Hollywood hearthrob took their breath away, now he’s pounding the keys for local choir.

KELLY MCMANUS, Outlook newspaper, Oct. 21, 2009

TAKE NOTE, GOSLING. Big screen love god dons monster mask, plays the piano for local choir. High school musicians rub shoulders with big stars. There could be magic here, and more than just the diamond dust sighs inspired when Gosling locked lips with Rachel McAdams in the rain. Daniel Pi photo

What could be scarier and more sublime than proposing to Ryan Gosling?

Singing with him. In a “real gig.”

Next weekend in a concert at Vancouver’s Venue, 11 Carson Graham students will sing with Hollywood actor Gosling’s band, Dead Man’s Bones.

“It’s outside school,” says Grade 12 student Rachel Buttrass of the Venue concert. “It’s not just our parents and our friends (in the audience). People are actually there because they want to see the show.”

The concert is a live performance of the Dead Man’s Bones concept record, a ghost-monster love story brimming with synthy, ironic indie ballads. It showcases a chorus of young voices, originally the children’s choir from California’s Silverlake Conservatory of Music.

This weekend, it won’t be the kids from Silverlake, but the crew from Carson Graham dressed in white cloaks with red hoods, holding flashlights under their faces as their favourite heartthrob, Gosling, croons over the piano.

An homage to grade school musicals and good, old fashioned spooks, the Dead Man’s Bones show has earned the band a mix of scathing and breathless reviews across the continent.

The show is “weird. It’s very creepy,” laughs Carson’s Jane Agyeman, Grade 11, one morning in the high school’s choir room. “It’s very Halloween . . . and it gets way creepier.”

Enter “Werewolf Heart “ – a track named for Gosling and band mate Zach Shields’ record label – where little angel-voiced Draculas sing about a doomed love between a werewolf lady and a regular joe. The lyrics go, “my skull is full of sunken ships, my heart’s a prisoner to my ribs . . . without the sun, I’m only shadows in a dress.”

But it can be airy, too, maybe the happiest haunting since The Unicorns sang Ghost Mountain. Imagine a Tom Waits concert in the school cafeteria, one critic said, a dreamy performance riff about wonders and nightmares.

Like the delicious terror of meeting the flesh and blood guy from The Notebook, he who kissed Rachel McAdams in the rain, stopped time as popcorn caught in the throats of women and girls in theatres across the continent.

“I’ll be nervous when I meet (Gosling),” says Isabel Cristina Gonzalo Semidey, Grade 12. “But I’m mostly excited. I’m mostly really, really excited.”

The Venue show will mark the biggest musical milestone since a few of the students recorded their own CD with the jazz choir. At least five of the 11 teens say they plan to study music in college or university, and they hope the Dead Man’s Bones concert will go a long way on their resumes.

“This is a professional standard,” says teacher Polsky. “It’s not just a Christmas concert in the school gym.”

She says she also asked Gosling if he might pose for photo with the students after their three-hour dress rehearsal this week.

“But he said he was hoping for the same thing, that we would pose for his pictures,” Polsky said.

There’s something very puppy dogs and Sadie Hawkins about a Hollywood powerhouse hosting his own talent show – the opening acts are local kid musicians, and Gosling’s publicists at Biz3 say the Vancouver line-up is top secret.

Dead Man’s Bones doesn’t do interviews, either, Biz3 says. “It saps their enthusiasm,” for the earnestness of their soirees.

And so the big screen love god dons a monster mask – as the Dead Man’s Bones band photos show – to dull his splendor, looks for a close, real-time connection with young musicians. And young artists rub shoulders with superstars in their first crack at the professional stage. It seems in the collision of those earnest desires for intimacy, there could be magic, more than just the diamond dust sighs inspired when Gosling locks lips with his costar in The Notebook. But still…

Jane Agyeman shakes her head, grinning, “Ryan Gosling is at the top of the list. Top five for sure . . . Ryan, will you marry me?”

Standing at the back of the group in that Carson Graham classroom, Mark Jackson, one of three guys in the choir, isn’t weak in the knees at all. He rolls his eyes as the girls recount how “cute” Gosling looked in Murder by Numbers.

“We’re still trying to figure out the balancing act, always,” Agyeman says as she points her thumb at Jackson. “And he’s like, Whatever.”

This could be a show worth seeing, brimming with a sweet, nostalgic innocence, a happy spook – one where movie stars roll up their sleeves to accompany the local choir on piano, and their voices rise up with the clouds from the smoke machine, “When I think about you, flowers grow on my grave, grave, grave.”

kmcmanus@northshoreoutlook.com

The shoehorns in his pocket break the crisp lines of his business suit.

Maybe he’s taking them into the courtroom so after he’s sentenced, when he takes off his jacket and steps into the prison jumper, he can slip those shoehorns into his shiny black dress shoes and they’ll hold their shape. In four months, when he gets out of jail, they’ll be just like they were.

Maybe it’s one small thing he can preserve after an eight-month public shaming, a family in “tatters,” a career in ruins.

He’s lost it all. Or so the court has heard and the media has announced again and again about Jack Crone, the 69-year-old bank executive who managed a $200-million portfolio, who kept a cabinet stocked with child pornography in his Vancouver office, plus a home computer loaded with files that together totalled more than 1,200 sex abuse images.

Standing before the judge after pleading guilty, he said he never meant to hurt anyone when he started surfing the net, looking at porn. He said what began as a fringe interest in images of children and minors turned into a habit, a collection that ruined his life.

“I am deeply humiliated,” he said, his shoulders shaking and his voice cracking. “I hope you will give me a chance to make amends.”

Jack Crone’s wife of 11 years left him after police raided his home in the tony British Properties last February. They were looking for a computer, a hard drive registered to Crone that was making hundreds of sex abuse images available for free to people using the file sharing software LimeWire.

When they raided his Vancouver office, they found a locked cabinet, to which Crone held the only key. It contained “documents and photographs,” cartoons about adults and children having sex. A few of the items in collection were classed level five, considered the most offensive and exploitive, showing children subjected to bondage or bestiality.

He told police they were “an arousal mechanism,” and that “he was ashamed of what he had done,” according to sentencing Judge William Rodgers. Crone said he thought it was a “victimless crime.”

Yes he had amassed child porn, but he was just a private collector. He didn’t distribute it – or at least, he didn’t intend to – he said.

What Crone didn’t know was that by using LimeWire, he made the files on his computer accessible to other LimeWire users, which is how police nabbed him.

A billion-dollar industry

Crone told the court he didn’t mean to distribute the files but Constable Rosiane Racine – an investigator with the RCMP Integrated Child Exploitation Unit that nabbed Crone – isn’t convinced.

“From what we understand it would be very difficult for someone not to be fully aware that they were sharing,” she told The Outlook in an interview. “Having said that, he (Crone) claims he didn’t know. We can’t put words into his mouth but I would have a hard time believing that.”

