It’s hard to imagine, but back in the 1930s members of the University of Alberta’s Varsity Ski Club would strap on skis, grab a rope and take a ride down the frozen North Saskatchewan river behind a car.
Called “skijoring,” it was just one of the Nordic ski disciplines the club offered.
“It was the most delightful sensation imaginable – a light spray of snow in our faces, the wind tossing back our hair, and our bodies leaning outward while we pulled on the ropes,” member Rita Rushworth wrote in The Gateway, U of A’s student newspaper, about careening down the river.
That’s just one snippet Lyndsay Conrad uncovered during research for her Master of Arts thesis on the little-known ski club, which became the Outdoor Club in 1938. Now pursuing a PhD in kinesiology, Conrad will be presenting Skiing Through the 1930s: Tales from the U of A Ski Club on Dec. 17 through the Alpine Club of Canada’s Edmonton chapter, where she serves as volunteer coordinator.
“When you do historical research, sometimes you don’t get an opportunity to showcase it – like the photos that I’ve found,” Conrad says. “I thought it would be a great opportunity to be able to showcase those photos and tell the story through them.”
In the ‘30s, with a wilder river valley and less development, the club would go on Sunday Ski Hikes, attaching seal skin to their skis to hike uphill and then ski down. The club also organized ski meets, ran a ski jump and built a cabin, located where Groat Road is today. “It was very different,” Conrad says. “When you think about the area west of the university, it was not developed at that time. It was a forested area. The photos depict the cabin, which was right near the Royal Mayfair golf course.”
While Conrad’s upcoming talk will focus primarily on the photos in Dr. H. E. Bulyea’s collection (he was the first dean of dentistry), she also co-hosts a podcast called Ski Like a Girl that uses historical research to tell the stories of women in Nordic sports like ski jumping, cross-country skiing and biathlon. She and her co-hosts launched the second season of the podcast earlier this month, but the very first episode focuses on the women of the Varsity Ski Club. “When the ski club started in 1932, 50 per cent of the executive were female,” Conrad says. “A lot of the articles in The Gateway student newspaper indicated that there were quite a few women in the club.” (For context, in the 1930s in Canada, only 20 per cent of university students were women.)
In the podcast episode, she highlights how some of those women went on to become leaders in their fields – like Marjorie Montgomery Bowker, Alberta’s first female family court judge.
As for the ski club, most Edmontonians have no idea it existed. “When I present and tell an audience where the cabin was and where the ski hill was, people are very excited by that,” Conrad says. “We’re really unaware of the kind of rich history skiing at the U of A — and in Edmonton in general — has.”
Skiing Through the 1930s: Tales from the U of A Ski Club takes place on Dec. 17, 2025 at 6:30 p.m. at Arcadia Brewing. Registration is first come, first served.
