A community, says mountain writer, historian and Canadian climbing legend Chic Scott, is a collection of memories.
“And those memories are all people,” Scott added.
In recognition of people who have contributed to making Banff and the Bow Valley the unique community it is, Scott will host the latest in his Fireside Chat series of live interviews at the Whyte Museum on Sunday (Oct. 22).
The first of two Fireside Chats he has planned for this fall, Scott will sit with longtime Banff local Eddie Hunter, who moved to Banff with his family in 1934 when he was just eight years old.
“He was there for the pioneer days of skiing, and he was an active skier during the late 1930s and the 1940s,” Scott said. “These were the real pioneer days of skiing in the Rockies. He really saw the old days.”
Remarkably, Hunter, now 91, is still skiing, and rollerblading too. But while skiing has been a lifelong passion for Hunter, he has stories to share about other activities as well, Scott said. For one, Scott hopes to entice him to tell the one about the time he played street hockey in Banff for hours one snowy winter day, never having to worry about or stop for traffic, because there was none.
In his profession as cinematographer, Hunter traveled the world. He’s known and respected for his writing, including a long-running column in the Banff Crag & Canyon, and for his book celebrating the Banff ski hill, The Spirit of Norquay, a collection of anecdotes about many of the skiers who helped shape Norquay’s story over the decades. Hunter was born in 1926, the same year Mount Norquay was established as a ski hill.
Hunter was also featured in the thoughtful 2014 film by Sherpas Cinema, Sculpted in Time: The Wise Man, which delighted audiences at the Banff Mountain Film Festival.
Audience members at the Fireside Chat will be in for a special treat though, because as part of Hunter’s agreement with Scott to participate in the interview, Hunter will turn to his journalistic background to spend some time interviewing Scott about his life and stories and memories.
“It’s going to be a back and forth, Eddie insisted on it,” Scott said. “It’s the only way I could get him to agree to do it.”
This is the seventh of Scott’s highly popular Fireside Chats, which previously featured Rob Crosby, Dorothy Carleton, Fran Drummond, Don Mickle, Bridget Jones and Ralphine Locke. While all those took place at the historic Banff home Abegweit, this year’s events will be at the Whyte Museum, which offers a larger space.
“They were all very successful,” Scott said. “We had an overflow crowd at all of them, but at most Abegweit could hold 60 people and we always had about 100.”
The Whyte Museum’s Gateway Hall, setting of the Whyte’s permanent Gateway to the Rockies exhibition, will offer a perfect setting, Scott said, for his chat with Hunter, and in November with Leo Grillmair.
“A lot of people haven’t heard the standard old stories,” Scott said. “Leo can tell them like they’re brand new.”
It’s important to tell and retell the old stories, he added, to ensure a deep sense of community and identity.
“Communities are like people,” Scott said. “They need to have a memory of who they were. It’s their identity. If a community doesn’t preserve its memories, it doesn’t have an identity. If you’re just looking at what’s happening today, that’s pretty thin. This is one way of doing it.”
Scott’s Fireside Chat, Eddie Hunter: Ski Days in Banff, takes place at the Whyte Museum in Banff, starting at 3:30 p.m. Admission is $5 or free for museum members.