Crone’s arrest came one month before Project Salvo, a multi-agency Canada-wide crackdown on the people who make, sell and collect child pornography. Salvo saw 57 arrests nation-wide, with 11 in B.C. In two of the cases charges will be announced soon, said Racine. For the other nine, the charges are pending.

“The Internet has no borders,” explained Racine, and when child porn collectors trade images – “like baseball cards” as many investigating officers and convicted collectors describe the obsession – the transactions are crossing investigating jurisdictions, and often continents.

The stakes were higher before the Internet, said Racine. Collectors once ordered magazines or photos, swapping images through the mail. Now a video shot in Thailand or Moscow or Kelowna can stream live to anyone who seeks it out, which some investigators say is feeding a body of material growing “more and more shocking,” featuring heightened violence and younger children.

“It (child pornography) did exist, but it wasn’t as accessible to people,” before the web, said Racine. “Now with the Internet it’s become accessible to everyone . . . anybody that has an interest in child sexual abuse material, they can go and get it very easily. For free too.”

What has sprung up with the help of the web are millions of sex abuse photos available at the click of a mouse – experts estimate that circulating at any given time are between 1 and 5-million illicit images. These feed a growing black market estimated to be in the multi-billion-dollar range, according to Canada’s Federal Ombudsman for Victims of Crime, with thousands of new images funneling into circulation every week.

Racine and her unit of nine other officers have their work cut out for them. This year they opened more than 130 files. Searching for collectors like Jack Crone who fuel the demand for contraband abuse images, the RCMP unit screens the glut of material out there, tries to identify where it’s coming from – and, if at all possible, where it was made. But Racine says the chances are not as good that investigators might arrest the producer and rescue the abused child.

“There’s those images that you just basically – your stomach gets all twisted in knots,” said Racine. “There’s a few that just stick with you forever, they’re just so horrifying.”

Checkups with a counsellor are a mandatory part of Racine’s job. “Words cannot even describe the horror that we see these children go through over and over and over again . . . We have to keep going. We owe it to the children to keep going.”

Fall from grace

One reporter will later call Crone’s highly publicized case a “fall from grace.” His lawyer, Richard Peck, tells media, “It’s not going to be easy for someone who’s fallen as far as he has.” The court hears how Crone has lost nearly $3 million in salary, benefits and retirement packages, along with his job as a senior executive at RBC Dominion Securities, where he worked for 38 years.

“It would be an understatement to say that his career has been successful,” says Peck of the $200-million portfolio under Crone’s management before his swift termination in February, and “the consequences of that (firing) are extraordinary.”

UBC law professor Janine Benedet studies prostitution, pornography and sexual assault. In an interview with The Outlook, she cautioned against fixating on Crone’s “associated humiliation . . . you have to be a little bit careful there. Because I’m a bit skeptical of a claim just because you’re wealthy and well connected somehow sending you to jail is worse than somebody else. When you read it that way I think to myself wait, don’t poor people also suffer stigma and shock from their family when they’re convicted of offences like this?”

Crone has been shunned by all but two of his seven children. He is cut off from most of his grandchildren.

“It is fair to say that the personal structure around Mr. Crone has crumbled as a result of this crime,” says Justice Rodgers at Crone’s sentencing, outlining the personal losses suffered by the ex-banker.

Crone sits forward in his chair, listening as the judge challenges his initial assertion that collecting free child porn was “victimless . . . nobody would ever know that I was a viewer, or so I thought.”

“It is difficult to accept that any right thinking person could honestly accept that child pornography is a victimless crime,” explains the judge. He says the mitigating factors in the sentencing are Crone’s apparent remorse, his attempts at seeking regular counselling, his cooperation with police and his letters of support from friends and colleagues. However, he adds, “I cannot overlook the aggravating factors. The images in the videos were both disturbing and disgusting.”

Earlier, the investigating officers showed a sample of those videos to the court in a session closed to the public.

Crown prosecutor Phil Sebellin and the judge each draw the connection between the collectors who fuel the industry – even through gathering free images – and the producers, adults who create a photographic record of child abuse.

In the sentencing Crone gets four months in jail, followed by two years probation. He’ll have to register as a sex offender and provide a DNA sample. He’s forbidden from being around parks, playgrounds or places where children congregate. He can’t work or volunteer where he could be in a position of trust or authority over minors.

He turns and says a stiff, sad goodbye to his siblings and the sheriff takes him away. The scene is short, terse, not nearly as poignant as the exchange that took place just one hour before.

As Crone pulled up to the court house that morning, he faced the TV cameras alone, making the long walk to the courthouse doors.

“Are you remorseful?” asked a cameraman.

“Very,” Crone said softly.

He sat alone in the waiting room. He was reading a newspaper, drinking from a disposable coffee cup. Those shoehorns threatened to fall from his pocket.

As he flipped quickly through the pages, smoothing over his suit, his earlier remarks seemed fitting: “I so much want to regain a measure of self-esteem.”

A pair of investigating officers in the case sat quietly at the other side of the room, hands in their lap, voices low, and Crone quickly acknowledged them with a nod.

Just then two people that he would later introduce as his brother and sister mounted the stairs.

“How you doing?” Crone stood excitedly, embraced the woman, somewhere near her 60s. “So nice of you to come.”

Soon he introduced his family to the officers who caught him.

“She’s a nice lady,” he gestured to the RCMP officer, telling the cops they’ve done a great job.

There was an awkward pause. Both officers nodded. “Thank you.”

kmcmanus@northshoreoutlook.com

KELLY MCMANUS, North Shore Outlook, Aug. 26, 2009

North and West Vancouver school boards could be sued for roughly $2 million combined if a North Vancouver lawyer succeeds in launching a class action over summer school fees paid in B.C. since 2004.

James Poyner said the province deemed the fees illegal in 2007. At that time former education minister Shirley Bond cited the School Act, stipulating B.C. students must not be charged for courses essential to graduation.

Bond ordered the return of summer school fees paid in B.C. that year.

Poyner has said the 2007 refund is not enough and that school districts should refund families for any illegal fees paid since 2004 under a six-year limitation.

Currently Poyner represents one North Vancouver family in a civil action filed in B.C. Supreme Court against the Vancouver board of education.

According to court documents Sarah and Ali Agha Riazi were informed their son, identified only as “KR,” needed remedial science and English summer courses before advancing past Grade 9 at Lord Byng secondary.

The Riazis paid $274 for each course and Poyner is seeking the return of those fees. Poyner also hopes to see the case certified as a class action some time this fall.

That means he may also take on North Vancouver, West Vancouver, Coquitlam, Richmond, Surrey, Burnaby and Abbotsford school boards, he said.

