MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Winter Spring 2019

WINTER/SPRING 2019 MLCM 93 words :: Feet Banks As far as ski and mountain culture is concerned, it’s by far the most important room in the house: the garage. Because in the right hands, that cold slab of automobile storage space becomes a shrine to the wilderness beyond its concrete walls, and a celebration of those who make their lives there. All hail the garage museum. And it almost always starts with a waxing bench. “That’s part of the fun really,” says Scott ‘Scooby’ Paxton. “You get a couple buddies over, tune your skis and tell stories.” But if you tell enough stories in one place, they begin to stick. One piece at a time, Paxton has accumulated an assortment of artifacts to accompany, and inspire, the stories being told around his waxing bench: old race bibs, signs, medals, maps, photos, posters, a leather Southside Deli jacket, and wall-mounted skis from the past four decades of life in the Coast Mountains. “My most prized possessions are probably my old season’s passes,” Paxton says of the hundreds of items carefully displayed in the back room of his Squamish garage. “Those passes…you can see the years going by and it just blows me away. You’ll notice I was unable to grow a moustache in 1978 but I had one by 1981 and I kept it until I was 30. Then the porn ‘stache had to go.” Paxton was just 18 years old on November 13, 1978—the day he and a friend rolled into Whistler and got jobs at The Keg. “We rented a place in Alpine Meadows,” he recalls. “Wood floors and a kick-ass stereo—we were pumped.” Right around the time his moustache came in, Paxton started working with the Whistler Mountain race department and ended up befriending Dave Murray, who volunteered him for a job schlepping Atomic skis up Whistler Mountain in the summer for the legendary Dave Murray Summer Ski Camps. That led to a job as an Atomic rep, as evidenced by the meticulously arranged wall of Atomics dominating the back corner of his space. MONSTER GARAGE Preserving history one plank at a time MOUNTAIN HOME Scott Paxton likes Atomic skis, vintage photos, and South Side Deli breakfasts. MARK GRIBBON