International Olympic Committee requires that snowmaking be available at alpine-ski and snowboard venues to ensure that races occur regardless of the weather conditions in 2010.

In 2001, Swain took over as general manager of Cypress Bowl Recreations Limited, or CBRL, from Wayne Booth, whose tenure was marred by conflict with conservationists. Both began their careers at Cypress as ski instructors in the early 1980s. "Over the years I've done it all, just about every job on offer here," she said with a laugh. "I figured I could make a living out of it." Indeed, Swain is the only woman heading a mountain snow-sport operation in Western Canada.

Along with her new job, Swain inherited an expansion plan that was approved in 1997 after a lengthy public process resulting from the 1995 report by special commissioner Bryan Williams. By far the most contentious recommendation in the master plan from the B.C. Ministry of Environment, Lands and Parks called for a restaurant to be built on Mount Strachan's summit, which would have resulted in the felling of many of the 800- to 1,200-year-old yellow cypress trees from which the park takes its name. The Friends of Cypress Provincial Park Society, or FCPP, an advocacy group formed in 1990, fought the restaurant project at every turn, and was constantly at loggerheads with Booth. In a sudden turn of events, Boyne USA Resorts bought CBRL's 99-year provincial-government lease on 620 hectares of the park from Booth in 2001. When Booth retired, Swain was offered the job.

Almost immediately, FCPP members sensed a thaw in the offing. After a guided tour of the park, Boyne executives indicated they intended to work cooperatively with the society to develop an alternative plan that would instead see a new lodge constructed at the base of lift operations between Strachan and Black mountains. At about the same time, the 2010 Vancouver Bid Committee set the wheels in motion for another set of events that would have an equal impact on developments within CBRL's 20 percent of the park that is officially designated a controlled recreation area.

By dint of the park's paved access road, coupled with its steep alpine terrain, Cypress became the default location on the North Shore to host the freestyle ski, ski cross, and snowboard events at the XXI Olympic Winter Games. When it came to deciding where to cut the new runs and install the halfpipe, Swain recalled: "We looked at the master plan. The back side of Strachan was not the best for a number of reasons, the least of which is it's not spectator-friendly. We asked ourselves 'What could we do instead?'" Attention turned to an area of second-growth forest lower down on Black Mountain that had been logged between 1969 and 1975. "We came down off the mountain," said Swain, "and talked with FCPP and other stakeholders, who were all in agreement."

Recently, FCPP director Katharine Steig and the director of the ski and snowboard school at Cypress Mountain, Kent Rideout, took the Straight on a walking tour of the affected areas. The first feature they pointed out was the snowmaking reservoir, a symbol of the new harmonious relationship in the park. Originally slated to be built in a sensitive wetland zone, the reservoir sits on the site of a former sawmill beside the Lions Express, which Rideout and Steig agreed was a far better choice, from both an ecological and a structural-efficiency point of view.

Farther along Pumphouse Road above the Yew Lake old-growth forest, Steig pointed out where turf, removed from the sedge meadows around the sawmill site before reservoir construction began, had been replanted beside the trail. "The not-so-common common butterwort and three-leaved goldthread are the rarest plants in the park," she said. "VANOC engaged in a lot of self-puffery about how good a job they did to mitigate any damage, when it was really CBRL employees who were turned out of their offices one day this summer to move the plants at no cost to VANOC."

Beneath the apparently smooth surface of the cooperation surrounding the changes in Cypress lies a festering legacy from BC Parks' 1997 master plan. FCPP chair Alex Wallace alluded to this during an interview with the Straight, when he echoed a sentiment expressed by the late mountaineer and conservationist Randy Stoltmann, who until his death in 1994 advocated tirelessly for better treatment of the park by the provincial government. "After the Williams report, BC Parks officials said they wanted Cypress to be a showcase," Wallace asserted. "It's now a showcase of neglect. It's beyond belief how poorly things are being run at BC Parks."

Still, the professional horticult ­urist plainly didn't intend to tar VANOC with the same brush. "VANOC wants to do the right thing without spending any money," Wallace said. "There's nothing morally wrong with that, but there's a tremendous contrast at Cypress. All the money being poured into 2010 isn't a complete waste, as it will come back in taxes over the next 10 to 20 years. But it's insulting that the public is getting nothing in terms of improvements to park trails which are deteriorating beyond belief."

Wallace cited the example of a woman who recently sank to her thighs in a mud hole on the popular Cabin Lake Trail. "It's a black comedy which the seniors, who make up a sizable percentage of trail users, find intimidating," he said. "There's a contrast between the huge dollars being spent on 2010 and the general public, who are funding it and getting nothing."

At this point Wallace trotted out some figures. Of the $11.2 million in the budget for Olympic construction in Cypress Park, $1.4 million is slated for interpretive and trail work. VANOC is supposed to put up $400,000 as seed money for the Howe Sound Crest Trail and the restoration of the old Hollyburn Lodge. "Nothing has come forward from VANOC and BC Parks, because it apparently has to go through a process. The public is irate because the trails are unusable or so steep in places they can't handle them. I'm still getting complaints on a daily basis about restricted access to the old logging road that used to lead to Cabin Lake on Black Mountain, which we gave up in exchange for no old-growth logging."

Wallace admitted the replacement route is like a "goat trail", but believes that in time the public will accept it. "It's a different world now," he said. "Our plan was never to get rid of skiing, it was to constrain Wayne Booth's Disneyland plan to cut old growth. We're not a special-interest group. We represent the general public. If anything, CBRL is special-interest."

Wallace suggested that as a Scot he likes to pursue lost causes. Still, he happily affirmed that the 2010 Winter Games accidentally helped get rid of the mountaintop restaurant. "In the larger picture we've come a long way. I think Randy Stoltmann and John Clarke [who stepped in after Stoltmann's demise to advocate on behalf of Cypress Park until his own death in 2003] would approve."

Links: To review the changes at Cypress Mountain, visit www.cypressmountain.com/ . For further details on Cypress Provincial Park, including the 2010 Final Environmental Assessment Report, visit www.bcparks.ca/ or the Friends of Cypress Provincial Park Society, www.cypresspark.bc.ca/