“We say that it (any summer fees dating back to 2004) is contrary to the provisions of the School Act . . . which provides that courses and materials charged for graduation must be provided for free of charge by the school district,” Poyner said.

According to Poyner, the North Shore school boards could owe over $2 million combined if a class action succeeds.

Amended budgets for the period in question show that the summer school fees collected by North Vancouver school board totalled roughly $1.9 million.

In West Vancouver that number was about $388,000 according to budget information.

A representative from the North Vancouver school district was unavailable for comment by Outlook press time, but West Vancouver superintendent Geoff Jopson said his district will keep tabs on the Riazi suit.

“I think all school districts will be (watching the suit),” he added. “But it’s really hard to speculate on what (the implications for West Vancouver schools) might be.” He said it would be “premature” to comment further “other than to say that when the Supreme Court judgement came down with regard to school fees, districts began to comply immediately and continued to do so.”

On top of expanding the suit to encompass other districts, lawyer Poyner also told The Outlook that he may try to attack other fees charged by public schools.

“There’s a lot of them (fees) and a lot of them are unlawful. Eventually we may go after those as well.”

A website for Poyner’s firm, Poyner Baxter LLP, lists class actions against Sun Life Assurance Company, Bausch & Lomb, Canada Life and Manulife Financial “on behalf of tens of thousands of class member clients.”

In 2006, Poyner sought a class action suit against the provincial government over fees, but the court ruled it was the responsibility of school districts and not the province to charge school fees.

Poyner said of his plan to launch the class actions, “We’re taking a different approach now and we’re suing the various school districts where summer school fees have been charged.”

A representative for the Vancouver school board said the board couldn’t comment as the matter is currently before the courts.

kmcmanus@northshoreoutlook.com

KELLY MCMANUS, North Shore Outlook, July 2, 2009

North Vancouver RCMP say a local “ring of pimps and drug traffickers” has been seducing teen girls into prostitution and advertising on Craigslist. Cpl. Marlene Morton said men in their early 20s or late teens are preying on their former high school classmates in a North Van neighbourhood, some under 18 years old.

“They know each other,” said Morton of the girls and the alleged pimps. “They were maybe in the same school but not in the same grade.”

The RCMP received a tip from staff at a North Vancouver high school and have been investigating since last November, Morton said. School district representative Victoria Miles said the investigation is an RCMP file, so the district is not free to comment on specifics, but she did point out the alleged recruitment of teens into prostitution is “not happening on school grounds or during school time.”

Morton said the North Vancouver pimps often recruit the girls through gifts. “Often these girls think its a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. They’re given clothing, drugs, cellphones, etcetera and then they’re told ‘You’re actually not my girlfriend and you need to work off your debt.’” Morton said the relationships spiral into exploitation and abuse. “The pimps are using violence or the threat of violence to control the girls,” she wrote earlier in a notice. So far RCMP investigators allege 11 young female sex workers and four pimps.

Some underage sex workers may be circumventing the relationships with pimps and advertising their services on Craigslist, Morton also said. She cited one June 26 posting that listed “uncovered” sexual services, meaning sex acts without a condom, offered for $150. She said investigators knew the girl in the ad to be under 18.

One June 26 posting promises a “Quick-e Car date” in North Vancouver at the Parkgate Community Centre. A June 29 search of Craigslist revealed over a dozen postings offering the sexual services of young women in North and West Vancouver claiming to be between 19 and 24, many of whom promised they looked “barely legal” and offered “G.F.E.” (girlfriend experience).

Some listings posted services ranging from $45 per sex act or $250 per hour.

Social worker says disclosure rate may not reflect rise in teen prostitutes

Morton did not reveal the number of North Vancouver teens who have identified as sex workers and reached out for help, but in another media report RCMP has said support groups are logging more cases of teen sex workers on the North Shore.

Morton said the RCMP’s Youth Intervention and Sex Crime Investigations units are working with ONYX, a Vancouver support network for sexually exploited youth.

However a social worker partnered with ONYX warned that just because more teens are coming forward with “disclosures,” doesn’t mean that the rate of incidences is on the rise. Diane Sowden, director at Children of the Street Society, a partner organization with ONYX, said her group speaks to teens in Lower Mainland classrooms, sharing information about how pimps recruit young people and how young sex workers can quickly find themselves wrapped up in a snarl of crime and addictions.

Sowden said more disclosures by local teen prostitutes can “mean that more kids are asking for services and help which is a positive.” “Now, through more education, they are identifying . . . (saying) maybe I am in over my head . . . That doesn’t mean more kids are being exploited,” she said.

ONYX could not comment on the issue, said a social worker from that organization.

Sowden said that her group has visited high schools on the North Shore to make presentations about avoiding prostitution. Outreach workers visited North Van’s Argyle secondary “on a regular basis and have for years.”

West Van assistant superintendent Chris Kennedy says the troupe has visited the West Van school district, but, “It (teen prostitution) hasn’t been raised by counsellors or administrators in the schools. It hasn’t been a concern.”

In visits to Sentinel secondary in 2008 and 2009, a troupe of young outreach workers from Children of the Street dramatized the downward spiral of gift-giving and exploitation of teens by pimps. West Van school board chair Mary Ann Booth said the presentation received positive feedback from students and teachers because, “It relates to kids . . . Any time you can get the voice of youth speaking out to youth the message is so much more underscored and accepted.”

Responding to the RCMP claims that young local sex workers are using Craigslist, Sowden said her group now focuses more on education about internet recruiting. She said pimps often recruit young people through social networking sites. “We now know that young people are using technology so the predators and the pimps are also using technology,” she said. “Young people can also be selling themselves without a pimp involved when it comes to online (exchanges) … but the fact is the customers they are meeting with are still the same customers.”

Cpl. Marlene Morton said anyone with leads about allegedly burgeoning teen prostitution networks or any young people who need help can contact Const. Cam Stewart or Const. Michelle Steele at 604-985-1311.

kmcmanus@northshoreoutlook.com

Bryan Tickell was sentenced this week to six years in jail for ripping off elderly and mentally unfit clients in his former job at the Public Guardian and Trustee of B.C. His taunts to investigators ring eerily, “It was just so easy.”

KELLY MCMANUS, North Shore Outlook, June 4, 2009

Standing in the hall outside courtroom number two, he could be a young lawyer. He looks healthy, well-fed, and is just beginning to show that 30-something heaviness to the cheeks.

He checks his cell phone, punching on the keys as though he’s texting. He smoothes over his crisp dark suit and his red silk tie.

It’s not until Bryan Michael Tickell walks into the courtroom that the cracks in his upwardly mobile demeanor begin to show. The 30 year old is accused of 14 charges involving forgery, breach of trust, theft and fraud covering a 10-month period where he worked for the Public Guardian and Trustee of B.C. (PGT) as a case manager of more than 200 clients. The PGT alleged after a forensic investigation with Deloitte & Touche that he had defrauded or attempted to defraud 12 of those people. In September 2008, Tickell pleaded guilty to three of those charges.

