Hot Hunks Pole Climbing and Other Canadian Treats

by Linda Solomon for The Vancouver Observer
 As I had just shelled out nearly seventy-five dollars to get my two boys, aged 5 and 11, and my eleven-year-old's friend  on this trip,  I was hellbent on having  fun.

After  the Capilano Suspension Bridge, Grouse Mountain demanded to be done. After all, it's on the same road, only higher. An invisible force field seemed to be pulling cars from one parking lot to the other and so I gave in to the magnetic compulsion and allowed my car to turn upwards, without being sure what a ski mountain had to offer in the last days of summer. When we first arrived at the ticket office, the attendant described what sounded like a theme amusement park. There was a lumberjack show, a bird show and, for an additional fee, we could take a helicopter ride.

We'd already paid enough, I figured, and we'd already enjoyed the pioneer theme of the Capilano Suspension Bridge tour. There, they'd employed young talent and made the best out of what could have been a bad thing. The jokes had been funny, the singing sweet. But lumberjacks? Oh, well, I thought, as my five year old tugged at me. "Mom, let's go." I punched in my bank code very regretfully, knowing full well it was too late to turn back.

There had been another amusement park; before the Capilano Suspension Bridge, that is. A couple of months earlier, we’d followed the billboards leading to DinoTown, near Hope. Billed as “North America’s only cartoon Dinosaur Town,” DinoTown offered games and junk food, but little pleasure for those over five gullible enough to swivel its turnstiles.

With ever present recordings of what sounded like a DinoTown Tabernacle choir singing odes to the fun that was supposedly being had in the grotty, little tourist trap, I felt like I was being brainwashed by a cult of DinoFreaks who were trying to convince me that Dinos would soon rise from the dead, and when they did, my eternal soul would be saved.

Sad, poorly maintained Jurassic figures and loud, loopy music didn’t buck up at $13.00 per person, even though the entry allows you the questionable privilege of staying all day.

My older son and I had the feeling that we had stumbled into a bad cartoon we couldn’t get out of, because my younger son was so utterly enthralled by it.

He didn’t care that the gooney golf carpet was so lumpy a golf ball couldn’t anymore have gotten over it than it could have sprouted legs and walked away. He saw magic in the bright pink dinosaurs and mosquito-infested paddle boat course. He was so enchanted with them that he infuriated his elders by demanding to go on the boat ride over and over and threw a mini-tantrum when we finally insisted on scratching our badly bitten bodies on land.

DinoTown was a bad Canadian dream. This had to be better.

After learning from the tram operator that over a million people a year pass through Grouse Mountain to ski or enjoy summer recreation, we contributed to the numbers by getting off and following the crowd into the Grouse Mountain Lodge.

We ate in the Grouse Grind restaurant, named after the famous trail that hikers were streaming up even as we ate our tuna fish sandwiches. We sat on the deck, enjoying the remarkable views and watching exhausted-looking men, women and children from around the world emerge out of the woods and collapse onto big boulders to lie down in the sun, or trudge the last few steps to the lodge.

Satisfied by the lunch, we headed to the first attraction: Real grizzlies living in a “real” grizzly habitat. Following the children, I scampered up a trail and found about a hundred people clustered around a fence, staring intently at a tree covered knoll.

After a while, something moved in the faux bush.

Excitement rippled through the crowd.

“There it is,” someone said.

Necks craned. Kids climbed onto their fathers’ shoulders.

People attempted to maintain a polite demeanor while struggling to position themselves in front of others who had managed to be in or towards the front of the pack. My kids ran to the side of the crowd. Then they ran to the other side. Then the bear exposed itself.

He, or she lumbered down the side of the hill and went to forage around the open side, as if it were alone in the wild.

The hundred tourists ran in a pack to the other side of the knoll and made elated human cries. The bear continued foraging and acting like a movie star plagued by a pack of paparazzi. In other words, it pretended to ignore us. After a while, however, perhaps the bear became irritated by all the attention. Or perhaps it craved more.

Whatever the case, it stood up and waved its arms. Its nose twitched as it scanned the bodies straining to take its picture. It could only have been thinking what a great meal that guy climbing up on his wife’s back to get a good photograph would make, if only that damn fence weren’t there.


Hot Hunks Pole Climbing

It was time for the lumberjack show. We heard the announcement and then raced en masse over to the bleachers were country western music was playing, giving me the sinking suspicion that this was going to be bad. DinoTown bad.

The emcee ferreted out the exotic locales some in the audience had traveled from. Nigerians, Indians, even Americans, shouted out the names of their native lands. The schtick was particularly funny because nobody has thrown a tree or slung an ax for real in probably forty-five years. Nobody has cut a tree with an ax in probably seventy years.

The emcee, a young woman, managed to make it clear within the first three minutes that this romantic depiction of manual labour in the Canadian backwoods would be tongue-in-cheek. My sixteen-year-old friend, Aliana, who was visiting from New York, was delighted when the two “lumberjacks” came out from wherever they’d been hiding.  Her mother, Lynn, author of the best-selling novel, The Botox Diaries, had craftily eased out of this adventure, citing a "need" to explore the possibility of including something in the next story she'd be working on a about a spa, notably the Miraj Hammam Spa, on Granville, where her "research" would force her to sample the steam bath, rub, and massage.

 They were “hot," Aliana said, and the tall one with the brown hair, whose name we learned was “Johnny” was “really hot.”

You had to be there. I can't tell you why it was  funny, but it was. I don't want to give it all away. Look, I paid $75 for this treat. I'm not giving it to you for nothing.

I will tell you that “Johnny” and “Willy” climbed poles, threw axes and rolled a log. And that two sophisticated New Yorkers, one Canadian wannabe, and three boys aged 5 to 11 laughed hard through the whole thing, so hard that time seemed to stop.

Unfortunately, however, time hadn't stopped. The show ended and we we ran en masse towards the tram where we discovered that we were too many to fit in.

So, we stood and waited twenty minutes for the next ride down the mountain, trying to at least look patient, while edging to get closer to the front of the pack, straining towards the little car that would carry us along on that gorgeous ride down.

On the way down, I reflected on whether it had been worth the fee. Taking a tram to a mountaintop to enjoy great Canadian humour and a preening grizzly was fun, alright, but was it worth seventy-five bucks?

I wasn't convinced.

Lynn, however, was certain she'd gotten her money's worth. She came back from the spa relaxed and smiling.
            

Read more great local news and features about Vancouver on The Vancouver Observer.