There are those pivotal moments, impossible to recognize as we live through them, that inexorably chart the path the rest of our lives will take.
For Arthur De Jong, that moment came when he was still a teenager, working as a ski patroller for Blackcomb Mountain in 1980. Schmoozing his way into the job as a mature 19-year-old (Blackcomb had a strict policy against hiring teens, so De Jong fudged his age—“Serves me right for hiring a ****ing teenager,” Blackcomb’s first patrol director Ken Newington liked to remind him), De Jong had to choose between a number of promising careers. He was working on a business degree from Simon Fraser; enrolled in a diploma program in HR management at BCIT; was training as a paramedic and served (and still does) as a crisis line support worker. Oh, and did I mention his father owned a dairy farm he hoped his son would take over?
As it turned out, the choice wasn’t all that difficult for a young De Jong.
“It was easy for me to choose between running my dad’s manure spreader and getting into a helicopter filled with bombs,” he said with a laugh.
Thus began a decades-long career in the ski industry that saw De Jong go from a wide-eyed, mop-headed patroller (yes, he once had hair) to addressing the U.N. and World Bank on climate resiliency. It was a remarkable path for one of Whistler’s most prominent environmental voices, who announced his retirement from Whistler Blackcomb last month after 42 years.
“I was just very privileged to work under leaders that empowered me. More than anything, they knew I was passionate about it so they allowed me the freedom to drive a number of causes with respect to the environment,” De Jong said.
When he was hired, De Jong was thrust headlong into a heated rivalry between what was then two separate ski companies in Whistler and Blackcomb mountains. Without the terrain or the infrastructure to rival Whistler, Blackcomb president Hugh Smythe recognized they had to find other ways to compete.
“It was Blackcomb as the little upstart against the established Whistler Mountain, and the only way we could win was through a service war,” De Jong said. “It eventually got us from a bankrupt backwater to the best in the world. That’s it. But how did that happen? It was through great leaders.”
This is something you hear a lot from the ever-humble De Jong. Throughout our interview, he rhymes off a list of mentors and colleagues he credits with shaping who he is today—Doug Forseth, Dave Brownlie, Rob McSkimming, Bob Dufour and Smythe, to name just a few.
It was another Whistler visionary who would further cement De Jong’s career path: avalanche forecaster and patroller Peter “Xhiggy” Xhignesse, who tapped the 20-something as Blackcomb’s next patrol director as he was battling a devastating cancer.
“Several days before he died, his wife calls me. ‘Come quick, Peter needs to talk to you.’ I’m thinking I’m coming over to say goodbye,” De Jong recalled. “The man probably lost about 30 per cent of his body weight, and he’s leaning against a wall in his living room, just crouched, and he gives me a two-hour-plus lecture on how I’m going to become the patrol director and become the guy running mountain operations. He put so much confidence in me and saw something in me that I certainly didn’t see at the time.”
It was through that role that De Jong honed his love for training new patrollers, carrying on the legacy of the mentors before him.
“He did all the ski patrol training and really showed an interest and a passion for passing on his knowledge to the new people coming on,” said Smythe. “As he picked up more leadership skills and those successes, he really enjoyed that and I think that supported the direction he moved in over the years.”
It wasn’t long after that Smythe offered his star employee the newly created position of mountain planning and environmental resource manager, a role tailor-made for the inquisitive and innovative De Jong.
“Hugh Smythe is a visionary. Not only did he create one of the first mountain manager jobs in the North American ski industry … but it was because of him that we had a position on-mountain that was specifically focused on environment and planning,” he noted. “So we dug deep on the environment and dug deep with our community.”
Fast-forward to 1993 and De Jong, now in his early 30s, is working with a glaciologist studying Horstman Glacier, “who really made climate change clear, tangible and real to me,” he said. “I went back to Hugh and said, ‘We have a problem here. We need to get focused on this stuff.’”
Long before climate change dominated headlines around the world, De Jong had the prescience to understand its potential implications for the ski industry and global tourism, and it was this mindset that would inform much of his work to come.
It’s difficult to overstate De Jong’s impact on WB from both an environmental and planning perspective. The Symphony Zone on Whistler is a prime example—and codified on De Jong’s business card, which reads, in part: “Create experiences inside ecosystems—don’t change them.”
“His work on Symphony was significant,” Smythe said. “Rather than coming in with the big machines, which has to be done in some cases, Arthur wanted it done with small or no machinery. If you walk through there, you will see very limited disturbance.”
De Jong was also instrumental in WB’s push to achieve a net-zero operating footprint, a strategy that was adopted across all of Vail Resorts’ ski properties after the Colorado-based company took over WB in 2016.
“That’s the biggest compliment we could get,” he said.
Since 2000, WB has reduced its waste by 70 per cent, and the company has, to date, carried out retrofits that save more than 575,000 kWh of electricity per year, equivalent to about 15 per cent of WB’s on-mountain consumption. In 2010, production began on a micro-hydro renewable energy plant located underneath the Peak 2 Peak Gondola that returns the equivalent of WB’s annual energy demands to the grid.
De Jong is the first to acknowledge the seeming irony of his role over the years: a voice for the environment in a town that relies on jet-setting visitors and mountain-scarring ski infrastructure. But herein lies one of De Jong’s greatest assets: his innate ability to impress the urgency of climate change without veering into fatalism. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more eloquent and impassioned advocate, a role he sees Whistler playing on the international stage.
“Whistler becoming sustainable is like taking a teaspoon to the Titanic. So what?” he said. “But if we can influence the ski industry and tourism at large—which makes up 10 per cent of the global economy, roughly—then we’re really making a difference.”
As for what’s next for the inexhaustible De Jong? He plans to carry on with his environmental design firm, and, despite an admitted aversion to politics, he will continue to influence the community through his role on council—at least until this fall’s election.
“I really have enjoyed my work on council, mostly because of the councillors and staff. I don’t like politics. I don’t,” he said. “So we’ll see what happens.”
After more than four decades working long hours on-mountain, in the short term, De Jong is just happy “to get home before daylight.” But after some much needed R&R, you can be sure he will be back to what he does best.
“I can retire. I’m OK that way. But with the environment and where I can add value, I want to help out. I want to roll up my sleeves.”
WB held a retirement party late last month for both De Jong and long-time building and electrical manager Laird Brown, who did not return a request for comment.