As he enters the courtroom, he turns a pair of aviator sunglasses in his hand, pacing the isle with a slow swagger, a little too slow. It’s as though Tickell needs to keep moving. His thick shoulders are squared, his chin juts forward.

His lawyer, Scott Wright, indicates it’s too soon to sit down, and Tickell stands waiting for the judge who will deliver his sentence.

Not much is known about Tickell, and what is known is sometimes hard to believe, according to Justice Tony Dohm.

But the court does know that Tickell’s job was to help manage the estates and finances of PGT clients, because, after being deemed mentally unfit, they couldn’t take care of their own affairs.

He lied to get that job, referencing a fake degree he’d hoodwinked from the University of Carleton and a non-existent one from the University of Calgary. He provided a phony-reference, one John Murray, a false identity he created thanks to an Alberta forklift operator who lost his wallet.

Former West Vanner Phyllis Lowdell, in her 80s, was one of his victims, and last fall Tickell pleaded guilty to defrauding her of a Maple Ridge property. He had it transferred into his own name for “$1.00 plus love and affection,” and flipped the property for $1 million.

Friend and unofficial guardian Ross Henderson and his wife Elaine Henderson remember meeting Lowdell three years ago, shortly before she came under the supervision of the PGT’s new recruit, Tickell.

It was spring time. Ross Henderson found her wandering down the street in their British Properties neighbourhood, her pants held up around her 90-pound frame with a Barbie pin. She needed help with her taxes, and she needed groceries, she told the Hendersons. Over the next six months, Elaine Henderson would bring meals over to Lowdell’s house every few days, but she often didn’t answer the door, so Henderson left the food on the hood of Lowdell’s old car.

In September 2006, Elaine Henderson crawled through Lowdell’s window and found her face down on the floor. According to Henderson, they took her to Lions Gate Hospital with a serious infection and soon after she was deemed mentally unfit to run her own affairs, and was entrusted to the PGT.

Tickell managed her case and many others like hers in his time at the PGT – between fall 2006 and summer 2007. There was Barry Boris Derlago, a victim of Tickell’s forgery, to which Tickell pleaded guilty last fall. A PGT client, Derlago suffered an aorta rupture in February 2007 and at that point Tickell was told Derlago didn’t have long to live, according to the PGT. The next month, Tickell had drafted a new will for Derlago in which 20 per cent of his $1.3 million estate was designated to Tickell, listed as “My (Derlago’s) longtime friend’s grandson,” reported by The Outlook last year. The fraudster tricked two caretakers into witnessing the fraudulent will, telling them they were signing a transfer of petty cash.

According to Justice Tony Dohm, when Tickell left his job at the public guardian it coincided with Derlago’s death, and “that’s what brought Mr. Tickell’s house of cards down.”

Derlago’s brother, Ivan Derlago, claimed it was when he flew from Winnipeg to North Vancouver in August 2007 to bury his brother – and found that he was no longer listed as the executor of his brother’s estate – that the PGT became aware of Tickell’s fraud.

The PGT has said it was internally aware of the fraud and that even if Derlago hadn’t died, they would have caught Tickell’s flub within the month due to internal controls.

Tickell was arrested soon after, and, according to PGT spokesperson Indiana Matters, he asked to speak with PGT head Jay Chalke. When Chalke arrived at the North Vancouver cell, Tickell allegedly relished the opportunity to taunt his former higher-up.

In Justice Dohm’s reasons for sentencing, he explains of that incident, “Mr. Tickell told Mr. Chalke that he had done other things, but he would not assist the authorities in finding those.”

He repeatedly told investigators, “It was just so easy,” and, according to a psychologist’s assessment, Tickell enjoyed talking about his crimes and also the “psychological challenge” of stealing, forging and conning others.

While the psychologist’s report said that Tickell showed “a large number of features” of a psychopath – a grandiose vision of himself, a lack of empathy for his victims, a self-centred vision of the world – he didn’t qualify because he hadn’t shown the unstable, antisocial lifestyle that typifies psychopaths.

Justice Dohm rejects that line. He also dismisses the letters from Tickell’s family – his mother, his cousin, an uncle and a friend – as personal observations from people who “have obviously not known of the other side of him (Tickell).”

“It is hard to know much about Mr. Tickell’s background and antecedents,” Justice Dohm notes. “He is profoundly dishonest and manipulative.”

Leaning back in his chair through the hour-long summary from the judge, Tickell is just that, apparently impassive, unknowable. As to how he has chosen to present himself in the past, what is known are photos from social networking sites. Those images now removed from the internet could certainly qualify as “grandiose” – one where he flexes, shirtless, glaring up at the camera, or another where he poses in a white singlet, hand over his shoulder, his head cocked. In all photos he is serious, not smiling.

Perhaps the most fitting is one black and white snap where Tickell stands behind a screen, partially obscured, his face in shadow. In each he stares straight into the camera.

In the sentencing, Justice Dohm gives Tickell four years for defrauding the PGT and six years apiece for his crimes against Derlago and Lowdell, all to be served concurrently. The sentence is one year more than requested by Crown counsel.

Phyllis Lowdell is pleased. The elderly woman is now 50 pounds heavier than she was three years ago, and more alert since moving to a North Vancouver seniors living facility where she sometimes hosts the Hendersons for dinner.

Elaine Henderson helps her down the courthouse steps, where TV cameras await. Lowdell concentrates on shuffling forward with her walker as she notes, “He (Tickell) just thinks he’s damned smart, that’s all.” She was previously quoted as having resented his imposition as her grandson. “That’s why he did it in the first place.”

The money recovered from Tickell’s sale of her $1-million property will go to charity, she and the Hendersons say.

There are other alleged victims out there, and their names are on public record, but the PGT cautions about drawing undue attention to “vulnerable people,” according to PGT spokesperson Indiana Matters. “They’re not in a position to respond or take care of themselves . . . Normally we don’t discuss anything at all about our clients . . . The law has determined they need protection.”

Matters says all 12 of the people or their estates have been reimbursed “plus interest.”

In that list is one man whose PT Cruiser Tickell stole, and the woman who found her Standard Life Pension and American Express Travelers cheques fraudulently converted for Tickell’s personal use. Others whose credit cards or TransLink passes or cheques ended up in the hands of their case worker.

The PGT says after the nine-month investigation, no outstanding cases of frauds remain in Tickell’s caseload. According to court records, that investigation process topped out over $1 million in legal fees, consulting and staffing costs.

The organization also says it’s revamped its hiring and internal checks and balances, so that opportunists like Tickell won’t get through the door again to have a crack at the 32,000 clients under its care.

But Tickell’s boast to investigators echoes with a creepy hollowness, “It was just so easy.”

