The Chairlift That Changed My Life: From a Foggy Ride to a New Home

This one’s been on my mind for a while so figured I’d put it down. It’s 2006 on Cypress Mountain just outside Vancouver, classic North Shore fog, that damp coastal kind where everything is grey and white & you can barely see the next chair ahead of you. I was volunteering as a ski instructor on weekends at that point, just for the love of it really, a way to spend more time on the mountain when I wasn’t doing my regular job in IT consulting.
So I’m sharing a chair with another part-time instructor & we’re doing the usual chairlift small talk … snow conditions, how the lessons have been, the fact that we can’t see anything. At some point she asks what I do during the week & I mention the IT background. Turns out her company was looking for someone with my exact background and before we got off the chair she’d told me I should give them a call.
That one chairlift ride turned into an interview, then a job offer, then sponsorship for my Canadian residency. Which is basically the reason I’m still here in BC twenty years later & the reason Advent Wood Products even exists … none of it happens without that foggy ride up Cypress and a chance conversation with someone whose name I can barely remember now.
I think about that day a lot when I’m in the workshop. The mountains have a way of putting you next to people you’d never otherwise meet, & the smallest conversations can end up being the ones that matter most. That’s a big part of why I make the signs I make … a lot of them mark places & moments that meant something to someone, even if the moment itself looked completely ordinary at the time.
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