Family Friendly
Dockside Publishing, Winter 2020
‘Things change over the years – new buildings, new lifts. But the core feelings are exactly the same as they were 60 years ago.’
After 60 years, a private club remains true to its roots.
Sometime in the late ‘50s, a couple of dozen young people in Toronto decided they wanted something to do in the winter. Something social, outdoors, and out of the city. Even though most of them had never skied before, they decided to form a ski club.
The club they founded would go on to become Alpine Ski Club, one of the best private ski clubs in the country. Alpine is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year.
These days Alpine is known as a club with an amazing clubhouse, superb catering, an excellent racing program, some of the best skiing terrain in Ontario, and a warm and friendly atmosphere. The atmosphere was there from the very earliest days, but not much else.
“We started out as a travelling club,” says Hans Kent, one of the founders and the club’s first president. “The High Park YMCA used to send people out of town in buses; we couldn’t afford that, so we just put everyone in private cars.”
Every weekend, club members would pile into each other’s cars and drive to the ski hills. Blue Mountain, Beaver Valley, Huntsville, Snow Valley… anywhere they could get to for a day’s skiing. Most were immigrants,
and few of them had even skied before, but they had fun learning and laughing and coming to terms with Canada’s winter.
Before long the club had about 250 members. Coordinating the carpooling had become a massive logistical challenge. And people were getting frustrated with long lineups when they got to the public hills. So they began looking for a piece of property.
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