Fraud might not be so easy for Tickell in the future, however, as Justice Dohm has ordered him to provide a DNA sample within 30 days, to protect against any future identity theft.

The measure will make it tougher for Tickell to continue “heaping deceit upon deceit.”

Even at this moment where perhaps the most is known about Tickell – what he’s done, where he’s headed – he shows no emotion. Led from the courtroom in cuffs he only squares his shoulders, stares straight ahead as the sheriff ushers him into the next phase of his life behind bars.

KELLY MCMANUS, North Shore Outlook, May 7, 2009

In her lucite pumps, Conni Smudge is seven feet tall, a 220-pound pillar of W-O-M-A-N. She spells it out like that, too, with a flick of the hips, “Doubleyew-ohhh, Em, Ay, En. Woooooo-man.”

Her dress, a billowing blue chiffon number, catches the afternoon breeze through the window.

“Daytime drag is always a bit scary,” the drag queen says, considering herself in the mirror.

She is wig-less, and arches one carefully-drawn eyebrow for effect. “The nighttime hides a multitude of sins.”

Daylight is one challenge, social frost is another. Whether hosting a ladies’ soiree for symphony supporters or MCing a biker’s night in Nanaimo, Conni Smudge sometimes has to blast through the deep freeze to help kickstart a party. As an MC, she sings or tells jokes, compliments people’s shoes — whatever works.

“They (clients) hire us (queens) out to walk around and be glamorous and fabulous … some people might be a bit nervous about it at first,” she pats more glitter over her brows. “It’s like, I know I’m a man in a dress. Let’s get over it. Tell me how fabulous I look.”

Chris Bolton grew up in North Vancouver, whereas Conni, his stage persona, had her start in little dives in and around Nanaimo, Comox and Port Alberni. Her first show, back in the early 1990s, was choreographed to perhaps one of the most ubiquitous of drag anthems, Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”

In one of Smudge’s first weekly gigs at a biker-frequented establishment on the island, management put up chainlink fencing around the dance floor – where she and a few of her fellow queens did their lip sync shows, baring chest hair through their faux fur get-ups – just in case unenlightened patrons threw beer bottles.

A few years later, some connected guys from Nanaimo’s bar scene arranged for Smudge to MC a biker party at an undisclosed location on the island.

With two exotic dancers, one known as Celica, Smudge boarded a float plane in Coal Harbour one windy afternoon, her sequined dress whipping at her legs. She agreed to be blindfolded. A couple hours later she removed that blindfold to peer from backstage into a room packed with about 150 bikers.

“I was really scared… they were hooting and hollering,” she remembers.

“Well, gentleman, the ladies have arrived,” shouted the organizer, and Smudge steamrolled onstage, guns blazing.

“I walked in first and said, how the f*** are ya? And they were like, what the hell?”

It was a tough crowd: huge guys, some with huge bellies drooping past their seats towards the floor. Guys with scars and scraggly beards and tattoos. Some muttered, “fag.”

In the front row, one of them leered at her, arms crossed.

“I walked up and said, listen pal, I’m more of a man than you’ll ever be and I’m more of a woman than you’ll ever get.” Soon after the men were lining up for polaroids with Smudge. When she MCed for that crowd again, she made a thousand bucks in one night just charging for snapshots.

“I started out doing drag because I wanted to change people’s opinions,” she explains: “The name is ‘Smudge’ because I wanted to smudge the lines between heterosexual and homosexual. We’re all just people.”

It’s the same reason Smudge tears off her wig after every Sunday afternoon show at The Oasis on Davie Street. “I think it shows the transformation. It ruins the illusion,” Bolton explains.

Instead of morphing completely from one to the other, he sees a continuum, “the whole journey” of Chris and Conni.

Chris Bolton was teased sometimes mercilessly by kids at Ridgeway elementary, an experience he shared with a sociology class at Malaspina University as an adult. “It was cathartic.”

He was a shy kid who went on an exchange to Germany in his teens and came back full of confidence and exuberance. He gravitates to service or sales jobs because they allow him to work with people and he loves to tell a good joke. His North Van home holds witticisms like a pillow that reads “It’s not easy being queen.”

“Connie is just me but ten times more,” Bolton explains in the blue chiffon and lucite pumps get-up, his voice beginning to fill the kitchen like some smokey clandestine watering hole, or a “Love Boat” party bus heading off into the night for a Vancouver Island pub crawl, one of his all time favorite gigs.

His gestures tumble forth with increasing gusto as he grabs a wig. Choices range between a purple afro, a Liza Minelli-like mop, and the blond Streisand bob that makes the cut.

“Oh! Just gorgeous!” Smudge booms. “Now just let me powder my chest.”

A few years back, Conni Smudge committed to multiple evening engagements in Vancouver’s West End. Her route between gigs took her, heels and all, past some downtown alleyways, a bit dark, away from the rainbow flags of Davie. Bolton’s mother worried a drag queen might run into trouble crossing one of those alleys.

Smudge shudders for a second when she mentions the more recent West End “fag bashings.”

Then Smudge lets her voice drop to Bolton’s range. “But are you going to f*** with this? I don’t think so.” She draws a long, theatrical hand down the many, many feet of her blue getup, saying sweetly: “Especially if I’ve painted one eye brow higher than the other.”

For all the snapshots out there of Conni Smudge – evading “handsy” bikers, twirling on party boats and party buses or holding court with other queens – this moment deserves a polaroid, of Chris and Conni congratulating one another with a resounding high-five.

Conni Smudge appears in Fit for a Queen, the Vegas-style drag show to benefit the Shooting Stars Foundation, running May 14 at the River Rock Casino, 8 p.m. Tickets: $30 through Ticketmaster, 604-280-4444. Last month the foundation donated $100,00 to local HIV/AIDS organizations including A Loving Spoonful, AIDS Vancouver and Positive Women’s Network. More info at shootingstarsfoundation.org.

Conni Smudge also hosts Hott Smudge Sundays at the Oasis Ultra Lounge. Info: 604-685-1724 or connismudge@yahoo.com. May 11 catch Conni Smudge on Studio 4 with Fanny Kiefer.

KELLY MCMANUS, The Globe and Mail, April, 2009

“God, it’s exhausting being me.”

So notes 17-year old Zoey Redbird in Hunted. Between boys, school work and the shifting allegiances in her social circle, life can be complicated.

Add to that an immortal sex god with a serious vendetta and a bloody civil war at her finishing school for vampires — “Hell High,” as it’s known to outsiders, or the “House of Night” as it’s known to vamp kids — and Zoey’s life becomes even more exhausting.

Twilight haters, don’t pull away yet. The fifth book in mother-daughter team P.C. and Kristin Cast’s popular House of Night series handles some interesting material.

