The Lucky Life of Syd Feuz a Golden Mountain Tale the Lucky Life of Syd Feuz
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A Golden Mountain Tale The Lucky Life of Syd Feuz A Golden Mountain Tale The Lucky Life of Syd Feuz Syd Feuz lived his life as a man born of the mountains. Growing up with seven siblings, he walked miles to school, in sunshine or deep snow. The son of Swiss-born mountain guide, Walter Feuz, Syd scrambled up ridges to stand on summits with his father and uncles, gaining the skills that would allow him to begin working as a ski guide by the age of sixteen. He served his country in the navy during World War II, and ran a bulk fuel business for two decades that was essential to the economy and livelihood of the Columbia Valley through the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s. Then in his fifties, Syd began a twenty-eight-year career guiding skiers for Purcell Heli-Skiing, sharing the precious wilderness of his backyard Purcell and Rocky mountains. As a second generation guide, Syd embodied the values of taking on a job and not just doing it well, but doing it right. Truck driver, sailor, hotel proprietor, gas jockey, boat driver, horseman, trail builder and ski guide, Syd embraced every job that came his way with enthusiasm, gratitude and humility. Syd Feuz is not just the world’s first Canadian-Swiss guide, he’s a true gentleman of the mountains. For further information regarding the Summit Series of mountaineering biographies, please contact the National Office of the Alpine Club of Canada. www.alpineclubofcanada.ca Sixteenth in the SUMMIT SERIES Biographies of people who have made a difference in Canadian mountaineering by Lynn Martel A Golden Mountain Tale The Lucky Life of Syd Feuz by Lynn Martel CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATIONS DATA Martel, Lynn A Golden Mountain Tale: The Lucky Life of Syd Feuz Design by Suzan Chamney, Glacier Lily Productions. ISBN: 978-0-920330-51-7 © 2013, The Alpine Club of Canada All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be copied or reproduced without the permission of the author or the subject. The Alpine Club of Canada P.O. Box 8040 Canmore, Alberta T1W 2T8 403.678.3200 Acknowledgements I owe many thanks to Karen Flewin, for supplying so many photos for us to choose from. Thanks also to Rudi Gertsch whose own memory was invaluable in sparking Syd to retell old favourite stories Rudi had heard many times over the course of their enduring friendship, without which I would have made precious little progress creating this booklet. A big thanks to Syd’s daughter, Karen Smedley, for her assistance identifying faces in photographs and for sharing some of her own special memories of her father. And thanks also to Chic Scott for his keen eye and historical knowledge, and to Ruthie Oltmann for her keen proof reading talents. Countless thanks also go to the Alpine Club of Canada’s Mountain Culture Committee, and to Rudi Gertsch and Lloyd Gallagher for their invaluable support of this publication. All photos © Feuz family collection unless otherwise noted. Front cover: Syd Feuz, left, shows his remarkable strength and unwavering enthusiasm for the mountains climbing Pigeon Spire in B.C.’s Bugaboos in his early eighties with his long-time friend and fellow ACMG guide, Rudi Gertsch. Photo by Marc Piché. Back cover: Syd and Baeda celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary at Mistaya Lodge, August 16, 1994. Title page: A sixteen-year-old Syd displays his impeccable skill and style skiing in the Lake Louise area. 2 A Golden Mountain Tale Introduction iming, they say, is everything. T Had the stars aligned for me to begin writing this booklet a year or two earlier than I did, Syd Feuz would have been much better able to tell his stories with sharper details and a clearer timeline. Alas, human memories are a lot like the rocks lining a creekbed; over time they become beautifully shaped and polished, but also worn, eroded by the ravages of time and the elements. That said, I was extremely fortunate to begin recording some of Syd’s stories in the summer of 2011, and not a mere month or two later. The timing of his Syd’s life carried him on an incredible journey. Born in 1922, he lived to experience western Canada’s railroad era, the Great Depression, World War II, the advent of helicopter skiing and digital photography. In his later years Syd was fortunate to connect with Karen Flewin, who generously scanned hundreds of Syd’s images, a great many of which are historically valuable. Those who notice this booklet doesn’t include many images of Syd must realize that’s because he was so often the person behind the camera. Syd’s life story is so much more than one of being born in a geographical location, but of living