I have been on skis since I was four
and I have not missed a winter since.
I started at Lake Louise, mostly by refusing to stay in the daycare at the bottom of the hill. I raced out of Fortress. I skied Sunshine with my older brother and his friends, who did not wait for anybody. Instructor at sixteen. Volunteer ski patrol at Lake Louise at twenty-nine.
I moved to Revelstoke because I got tired of visiting it and wanted to ski like a daily workout. The pow, terrain, accessibility from your home and a fabulous caring community - you just can’t beat it. Three days a week now, sometimes five. Summers it is usually a paddleboard, and lately a motorbike.
Which means the sun has been on my face for over forty years. You can see that it has, if you look closely. I would not give back a single day of it.
Feet First
Pedorthics is the longest thing I have done. Kinesiology at the University of Calgary — I started in the outdoor pursuits program, picked up biomechanics along the way, and finished with a major in exercise and health physiology. Then a Calgary foot clinic, hired me for the retail floor, the management side, and I was taken on as the owner's first pedorthic protégé.
Pedorthic certification was a two-year mentorship then. Once I became a pedorthist I moved further into clinical work every year until that was all I did. It was a busy practice with a wide range of patients, including referrals from a high-risk wound clinic.
While I was there, the way you became certified changed. The mentorship gave way to a post-degree diploma at Western University. With two colleagues from the clinic we developed and taught the orthotics side of it — how to make an orthotic, how to run the lab, health and safety. I kept teaching those courses for years afterwards, eventually on my own.
I still practise pedorthics and I always will. But my toolbox had got too small for what I wanted to be able to do for people. Chinese medicine was not new to me by then. Friends from Nelson introduced me to it in my twenties, when I had sore swollen knees from skiing, and I kept going back — through the first challenging years of starting out as a practitioner, and later when we were trying for our sons, both times. By the time I applied to school it had become the primary way our household looked after itselves.
Near the end of my studies I went to China with the school. I shadowed at a hospital where Western and Chinese medicine were practised together, and sat in on a lecture at the parent university - where I also saw ancient texts and a huge herbal library.
I now practise both, pedorthics and Chinese medicine, out of Jade Wellness in Revelstoke since 2020. Facial acupuncture is part of that work, and it is how I came to make skincare.
An oil cleanser came into the clinic for facial treatments — American, expensive, awkward to reorder across a border. It was better than anything I had used. Then I read the ingredient list and realised most of it was already on my shelf.
So I made my own. Then I changed it and made it again, and I have been doing that ever since. Every version goes on my own face first and stays there for months before anyone else sees it.
One Christmas I gave small bottles to friends and family, three different blends. The one I had built for skin that has spent its life outdoors was the one people came back and asked for.
That is this line. Not a range that got extended — the three bottles that survived.
Why there is a bottle
Who I made it for
I do not wear makeup. I never have, much. And I do not wear sunscreen every day — only when I am genuinely in it, paddleboarding or ski touring or out for a long day, and I put it on right before I go.
So there is nothing on my face most days. That is the whole reason this line is shaped the way it is. I was not making something to go under makeup. I was making it for skin that gets looked at bare.
Most of the people I treat are the same. Outside, active, and not carrying a cosmetics bag up a mountain.