Admittedly, vampirism is an all-too-pervasive trope in teen narratives of late, the problem being that many authors don’t go beyond the surface flash and glamour of young, hot, undead teens. However, the Cast team rises above bottom-of-the-heap vampire clichés by exploring teen sexuality with creative gusto.

Remember your first kiss, or the first time you fell in love? Chances are you were a teenager. Chances are you felt invincible, otherworldly even, as the surge of your new sexual power flooded your horizons and your body morphed overnight from kid to adult — not unlike, say, how the goddess Nyx marks Zoey with “gorgeous” tattoos that frame her face and unfurl down the new curves of her body.

I remember hitting 16 and discovering the strange world of sexual attraction. Those new feelings were magical, mythic even. They rose above the mundane indignities of math class or soccer practice, convincing myself and my friends, as Zoey notes of her circle of sex-charged, multicultural vampire pals, “all of our lives were in the process of never being the same.”

Sex drives and metamorphosis lead the charge in that department, and in these novels, there’s a scientific explanation for what happens when vamps bite humans or other vamps. Sexy pleasure receptors in the brain of biter and bitee stimulate an unparalleled erotic romp, creating psychic bonds in some cases or inspiring (for teen participants) make-out-only three-way sessions in others.

“Hot,” Zoey or one of her friends might note in the many times they witness sexy vampire outbursts of desire and longing mixed with lunchtime. But that hormone-charged power comes at a price and can turn dark, greedy or possessive, as Zoey finds — in this novel and in others — with the cast of dreamy men and boys who vie for her attention.

Frisky teenaged vampires might not represent “new material,” but the Casts use those fertile themes to create strong, complex female characters negotiating the darkness and the light of sexual attraction, the biggest strength in this series.

Zoey has recently lost her virginity, although she regrets it and thinks she’ll wait before she tries sex again. That doesn’t mean she isn’t strongly attracted “to more than one guy” — sexy undead archers, vampire guards or even her ex-boyfriend, the (merely human) quarterback.

The worst of her would-be suitors is Kalona, a fallen angel turned sex-addled predator who, in ancient times, was imprisoned in the earth by Cherokee women who grew tired of serving as his sex slaves. Now he’s taken over the House of Night with his twisted “Raven Mockers,” a band of mutated raven-human hybrids.

When Zoe and her girlfriends lay eyes on the shining Kalona, who is perpetually shirtless, his night-black raven’s wing’s unfurling to frame his washboard stomach and rippling pecs, they fall instantly under his spell. He is, in Zoey’s words, “mortal enough to touch but too beautiful to be anything but a god.”

Ring a bell, Twilight fans or haters? Think paranormal BF numero uno, Edward Cullen, resplendent in the sunlight with a diamond gleam that brings Bella Swan to her knees.

Hunted boasts Harlequin moments as intense as, if not more intense than, those in the Twilight books. Hello, Zoey might say, it sounds lame but it’s true: Kalona is “an ancient immortal with eyes like the night sky and a voice like a forbidden secret.”

Shudder — by all means, shudder. But chances are, at one time in a person’s life, this stuff could have resonated sweetly, and it still might, as even thousands of full-grown women have admitted to falling at the feet of the fictional Edward Cullen.

So what of bird-god Kalona and Zoey’s battle to save vampire finishing school (and possibly the world)? Look for an action-packed climax where ancient Cherokee blessings meld with the prayers of Benedictine nuns and a vampire power-circle of the five elements.

Kalona relents, for now, but not before taking to the sky in rage-soaked sexual betrayal — book six reportedly publishes this fall.

There’s definitely something deliciously resonant if not occasionally melodramatic here: the cosmic ka-boom of young desire.

Kelly McManus is a Vancouver journalist with a special interest in science fiction and fantasy literature, and, in particular, identity issues in young adult narratives.

Violet Antone tells the story of Kalkalihl, a cannibal ogress who roamed the North Shore mountains. Part of an ongoing series: Squamish words. Daniel Pi photo

KELLY MCMANUS, North Shore Outlook, March 2009

Violet Antone heard the story of Kalkalilh, the cannibal woman, when she was 6 years old. She listened carefully as her aunty told her the Coast Salish legend.

Kalkalilh (sounds like Kaw-ka-leye) is “this big lady that comes out in the mountains every single night. She comes out to get children who are late and then she puts pitch in their eyes and she eats them.”

The Norgate student says that until she was 7 years old, she made sure to be in bed before 7 p.m. every night, just in case Kalkalilh was on the prowl.

Several Salish cultures tell stories about a giant ogress who snatches kids in the night. The Squamish tale features the ogress who lived in the Coast Mountains. She hunted stubborn children, tossed them into the basket on her back and roasted them on her fire. One night T’it’ki?ctn (sounds like Ti-kin-tin) the young carver was home with some hungry kids – their parents had gone to a potlach, but there was no food for the young ones to eat.

Kalkalilh tricked the kids into leaving the house, offering pieces of cedar bark that looked like smoked salmon. Then she scooped up T’it’ki?ctn and some of the smaller kids and made for the mountains. T’it’ki?ctn, being an excellent carver, cut a hole in the back of Kalkalilh’s basket so that the tiniest kids could escape. Then, once back at the ogress’ hut, T’it’ki?ctn helped the remaining kids outsmart their captor. First they shut their eyes tight so she couldn’t blind them with pitch, and then they pushed her into the fire.

In some versions, Kalkalilh offers salmon berry shoots – Tsa7tskay (sounds like Sas-skies).

Latash, a Squamish educator in the district, reads the story of Kalkalilh and other Squamish tales with aboriginal students in the North Vancouver public schools.

“Do you remember what I was sharing with you guys about Kalkalilh and our people?” he asks a guided reading class at Queen Mary elementary, around the same week that Violet’s class discusses the legend at Norgate elementary.

“They don’t mention it in here, but when Kalkalilh was burning up, the sparks came off her body … that’s what became mosquitoes.”

The mosquitoes channel Kalkalilh’s ravenous nature: “That’s why they eat you… and come out at night, when the sun goes down, the mosquitoes come out.”

Latash has a joke to go with the story. He shares it with a mischievous grin: “Kalkalilh always says ‘don’t be afraid to try someone new.’”

In the next installment of Squamish words, students at Westview elementary talk about Tsa7tskay, a local spring delicacy.

Read more in the SQUAMISH WORDS series, an ongoing series about the cultural renaissance and the educational programs in North and West Vancouver’s Squamish Nation.

Schayilhn: little salmon people. Queen Mary elementary hosts thousands of salmon eggs this spring and Squamish Nation students shared a blessing to help protect the little fish.

Tribal Journeys. There may be only 12 fluent speakers left of the Squamish tongue, but the Squamish Nation is in the upswell of a powerful revival of language, culture and identity.

In other stories, Squamish Nation students and educators share words and stories from a language in revival: Sasskies for lunch; The story of Eagle.

