1953, the Pok-a-dot Café, Audrey Bonnett stepped off a bus bound for Trail, BC. She sipped her coffee and stared out the window onto Columbia Avenue and thought Rossland, B.C. was the most primitive place on earth. This was, of course before she boarded the bus and headed to Trail. “I thought to myself, I’m going into hell. The hillsides were all black and the factory dominated the skyline. I couldn’t understand why anybody would want to live here.” During that first visit to Trail, she never imagined she would ever return. A few years later, Audrey met Richie in Vancouver. She was bookkeeping for different companies and Richie worked in construction. They married in 1958. What Richie didn’t tell Audrey at the time, “Or maybe I didn’t make the connection,” was that Richie’s hometown was Rossland, B.C.

   Richie’s memories of growing up in Rossland were considerably different from Audrey’s first impressions. “It was a great place to grow up. There were four kinds of skiing in those days and we skied all of them. We skied slalom, downhill, ski jump, and cross-country.” People hiked out in knee-deep snow along what is now the Centennial Trail. They yo-yoed up and down the backside of Monte Christo, almost directly across from where the Block Motel is located. “We skied all those fields out there. You can still see the old stove we had in the Rossland Ski Club’s cabin sitting in the field across from the Block Motel.” Some teenagers from Warfield and Trail loaded themselves onto George Merry’s flatbed truck and drove up to the old mining school, hiked up the backside of Monte Christo, and skied down the other side across Finney’s fields to ski with the Rossland kids. “There were a couple of different ski jumps, a slalom course on the main hill, and cross-country everywhere.” There was no 3B loop back then. The only highway connecting them to Christina Lake was the old Cascade. “On Friday nights after school, Al Fisher and my older brother, Harry would lead a group of us up to the old cabin on Indian Flats. We’d spend the whole weekend skiing on Granite, Grey and Kirkup.”

   Richie and Audrey married and lived in places as far away as Indiana before they came back to settle in Rossland. They bought their property in the early ‘60’s (five hundred acres around what is now the trailhead of BlackJack) but weren’t able to build their log home until 1968. During that time, Richie drove snowcat and worked maintenance for the Red Mountain Ski Club and Audrey worked in the office. “The kids had no choice but to hang out at the ski hill all weekend because that’s where Richie and I were working.” Audrey rolls her eyes when she remembers how much money the kids would spend in the cafeteria. “We eventually limited it to one hot chocolate per day of skiing.” The family experience we have at Black Jack now is how she remembers the family experience was at Red Mountain.

   But they were restless in Rossland, so they stirred things up a bit and bought 150 acres of land in Grandforks to run a cattle ranch. After ten years in Grandforks, the killer interest rates of the early ‘80’s chased Audrey and Richie back to their property on the outskirts of Rossland.

   Around this same time, Roger Crisfield, an orthopaedic surgeon, and a handful of cross country enthusiasts got the idea to buy a snowmobile and set tracks up the old Gibbard’s road. “Jim and Dianne deLong [National Team skier, Rhonda Delong’s parents], Helen Bouchier, Dave Smith, Carmel and Brian O’Flanigan, and Guy Woods, they were all involved. Roger tried dragging a spring mattress behind the skidoo and then Jim Douglas made our first track setter for the skidoo.” The club charged for day passes by providing a drop box at the trailhead. A few polite, but emphatic signs were posted along the trails encouraging people to be honourable and pay up for the luxury of having set trails. After a shift in the operating room, Roger would drag that bar behind the old snowmobile all the way up Gibbard’s. Roger eventually commissioned Mike Pistak to weld a heavy bar with two slabs of bent metal the width of an old pair of skis. “They eventually dragged that big bar behind the Thiocol.”

   Red Mountain offered to sell the Thiocol to the BlackJack club and Roger Crisfield and Rob Grey, another orthopaedic surgeon [National Team skier, George Grey’s father], set tracks in-between knee operations. Al Dixon was driving cat by the time Richie took over setting track in 1987. Richie offered up his field for a stadium during races, or training for beginner skiers. He was out there most race mornings before 5:00 a.m. setting track. “If it was zero degrees, I knew I had to get out there early. Any later, the snow would get too sticky.”

   When I first arrived in 1987, I wrote poems about Richie setting tracks, the way he’d stop and wave me over to show me cougar tracks in the snow, the tail drag, and the wildcat’s general trajectory into the woods. I loved the routine of it, and so did he. Sometimes we’d get out for a ski together. It’d happen spontaneously, as it does for most people on the trails – we’d link up for a lap around Hemlock or a lollygag up Aquaduct. But always, the experience with Richie was, and still is, generous.

   “Skating changed things,” he says now, recently retired from track setting for the club. “The tracks have to be perfect now. There’s no tolerance for a poor track anymore. Classic skiers can always get by if the machine is down for a couple of days, but if a person only skate skis, they find it frustrating.” Skating became fashionable in the mid ‘80s but didn’t really reach Rossland until the early ‘90’s. Audrey saw the sport change from a sociable stroll with friends to a lycra, lightweight, “whizzing by” kind of sport. “Yes, we’re better skiers now,” says Richie. “Our equipment is so much more sophisticated. It’s a different culture.” Neither Richie nor Audrey regrets the way that cross-country skiing has evolved. They both skate and classic, “depending on whether Richie is around to wax my classics or not,” but they are still fond of the social aspect of classic skiing.

   Richie had his right knee joint replaced this fall but as he rubs his knee and brags that he can get it passed 90 degrees already, he thinks he’ll be out there on the tracks again this season, “sharing the history of this place with the skiers.”

   “You can’t stay lonely and injured here,” Audrey says ‘here’, meaning the same community she passed through 40 years earlier and couldn’t imagine what on earth she would do in a place like this. “Now, of course, I go down and see the trees in bloom and I love walking along the river in Gyro Park. It’s the best park I’ve ever been too. It’s pretty now.”

   Richie agrees with Audrey about being injured. It’s not for him. “No, I’ve just got to get out there and make people feel welcome,” says Richie.

   The club has changed from the early days of the trailer with the potbelly stove, and wondering whether Rob Grey was going to take out another tree with the Thiocol or not, but what has been deadly consistent over the years is that there is a generosity of spirit on the trails and it is my belief that Richie and Audrey have set the tone for this.

   After subdividing their property as part of their retirement plan, Richie and Audrey have provided an easement ensuring the club will have access to the trails across their land. Linking the Black Jack Ski Trail system to the Centennial Trail and Red Mountain will indeed be an asset for this community of skiers. At the release time of this article, Richie can now bend his knee beyond 120 degrees.