Fear not when at Marmot

A manual evacuation of 75 stranded skiers on a gondola at the Lake Louise ski hill made international news broadcasts late last month, but if a similar incident occurs, it won’t happen at Marmot Basin.

In the case of mechanical failure, the Jasper area ski resort could manually evacuate a full chairlift in less than an hour, according to Brian Rode, vice-president in charge of marketing for Marmot Basin.

“With our lifts, it’s a bit less complex,” said Rode.

Most often, lifts stop due to a loss of power, and each one at Marmot is equipped with an auxiliary generator that gets skiers moving within ten or fifteen minutes.

“If for whatever reason you can’t make the rope go, we do have a manual evacuation plan,” said Rode. The evacuation at Lake Louise took more than five hours due to the fact that ski patrollers had to enter gondola cars in order to secure skiers before belaying them to the ground.

A similar system of evacuation would swing into action at Marmot in the case of a lift stoppage, Rode said, but because open chair lifts are easier to access, Rode estimates that it would take forty to forty-five minutes, “at the outside.”

Evacuation T-bars are placed on lift towers at regular intervals and would be lowered down to skiers on the chair. After being attached to the device with a harness, the skier is simply belayed to the ground by another group of patrollers.

“It’s a very smooth, easy to understand system,” Rode said.

Such measures are practiced every year by ski patrollers, using Marmot staff as placeholders for paying clients, but an actual shutdown during the ski season hasn’t happened in Rode’s memory.

“In my 28 years that I’ve been out here we may have done it once, but I can’t recall an example,” he said. “We haven’t had to do a manual evacuation in many years.”

Onward Christian soldier

John Wierenga knows the odds are stacked against him in the 2005-2006 federal election campaign, but as a man of faith, he believes that anything is possible.

“We never see the prospect of being elected as an impossibility,” he told the Fitzhugh from his home in Neerlandia, on the northeastern edge of the Yellowhead constituency.

Wierenga is running for the Christian Heritage Party, a group whose 2004 candidate earned only 721 votes.

Wierenga’s task is not made any easier by the fact that the incumbent MP, Rob Merrifield, has the reputation and voting record of a staunch social conservative.

“He is a popular man,” Wierenga said of Merrifield, who voted against legalizing same-sex marriage, one of the key points in the CHP campaign.

“Obviously, protecting marriage and strengthening the traditional family is a huge issue for us,” he said.

Wierenga hasn’t yet heard concerns over the separation of church and state on the campaign trail, but said that his party is simply interested in returning Canada to its Christian roots.

“That’s what this country was founded on,” he said. “It’s no secret for us that we are Christian, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

The Christian Heritage Party is concerned with more than so-called social conservative issues, he added.

“We want to talk about honesty and accountability in government,” he said. “I think all Canadians agree that there are some problems here.”