By Georgia Twiss, Reference Historian
The third week of November marks Archives Awareness Week in British Columbia.
BC Archives Awareness Week is meant to raise public awareness for archives and archival records in communities across the province. This year’s theme is ‘Memories and Milestones: Celebrating Anniversaries in the Archives‘, which asks us to recognize and celebrate milestones and anniversaries from our organizational history or those found within fonds and collections in our holdings with community connections. Looking forward for North Vancouver, 2026 marks the centenary of Grouse Mountain Resorts, giving us the opportunity to reflect on the way Grouse Mountain shows up in our archival collection, and share about a recent major donation of records from Grouse Mountain Resorts Limited.
THE STORY OF GROUSE
Located on the traditional territory of the Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, the first settlers summited Grouse in 1894. The group chose to name the mountain after the Blue Grouse birds who are found in abundance throughout the North Shore Mountains. In 1907, the mountain became the homebase of the Vancouver Mountaineering Club, later renamed the British Columbia Mountaineering Club, who built their cabin on one of the slopes in the Spring of 1910. By the 1920s the mountain was home to a village of cabins from which grew a small but lively community.
In the fall of 1926, the Grouse Mountain Chalet and Grouse Mountain Highway were constructed, marking the beginning of Grouse Mountain Resorts Limited and the commercial history of the mountain. Over the next century, the company transformed the mountain into an internationally known tourist destination. The old Grouse Mountain Highway became a thing of the past, replaced by a chairlift and then modern aerial tramways. Night-skiing and artificial snow were introduced to prolong the season, and new attractions were implemented to ensure year-round tourism. Half a century ago, its south slopes, which include the popular Grouse Grind and BCMC trail, were designated a regional park.
GROUSE MOUNTAIN IN OUR ARCHIVES
Records relating to Grouse Mountain have been a part of our collection since the earliest beginnings of MONOVA. The story of the mountain is woven throughout the archives’ shelves in photographs, correspondence, advertising material, scrapbooks, oral histories, memoirs and other ephemera. This pattern of donation, scattered across a wide swath of donors, reflects the importance of Grouse Mountain to the lives of North Vancouverites: as a place of sport, recreation, industry, ingenuity, and celebration.
In 2024, MONOVA received an accrual donation of Grouse Mountain Resorts Limited records which tell the story of the last century of the mountain. Made up of over 17,700 images and a variety of different textual records, including scrapbooks, brochures, pamphlets and reports, the donation represents the largest collection of photographic material in our holdings. Over the last year, we have begun the early stages of processing these records in anticipation for the centenary of the resort in 2026. So far this has entailed sorting the photographic prints and weeding out duplicates, and having volunteers scan the larger sets of negatives from the 1950 and 1951 season. Fully processing a set of records of this size will take years of work, but we look forward to sharing updates on the project going forward. If you are interested in supporting this work, please donate to the MONOVA Archives, to help our preservation and digitization efforts!
To learn more, drop in and visit us at 3203 Institute Road. Early in the new year, we will be celebrating Grouse Mountain Resort’s centenary with a display created by a Langara College practicum student, Natayla Porter.
OTHER RECORDS & COLLECTIONS TO SEE RELATING TO GROUSE MOUNTAIN
Don and Phyllis Munday Grouse Mountain Album
British Columbia Mountaineering Club Fonds
