About us

Hi. We’re Sarah and Tom. We wrote this page together on a Sunday morning in September, one of us with tea, one of us with coffee. This is the honest version.

We traded a Liberty Village condo for a Banff basement suite in 2022. It was not a plan. Tom had been coming out for two weeks every summer since he was a kid and had been threatening to move for as long as I’d known him. In the spring of 2022 the lease on our Toronto flat came up for renewal, his uncle called and said his neighbour was renting out a basement suite on Muskrat Street, and Tom looked at me and said “shall we?” and I said “yes.” It was Tuesday. By Friday we’d signed. We drove west with a Prius full of houseplants and one very unhappy cat.

Four years later, we are still in the same basement suite, and we now know things like which grocery store has real feta on a Thursday, which coffee shop stays open when the bus tour hits, and how to shovel a path from the front door to the car in under six minutes when it’s minus twenty-three. We know a couple of names of ravens that hang around outside our window. We’ve learned that the mountain doesn’t care about your plans, and that this is a feature, not a bug.

Sarah is a copywriter. I was a copywriter in Toronto and I still am, but the work is now half of what it was and I have replaced the missing half with editing other people’s essays about mountains. Tom used to run a small café on Queen West. He now walks dogs for a living, sometimes six at a time, in various states of weather. He is happier than he was.

We started writing these posts as long e-mails to friends back east who kept asking “so what’s it actually like?”. Enough of them said “you should put this online” that eventually we did. There’s no schedule and no editor. There are also no ads, no sponsored posts, no affiliate anything, and no tickets for sale — we don’t and won’t sell anything on this site.

A few things this blog is not

• It is not a ticket seller. We have never sold a ticket in our lives, we don’t process payments, and we don’t plan to start. If a page anywhere pretending to be us tries to take a card, it is not us.
• It is not an official operator page. The people who actually run the lift and the boardwalk have not asked us to write this and would probably fix a few things if they had. That’s the point of an independent blog.
• It is not sponsored. We have politely turned down five approaches to make it sponsored, and one to run advertising. Everything on here is our own opinion, formed on our own time, with our own coffee.
• It is not perfect. If we’ve got something wrong — a hour changed, a policy shifted, a trailhead moved — write in via the contact page and we’ll fix it on the next slow Sunday.

Off the mountain: we walk. A lot. We read too many books and we bake too much bread. The cat has forgiven us. Thank you for reading.

— S. & T.