For many kids who grew up skiing on Whistler or Blackcomb Mountains in the 1980s and ’90s, attending ski school could be an important life experience that formed unforgettable childhood memories. Whether you attended Kids Kamp or Ski Scamps depended on which mountain you (or really, your parents) skied, and though it wasn’t something most students noticed, the schools were part of the competition between the two ski hills.
Ski Scamps was introduced on Whistler Mountain for the winter of 1983-84 in response to Blackcomb’s Kids Kamp, a ski school designed specifically for children. According to Mike Hurst, who began working for Whistler Mountain as a marketing consultant by 1982, Blackcomb was “a very competitive entity” from its early operations. This meant if Blackcomb had a program targeting families, Whistler had to have one, too. Whistler was able to find space and reorient some existing instructors with the help of ski school director Bob Dufour while Hurst secured sponsorship for the program from 7-Eleven.
Though Whistler already had a ski school and offered lessons, Ski Scamps was a bit different. Instead of a private or small group lesson, it offered a full-day program throughout the season with different levels based on ability and special events, and included lunch. It was designed for children aged three to 12, and season-pass holders could even buy a $190 Scampers Pass that, along with their lift pass, offered unlimited access to Ski Scamps programs and lessons. Parents could drop their young skiers off in the morning and pick them up again at the end of the day after a full day on the hill.
One of those young skiers was Mercedes Nicoll, who began attending Ski Scamps in 1986 at the age of three. Though her family lived in Toronto at the time, her parents had owned a place in Whistler since the 1970s and would always come back for Christmas holidays and spring break. Whenever they came back, Nicoll would go skiing in Ski Scamps. According to an oral history interview in 2024, Nicoll loved Ski Scamps, though apparently her parents and babysitters might remember it a little differently. As hard as it might have been to get her there in the morning, Nicoll recalled coming home with a huge smile on her face.
Ski Scamps had different difficulty levels through which skiers would progress, but because her family did not stay for the entire season, Nicoll remembered she was “a red star forever—there was no getting rid of that bib.” She fondly recalled the structure at the learning area where they would eat lunch, often grilled cheese or hot dogs. According to her, “I remember it just smelling of sweaty gloves, but we were all in it together and it was amazing.”
One of Nicoll’s memories from her Ski Scamps days happened (as many do) on Pony Trail one Christmas Eve. She couldn’t remember exactly how it happened, but she knocked out one of her front teeth with her pole, leaving blood everywhere on the run. Luckily for her, her next door neighbour in Whistler was a dentist who told her family they had to go to the dentist in Squamish as she had knocked it back to the nerve and could feel it every time she breathed. As Nicoll put it, “There’s little bits of the mountain where I have childhood core memories from, good or bad.”
This incident and her time spent as a red star didn’t hold Nicoll back on the mountain. After her family moved to Whistler permanently in 1995, she began snowboarding with some of her friends. She started entering local competitions and doing well, leading to a long career as a professional snowboarder and a four-time Olympian competing in the half-pipe.
After Whistler and Blackcomb Mountains merged under Intrawest in 1997, Kids Kamp and Ski Scamps came together to form Whistler Kids. Nicoll still sees some of her Ski Scamps instructors out on the mountain, and when she sees classes of kids skiing or snowboarding, can’t help thinking, “Oh, they’re living their best lives, they don’t even know it yet.”