Spinning yarns

Students at Cleveland elementary ramp up for an oral storytelling event April 30.

KELLY MCMANUS, North Shore Outlook, April 23 2008

Cleveland elementary students talk about the influences of popular novels in their own creative writing.

Daniel Pi photo

What’s the deal with teen vampires in young people’s fiction? Not just teen vampires, either. What about teen werewolves, teen ghosts, teens with super powers…

Invoke the word “Twilight” in a seventh grade class anywhere in North America – and other places too, the Harlequin-type books about a teen-vampire romance, published in several languages have recently been translated into Arabic – and chances are a host of girls, and maybe even a few boys, will respond with the same enthusiasm.

“I got kind of obsessed,” confesses one student at Cleveland elementary, sitting with a group of avid readers and writers, grades 6 and 7, to consider the trend.

They start by rhyming off their favourite titles at the moment: Elsewhere, Breaking Dawn (the fourth sequel to Meyer’s Twilight), The Vampire Diaries.

What’s the big attraction of fantastic stories, or “paranormal romances” as they have been called? Across the board, the young readers say they dig the thrill factor of mixing the everyday (school, homework or small town life) with juicy surprises (boyfriends who can fly or the secret of the afterlife).

Take Elsewhere, explains Charlie Muir.

“In Elsewhere after you die you go somewhere else and you age backwards and then you go back to earth,” she says. “It’s really a series you can read and get into.”

The “hot guys,” in the story don’t hurt either, adds Samantha McCabe.

The girls explain they feel the same pull to exploring fantasy in their own creative writing.

“When I work on creative writing I find… you can just go to another place and it’s more interesting,” explains Olivia Startup. “In a more realistic story I find it hard to imagine myself in.”

Startup, Muir and other young writers at Cleveland have been writing stories for a school anthology. Some students have chosen to write non-fiction, as in Allie Donaldson’s interview with her gymnastics coach.

Saboura Ahmadzadeh, recently emigrated from Iran, chose to talk about her transition to Canadian schooling.

“In Iran we don’t have the same school for boys and girls,” she writes, “but in Canada, the boys and girls study in the same school. That was interesting and scary for me.”

Some have chosen to write fictional mysteries or paranormal romances a la Twilight’s Bella and Edward.

Some have even straddled the two disciplines, conducting interviews with fictional characters (one student interviewed the main character from her favourite book, The Rainbow Fish) or imagining fierce alien invasions and relaying that information in a newspaper-style brief.

Grade 4 student Gavin Lopez-Smith crafted a hard news take on an alien abduction as witnessed by a photographer, an Orangutang named Dinosaur.

The anthology launches in tandem with the school’s Standup Storytelling night, a celebration in oral storytelling.

The April 30 community event that will see kids, parents and special guests including author Brendan McLeod and RCMP Const. Chelsie Isobe spinning yarns and sharing tales. The Dancers of the Damelahamid, a performing group with the Gitksan Nation, will kick off the evening.

Students are invited to stand up and share stories, too, a prospect which might seem more intimidating than submitting a written copy. But don’t sweat it, explains teacher-librarian and event organizer Sandra Santarossa.

Plenty of Cleveland kids have been practicing their oral storytelling techniques, whether they are aware of it or no. A teacher team at the school has been developing a storytelling curriculum for the district, and that unit, implemented in Cleveland classrooms this month, is designed to give kids the tools to stand up and tell a story for an audience.

“For us, the big idea is all stories have a purpose that help us learn about ourselves, others and the world,” explains Santarossa. “They (stories) bind us together, ground us in meaning, and most importantly evoke empathy.”

For kids and parents puzzling over good story ideas for the event, Santarossa explains, the stories can be about anything, although preferably about things that have happened.

“Some kids have been using family stories that make them laugh or make them cry, stories that grandpa or great grandpa told about the war or maybe an immigration story, how families came to Canada,” Santarossa explains. “One parent was telling me about being sprayed by a skunk. Another child, her dad wanted to take the kids for quality time and they were attacked by a storm of bees.”

The April 30 Standup Storytelling event at Cleveland elementary begins at 6:30 p.m. in the school gymnasium. For more information, phone Cleveland at 604-903-3390.

Read student writing from Cleveland elementary here.

kmcmanus@northshoreoutlook.com

North Shore Rescue trains up its new wave of young leaders.

KELLY MCMANUS, North Shore Outlook, April 16, 2009

North Shore Rescue search manager Tim Jones oversees a helicopter flight rescue systems training day at Bone Creek. Seven young members have been groomed for leadership roles in NSR's 10-year succession plan. Daniel Pi photo

Tim Jones humours the TV cameras. Barely. The North Shore Rescue manager is legendary for keeping at least one eye and one ear to the rescue crew at any given time.

“This is a multiple helicopter operation,” he explains, his eyes shifting back between the reporter and the stream of rescue technicians filing into the bunker at Bone Creek. “Multiple people. Multiple subjects … rescuers will be suspended from a cable simultaneously.”

The walkie talkie at his side punctuates the interview and quickly Jones is back to work.

“Okay, Bridget,” he rumbles into the speaker, “set the radios for Seymour repeater… we’re going to conduct our briefing in one minute.”

He turns to call after the crowd of rescue techs, mostly men in top-of-the-line gear – high-end Goretex shells and hard plastic boots for serious mountaineering.

These guys look like they really use their gear, too, as they smile and nod to Jones, filing into the building on burly mountain legs.

Moments earlier the helicopters arrived, the sun just up over the ridge across the Seymour Valley. In succession, the aircraft came arcing down from the skyline, like prom dates drifting down the stairs. The two yellow Talon choppers – private contractors – came first, followed by the RCMP craft, setting down on either end of the staging area by the North Shore Rescue trailer.

Today the teams at NSR, joined by Coquitlam and Lions Bay Search and Rescue teams, will run a number of staging drills to keep their helicopter rescue skills sharp. But this day is also an important one in what Jones and other veterans call the North Shore Rescue “succession plan.”

“We’re over 50,” Jones explains later of the NSR management team. “We have to take a step back.”

Just two years ago, North Shore Rescue admitted to a dire need for qualified young personnel. A committed group of now-aging guys, led by Jones and George Zilahi, built the helicopter unit from the ground up, spent between 20 and almost 40 years honing the world-class volunteer rescue agency. But due to rising real estate prices and busy family lives or lack of interest, the young people weren’t stepping up to inherit responsibilities.

Today, Mike Danks, 32 years old and 10-year member of NSR, will try his hand at third in command.

“This is a big day for Mike Danks,” Jones explains.

With Danks, five other men ages 23 to 38 have been groomed to take on increasing field responsibility, allowing Jones and Zilahi to take themselves out of critical field positions while keeping their expertise available as managers. But that plan will take at least five or six years – all told probably 10 years before the men retire.

