There’s something pretty cool about a woman who celebrates her 50 th birthday by inviting all her friends to participate in a Loonie mountain bike race before launching her party proceedings. But then, you wouldn’t expect anything different from Cathy Jewett…
A Whistler resident for over three decades, the Toronto-born energy bomb has made a career of challenging the odds. Funny, competitive, enthusiastic, generous, outspoken — and tougher, pound for pound, than anybody I know — Jewett is a jewel in the rough. Always ready for action. Always ready for fun. Indeed, you only have to hear her cascading laughter once to truly understand how much this woman is in love with life.
Of course she’s not alone. At Whistler, women of all ages are re-defining the limits of the possible. From the young houndettes giving their male brethren conniptions on the steeps, to the hard-charging matrons still cutting it up like youngsters, the females in this valley are rarely defined as “shrinking violets”. Still, Jewett stands out.
But then that’s a big part of her charm. First as a liftee on Whistler, and then as one of the first female pro patrollers to be hired during the 1980 expansion drive, Jewett’s distinctive style and unbound passion for mountain life has endeared her to just about everyone who has ever worked and played with her.
“I can’t help thinking of my first year here during the 1976-77 winter,” she says. “I’d been hired to work at the top of the T-bar. But because it was such a dismal snow year it took a while for the T-bar to open. So I really didn’t have a job. But I was desperate. To get work, I showed up every day, even though I wasn’t called in, until they finally gave up and gave me a shovel.”
She laughs. “My first work memory is of getting sent to the Green Chair area to shovel snow onto the runs. Can you imagine how I felt skiing through snow with grass sticking out and not having a clue where I was going?”
But Jewett had a dream. She was going to make it at Whistler. And nothing — not rain, nor bad snow, nor lack of work — was going to stop her.
“I ended up working on just about every lift of the day,” she explains. “I was thinking this year about how the old Whistler gondola worked. It was pretty much manual labour: we’d push the cars around the bull wheel and when a light went off we’d send them up the mountain.”
Her stories of mountain misadventures too are legion.
How about the time she skied up to the T-bar lift shack and couldn’t stop. Her tips hit the doorsill and she double heel-released and hit the door — flying through it and landing in a heap on the floor. “My supervisor, Peter Dyson, looked down at me and said: ‘Mornin’ Cathy. Glad you could drop in.’” Another burst of laughter. “And that was that.”
Thus the Cathy Jewett legend was born. And while her adventures were not confined to her work hours — “I could tell you stories that would make your toes curl,” she says with a knowing grin — her toughness, her good humour, and her generosity of spirit quickly established her as an enduring Whistler character. And one who always held her mountain colleagues in high esteem. “We were really lucky in the early years,” she says. “We had some pretty good leaders — people like Doug Walsh who was Lifts Ops Manager when I started. He knew we had a job to do, but he also knew how to have fun and not take himself too seriously.”
Like many long-time W-B employees, Jewett’s stories of the good ol’ days celebrate a spirit of on-the-edge teamwork that border sometimes on the downright absurd. “I was doing a lift evacuation on the Black Chair once,” she remembers. “Roger McCarthy (former head of the Whistler patrol) was my partner. I was belaying and Roger was holding me down as the weight came onto the rope. The biggest guest was about to leave the chair and put all his weight on the rope. Suddenly Roger got a radio call. The guest went down and I went up. Roger caught me by my ankles and thanked me for not letting go!”
It was that tenacity — that refusal to let go when things got tough — that kept her progressing through the years. Whether it was becoming the first female patroller to work an exchange program in macho Val D’Isere, or being named Training Coordinator for the Whistler patrol, or producing a groundbreaking mountain safety video for the Canada West Ski Area Association — or even picking up the phone and asking famed UN envoy Stephen Lewis to come out west and speak to Whistlerites (and succeeding!) — Jewett has always managed to put her personal stamp on every project she’s been involved with.
“I’ve got to give my parents a lot of credit for that,” she tells me. “They’re just so great. I’m really lucky that way.” Another peal of happy laughter. “When I was growing up my friends used to LIKE to come to my house because they could talk to my parents. And that’s because they could relate to kids…”
And they gave a lot back to the community too. “My dad was a scout leader and a Big Brother.” She pauses for a moment. “You know, I haven’t thought about it for a while, but every Sunday dinner he’d have his Little Brother over to the house. It wasn’t done as a statement or anything. It was just the way our life was.”
Not surprising then that Cathy has never hesitated to step in and volunteer her time whenever her own community needs help. Her latest project? “I applied to VANOC recently for the job of Chief of Patrol for the women’s alpine events during this year’s World Cups.” She smiles. “And against all odds, I got it!”
This is not a small part. A test event for the same role during the 2010 Games — “It’s kind of like being on probation,” she explains — it will be Cathy’s job to oversee all things emergency-related during training and racing during the two-week extravaganza. “It’s an interesting challenge,” she admits. “I’ve learned so much already. I really feel like I’m adding to my palette of professional skills.”
But here’s the kicker. Even though she’s been a full-time pro-patroller at Whistler-Blackcomb all these years, this very important safety position, she makes a point of telling me, is strictly a volunteer post. “This isn’t a paying job,” she says. “I’m doing this strictly on my own time.”
Which strikes me as kind of strange. After all, Intrawest negotiated an incredibly advantageous settlement from VANOC to offset W-B’s drop in traffic during the Games. Yet they won’t pay a 30-year staff member a week’s salary for doing what she’s been trained to do on their own mountain? Seems like bad optics at the very least…
But it doesn’t seem to bother Cathy one bit. “People don’t realize how ski races get put on — even big races,” she says. “It’s all about people power. Everyone’s a volunteer.”
She laughs. “You know, I never thought I’d be a ski racing parent. But after watching how much my kids have gotten from being involved with the ski club, I totally see the value of the program now. It’s so well run! And so much of it has to do with parent volunteers. It never ceases to amaze me just how much work gets done at that club…”
Her next challenge? “We now have to go out into the community and find more people to get involved in the Games,” she says. “We need volunteer patrollers. We need more homestay hosts.” A pause. “You know, when it comes to volunteerism — and I hear the same thing from other communities — Whistler has a core group of ‘usual suspects’ who can usually be counted on to step up and get involved. But they’re getting older — and some are just plain worn-out. We need a bigger pool of individuals to choose from.”
As far as the Olympics go, she argues, you can sit back and let it all happen or you can actually get involved and see what that involvement brings you. “If you’re volunteering because you’re looking to ‘get’ something from the Olympics, forget it. The benefits you’ll get from the Games will probably be nothing like you expected.” She smiles. “The benefits may not be tangible. They may not even be evident at first. But they’ll be there. And you know what? You’ll never know if you don’t get involved…”
As she enters her sixth decade — “Oh my gawd!” she says. “That sounds so old.” — Cathy isn’t afraid to reveal a slightly more introspective aspect of her personality. “When you get to ‘our age’ you tend to pause and reflect more — about the goals you accomplished and the dreams you didn’t achieve. For me, I would have wanted to make a transition from using my muscles at work to using my head more. But that didn’t happen…”
Any regrets? Not really, she says. Yet she can’t help but wax nostalgic for her early Whistler years from time-to-time. “Work on the mountain was a lot different back then,” she says. “We lived the dream. We were like a family too. We did everything together. The Volly Cabin at Creekside was our locker room, crash pad, decompression zone and guesthouse. It was a very magical way of life…”
Note: For those who were inspired by Cathy's story to get involved, go to www.whistleralpinevolunteers.com for more information.
