"If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it."
Reverend Jesse Jackson
She doesn't come across as extreme. She looks way too sane for that. Balanced. Patient. Totally under control. In fact, she looks exactly like what she is: a happy Pemberton mum and local realtor. There's zero sense of danger to her behaviour. Zero sense of ego. Just listen to her voice - so calm and measured and peaceful. It's never about her.
And yet. And yet...
Lisa Korthals has always been a bit of an enigma to me. Maybe it's because there are two narratives to her story. On the one hand she's the afore-mentioned low-key mum with the welcoming smile and good word for everyone. On the other, she's this bad-ass mountain chick who's accomplished more in her four decades on this planet than most of us can dream about.
Consider her "professional" CV for a moment. River guide. Heli-ski guide. Alpinist. Rock-climber. CSIA Level IV ski instructor (one of only a handful of women in this country to reach that level). Powder Eights World Champion (with team mate and long-time friend Lee Anne Patterson). First woman to climb-and-ski Alaska's forbidding University Peak (along with husband Johnny "Foon" Chilton). And the list goes on.
Her commitment to mountain adventures knows no bounds. I mean, this is a gal who revealed to me (while giggling semi self-consciously) that she got pregnant with son Tye while climbing at Nevada's Red Rocks...
Need I go further? Still, I will. This is a woman with an incredibly rare feel for the snow. She doesn't just turn her skis in the white stuff. She dances with it. Makes it hers. And it doesn't matter where you plunk her - steeps, flats, bumps, whatever - she plays with the terrain like an old friend. She makes it look so-o-o-o easy.
Quietly powerful and surprisingly strong - with the kind of poise that only millions of miles on skis can bring - Korthals constantly inspires her skiing charges to leave their fears behind and experience new on-mountain sensations. She's a mentor and a friend. Confidante and cheerleader; shepherd and coach. And she's very, very good at what she does.
So how the heck did she become who she is? What's at the root of this woman's dual story? What kind of an upbringing did she have?
Lisa doesn't answer right away. First comes a smile. "My parents were both athletic people," she explains. "But as far as getting us all skiing, my mother was definitely the instigator. She was a super-keen skier."
The Korthals' favourite ski area when Lisa was a kid was Devil's Glen, a popular private club north of Toronto. "We weren't members of the club though," chuckles Lisa. "We just piggy-backed on friends' guest passes..."
But it wasn't so much the Ontario skiing that entranced Lisa as the ski trips the family would take at Christmas and March breaks. "Toronto, as you know, is not in the heart of ski country," she recounts. And laughs at the idea. "But we were so fortunate. My two brothers and I got to ski all over. Sugarbush in Maine, Stowe in Vermont, Sun Valley in Idaho, the Quebec resorts, Colorado, France... And with a whole gang of other kids too." She pauses. Takes a breath. "As for Whistler, we finally made it there when I was in grade 13. And I immediately fell in love. That trip totally changed my life."
Indeed. Lisa was all set to head to Trent University in Peterborough in the fall. "I was really connected to the paddling world at the time," she explains, "and the director of the summer camp where I worked as a guide was a professor there." But her family's spring trip to Whistler totally changed her thinking. Stay back east for school? Pass up on all this snow and all this fun? No way! Instead she decided to enrol at UBC. "For me it was a kind of epiphany," she says. "I was choosing mountains over rivers..."
Lisa arrived in Vancouver in September of 1987. "It was all pretty overwhelming," She remembers. And sighs. "Frankly, I wasn't all that psyched to go to school. I wanted to go to Whistler. I wanted to ski big mountains. Powder snow. You know..."
But she kept at it. "I didn't like UBC all that much," she admits. "I found it very sterile. Besides - it was really hard to meet people there. Not my kind of place at all."
She lasted two years there. But it was no use - Vancouver and UBC just weren't working for her. "I blew off my final exams that second year and went spring skiing instead." She stops. Shrugs. "But then, I guess that's because I wasn't getting what I was looking for there..."
Besides, it's hard to focus on school when Whistler's siren song is playing so loudly in your ears. "So I stopped fighting it," she says. "And moved to Whistler the next fall."
I always love this point in the story. The life-defining moment. The turn-of-the page instant when a character decides on a course of action that will completely alter her future narrative. For Lisa Korthals, this was it.
Until her Whistler move, our young heroine had pretty much followed the conventional path her Southern Ontario urban roots had forged for her. You know - grow up, go to school, grab a university education along the way, get a job, start a family, settle down...
But something broke when she left UBC. Or should I say flowered? For Lisa fell totally and uncontrollably and irremediably in love with mountain life. And particularly Whistler mountain life.
But then Lisa's timing was pretty good too. After all, Whistler in 1989 was one happening place. It was the beginning of the phat years here - a time in the resort-community's development when it seemed we could do no wrong. Rob Boyd had just bested the world's top downhillers on his backyard run and Intrawest's multi-million gamble on Blackcomb Mountain was just beginning to pay dividends. As for the twenty-something set, they were all over it. Resident bad-boy filmmaker Greg Stump was singing Whistler's praises around the world while local homeboys Trevor Petersen and Eric Pehota were redefining "extreme" by notching first descents throughout the Coast Range. As for snowboarding, it was about to explode like a super nova, with Whistler as its ground zero.
Oh yeah, and the Canadian dollar was beginning to look like a northern version of the peso to our American friends. What was there not to like?
Fun as it was in those days, Whistler was still no cakewalk when it came to finding a job. But Lisa had an ace up her sleeve. "I'd already gotten my Level 2 instructor's certification," she explains. "So I figured I'd try to get a teaching job with the Whistler Mountain School."
Doug Perry (of World Ski And Snowboard Festival fame) was running the ski school back then out of one of the old trailers at Creekside. Ambitious and innovative, Perry was looking for competent young skiers to fill his modest complement of pros. Lisa seemed to be just the kind of person he was looking for.
"I got the job," she says - seemingly still surprised 22 years later. "And immediately moved into employee housing - with five other roommates. It was crazy..."
And she loved every minute of it. "The ski school in those days was pretty small," she remembers. "I think there were, like, 30 or 40 full-time instructors in the adult program..."
Most of them, she adds, still live in Sea-to-Sky. And many of those early acquaintances are still close friends. "Working for the ski school was an awesome experience. And it had a lot to do with the staff. You know, people like Allison Williams, Rick Perolli, Lincoln Phillips, Leslie Gleyshier, Lee Anne Patterson, Bob Brett..."
She sighs. Another happy grin dances across her features. "That was a big reason why I set my roots down in Whistler - for sure. It wasn't just the mountains. It wasn't just the snow. The people I met that year - the can-do culture here - it all confirmed for me that I'd made the right choice in coming to this place."
Next Week: Lisa leads a group of teenagers on an Arctic paddling adventure, goes back to school, falls in love with heli-skiing and guiding, meets and marries gonzo mountain explorer Johnny Foon and "settles" down in Pemberton as a heli-ski guide and realtor.