“We’re in our 50s,” exclaims Jones, “we’re still relatively young men.” First the young crew will have to pass through the fire of Jones’ meticulous scrutiny.

“We’re proud,” Jones says, but not without firing: “They (the young rescuers) also know we’re going to be hard asses on them.”

Longline

Forty or so people are sardined in the briefing room at Bone Creek, Jones delivering a power point in his green NSR vest, two radios strapped to his chest.

“Right now, today, I’ll tall ya, it’s a Gong Show out there,” he points through the window in the direction of Seymour’s second peak. “We could easily have to rescue multiple people from Goat Mountain … you name it.”

In mid-March, with longer, warmer days, outdoor enthusiasts are starting to feel the pull of the mountains. But things go wrong in the backcountry – mudslides or avalanches, broken legs, nasty weather systems. Sometimes people get lost.

This year, NSR will have greater rescue capability with the skills to execute “multiple extractions,” rescues involving volunteers suspended from helicopters by longline with not just one, but two or eventually three choppers working at once.

But this is no cowboy drill, Jones warns the crew.

The gear bags must be packed meticulously, every time. The rescuers need to nail the timing and obey pristine communication protocol. Precision, as exemplified by NSR’s Tuesday night gear checks, is what enables the team to accomplish safe, efficient rescues.

“This (day) is a huge part of our succession plan on the team,” Jones pivots to make heavy eye contact around the board room. “I operate on a 100 per cent intensity level. I get really serious. No jacking around. If I ask you to do something, you do it. We’re not going to say please.”

Heir apparent Mike Danks says he appreciates Jones’ tough-love, often militaristic, approach to leadership grooming.

“He’s the most passionate guy I know for search and rescue,” says Danks, whose father, Allan Danks, was among NSR’s founding members. “You name it, (Jones) takes the time. He’s patient.”

Jones says the team “didn’t ask for any applications,” but watched the new recruits carefully over the last 10 years. Those deemed worthy and committed have been given the chance to take on the mantle of leadership.

“It’s draconian,” explains Jones. “The members who have trained (for the succession plan), they’re on one-year probation.”

Danks may be in the hot seat today, but the tall, lanky CNV firefighter looks calm while he dons the headset and gives orders to his team.

The choppers power up, kicking sand from the parking lot at the crowd of observers – supporters from RCMP, the Provincial Emergency Program, Integrated Public Safety, Metro Vancouver and B.C. Parks teams.

Jones looks tense, watching the pairs of heli-techs, their faces tight under the wind off the chopper blades. Danks helps coordinate as the rescuers take turns clipping in to a 45-metre rope, doing two-kilometre circuits suspended from the helicopters 900 metres above the canyon.

The pressure is on, as Danks has to know who’s on the line, who’s on deck, and where each helicopter is at in the circuit. On the ground, he communicates with the techs through hand signals.

Eventually they stage a rescue across the canyon with additional gear and a neck board, and Jones is hoarse from barking input between the drills.

“Everyone (is) really fresh with their skills,” Danks explains, pleased with the test run. “The six guys just ran through every step, every procedure.”

Groundpounders

Danks has spent a lifetime exploring the North Shore mountains, and has come through the fire with Jones before. In one rescue about four years ago, he says, “It really sunk in for me that there’s a lot of risk in this (rescue).”

Climbing a steep scree slope four years ago during a rescue in Golden Ears Provincial Park, softball-sized rocks barreled down at Jones and Danks, who luckily went unscathed.

“It was like being in a firing range,” Jones remembers. “We were lucky we didn’t get killed.”

This is something Jones hammers home to the team: NSR volunteer lives are on the line with every call.

There’s imminent danger whether it’s a night rescue – like last October’s 4 a.m. call to the Lions, where a hiker had broken her leg and waited stranded with her son, or this winter’s twilight call to help RCMP and firefighters retrieve the body of a fallen hiker from the BCMC trail on Grouse Mountain – or a dangerous weather pattern like the 2007 rescue of a snowshoer on Mount Seymour in severe avalanche danger. That op saw Jones and other NSR members stranded for three days in a storm.

The helicopter extraction is a safer, more efficient alternative to foot rescues, explains Mike LaVigne, one of six young heli rescue-techs in training. “You’re not exposing 30 guys (NSR rescuers) to ugly terrain, instead you’ve got two technicians who can go in and get this (rescue) done quickly.”

But that experience on the ground is essential too. Danks remembers one other key moment in his initiation as a “groundpounder.” In one rescue nearly eight years ago on the Grouse Grind, Jones and Danks located a man who had been carried 300 feet by an avalanche that fractured the man’s leg. They tethered him to a stretcher and then dragged him up the last third of the trail. “The snow was so deep it was incredible,” says Danks, who remembers that slog as one of the toughest in his life. “But we had done a lot of training. We were well prepared … my job was just to keep talking to the guy. Keep him awake.”

Helicopter rescues don’t preclude the need for avalanche safety training, rescue skills, stamina, stability and comfort in the mountains – those tree trunk-sized mountain legs under the Gortex outer layers.

“Plan for a one way trip (on the chopper),” Jones says. “When you know the gig is up and you have to convert from air op to ground op, you have to be just as comfortable.”

The dynasty

LaVigne, Danks, and five others – Jeff Yarnold, John Blown, Barry Mason, Jim Loree and Jones’ son Curtis Jones — will spend the next five years absorbing the legacy of Jones, Zilahi and their contemporaries.

“There’s a lot of knowledge in these guys’ heads,” explains LaVigne. “We’re being pushed forward to basically close that gap.”

The HFRS expansion is just the beginning, explains Jones. The group has an eye to building their capability for big wall rescues, for example, on the Stawamus Chief or kayak insertions for river rescues. “What we’re trying to do is specialize into a niche team,” explains Jones, who hopes the next winter drill at the team’s cabin on Dog Mountain will see steep snow insertion helicopter rescues, with one long-liner dropping in early to build a snow bench for the team.

Still, with half the crew over 45 years old, Danks says the younger generation is “going to have to step up to the plate … we’re going to lose our experienced members.”

He says he hopes more young people will step in to fill the gap: “We’re always looking for good, committed members – people that can actually commit, because of the amount of time (NSR) takes up. It’s phenomenal – a huge commitment.”

Will the young generation be able to fill Jones and Zilahi’s mountain boots?

“Tim – it’s phenomenal the time he puts in. It’s beyond belief,” wonders Danks.

Still, these seven guys will be putting in an awful lot of air time over the next few years. LaVigne explains what it’s like, clipped to the long line, exposed to 360 degrees of high-mountain views.

The chopper blades are so far above, you don’t even hear them, he says. All you hear is the wind in your ears and the drill of your training:

Jones recites the mantra, “The clock is ticking. The minute they release from that line … we’re talking areas where, if you don’t get out, this is an exercise in survival.”