as an inimitable thread in the very fabric of Golden, B.C., the Canadian Rockies and the development of western Canada. His experiences as the son of one of Canadian Pacific Railway’s Swiss Guides, Walter Feuz, granted him a unique childhood, hopping on trains to explore such cherished places as Lake Louise and Skoki on hand-shaped skis rubbed with homemade wax. Syd believed in the lessons life—and his father and uncles—taught him. Living through hard times taught him gratitude and humility, traits he exuded his entire life. Overlooking Golden from high on Mount 7—the road to which he still drove solo into his late eighties—Syd surveyed the mountains of his life-long home. While his legs wobbled a bit, his stories of adventures shared with his father, uncles and cousins poured forth in a steady, enthusiastic flow, just like the Kicking Horse, Spillimacheen, Blaeberry and Columbia rivers of his backyard. Even as his body betrayed him, his spirit and sense of adventure that drove him to explore in his youth never waned. The stories on these pages were recorded many decades after they happened. I’ve done my best to verify as many details as possible, but in the end, they are Syd’s stories as he remembered them, and we should treasure them as just that. And know that if you asked Syd how he felt about his remarkable life, he’d just say he was a damn lucky man. —Lynn Martel The Lucky Life of Syd Feuz 3 Edelweiss Swiss Village hen Syd Feuz was born on February 4, 1922, WGolden, B.C. was a town of less than 1000 people. Sprouting from the fertile river valley at the confluence of the Columbia and Kicking Horse rivers, Golden had served as an essential hub of the Canadian Pacific Railway since the railroad’s completion in 1885. With the trains rolling from eastern Canada through the Rockies en route to the Pacific Coast, word spread quickly across the continent and over the ocean to Europe about the beautiful mountain landscapes of western Canada. Climbers, natur- ally, were among the first tourists to hop aboard. By that time, with all the prominent peaks in the European Alps having been climbed by well-worn routes, western Canada’s wild glaciated peaks promised countless worthy virgin summits. That promise didn’t only lure the well-heeled who arrived with steamer trunks stuffed with two months’ worth of finery for luxurious stays at the CPR’s hotels - Mount Stephen House in Field, Glacier House in Rogers Pass (both completed Syd, rear, poses for the camera with his siblings in 1887) and later in the 1920s, the Chateau Lake (from left) Ann, Paul and Doris, circa late 1920s. Louise - it also helped lure the mountain guides those folks needed to lead them safely up to those Walter Feuz holds one of his eight children. summits. Christian Haesler arrived from Interlaken. In 1901 In 1899, the first two Swiss guides to sign a more guides came, eager to experience the riches seasonal contract with the CPR, Edouard Feuz and of the new country. In 1903, at just eighteen years old, Edward Feuz Jr. made the journey with his father to work as a porter. When the senior guides returned to Switzerland at the end of the 1903 summer season, Ed Jr. stayed in Golden that winter to learn English, not returning to his homeland until the end of the 1905 summer season. In 1908 Ed Jr. passed his guide’s exam in Switzerland and in 1909 his younger brother, Ernest, along with Rudolph Aemmer, joined him in the journey to Canada to work as guides for the CPR. Until 1912, every spring the Swiss guides made the long and gruelling commute across the Atlantic by ship to their summer jobs in the Rockies and Selkirks, returning to Switzerland and their families every October. Acknowledging the strain the travelling caused the guides, who were very popular among the CPR’s hotel guests (and also quite likely in an effort to ensure the guides Walter and Johanna Feuz’s house at the Swiss Village, where Syd and his didn’t return to Switzerland for good) in 1912 the siblings grew up, is kept as a mini-museum and open to visitors by appointment. company had six chalets built in Golden to house Photo courtesy of Lynn Martel. the guides and their wives. That summer Edward 4 A Golden Mountain Tale Jr., Ernest, Rudolph, Christian Haesler, Jr., and a younger Feuz brother, Walter, moved to Canada permanently. The men were accompanied by their wives, Elise (Ernst), Martha (Ed) and her sister, Johanna, who later married Walter, plus Clara Aemmer and Rosa Haesler. No doubt, these were exceptionally courageous women to move so far from their own villages and families to a country where they did not speak the language, at a time when flying home for a week was not imaginable, all the while knowing their husbands would be away working in the mountains for weeks and months at a time.