Words: Gloria Goñi-McAteer 2017-10-31 17:35:13
I meet Raine Brooksbank at Mount Currie Coffee Co., a small café in her hometown of Pemberton, BC. The hands holding her mug are strong, and the smile on her weathered face speaks to a life of both good times and hard work. Her hair betrays her age, but she looks as if she’s just come from the slopes of Whistler Blackcomb.
That’s because she did, and has for most of her life. Brooksbank has driven one of the resort’s snowcats for 40 years, and she’s Canada’s first female snowcat driver. Four decades since she laid her inaugural stretch of corduroy, she still loves the job as much as ever.
Brooksbank arrived in Whistler in 1976, when the chairs were still doubles and the ride up took longer than the ski down. It was perfect for the 19-year-old flatlander from Ontario, who moved west in search of snowy mountains. Upon arrival, she applied to Whistler for a job, but there was one problem: She didn’t know how to ski. “I applied to be a liftie,” Brooksbank says, “and I kind of lied when they asked me if I could.”
She quickly learned, becoming confident enough to earn her a spot at the top of the upper lift (at the time, the late “Big Red Chair”). But as she loaded passengers, her gazed drifted to the snowcats moving across the slopes. “I kept thinking, ‘That looks like way more fun,’” she says.
Brooksbank began asking Jamie Catersfield, the manager of the grooming department, to let her try her hand driving the machine. “One day, Jamie asked me how I planned to get down the hill from work, and I said I would ski,” she says. “‘Oh, that’s too bad,’ he told me. ‘I was going to let you drive the snowcat.’”
At the time, the only qualification for operating a cat was being able to drive a tractor, something Brooksbank had learned while working summers on a farm in Alberta. So when Catersfield asked about her abilities, this time Brooksbank didn’t have to lie.
Brooksbank laughs as she remembers her first night on the job, when the mechanics brought the cat to mid-station. She found the windows decorated with curtains made from shop rags and flagging tape, and a little mirror was set up for a make-shift vanity station. “You learn to ignore the teasing,” Brooksbank says. “They’re the ones with the problem, and if you make it your problem, that’s when you can’t cope. You just have to carry on and do your job.”
In general, Brooksbank found a lot of support in the small community. No woman had done the job before, and people were excited about her. Unbeknownst to Brooksbank, her new position had implications on the ski patrol as well, who had long said they wouldn’t hire a woman until the snowcat drivers did. That year, ski patrol brought on Cathy Juit and Jen Tindel, who—like Brooksbank—still work at Whistler today. Now the mountain employs more than 50 women as snowcat drivers.
“My favorite part about the job is artistic expression,” she says. “You arrive at the run and it’s just messy moguls, but when you’re done you leave this beautiful corduroy, perfect for skiing.”
Brooksbank has been around for six different owners, and like all employees who have worked at Whistler for 30 years or more, she has a lifetime pass to the mountain (the resort’s official policy). She spends her summers doing road and river maintenance with Whistler’s road department, and in the few weeks before the season she camps and fishes in the mountains around Pemberton. She’s starting to look toward retirement, but in the meantime she’s more than content.
“I work from 3 a.m. to 1 a.m., four days a week,” she says. “Then you wake up at 9 a.m. and still have your whole day. You aren’t rushed going to work; you get up and have a cup of tea going up the gondola. It is really a fabulous job. It’s the life.”
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