2019 NPOY Photos and Article Finalists
2019 NPOY Photos and Article – Sponsored by Fujifilm
Listed in alphabetical order.
Evan Buhler / The Rocky Mountain Outlook
Before his accident, Adam Campbell could quickly and effortlessly traverse more than a dozen mountain peaks in a single day.
Campbell was an accomplished elite-level ultramarathoner who’s life changed on Aug. 31, 2016 while attempting the Horseshoe Traverse with two friends in Rogers Pass, B.C. The 35 mile crescent-shaped traverse involved linking 14 mountain peaks, crossing glaciers and scrambling and climbing.
It normally takes three to five days to complete. The trio was attempting to complete the high-alpine route in less than 24 hours.
When grabbing for a rock on Sulzer Tower, it let go and Campbell fell backwards more than 200 feet down a series of rocky cliffs, before coming to rest on a ledge. He remained conscious during the entire ordeal.
Campbell suffered three broken vertebrae and now has two metal rods in his back. His pelvic bone had to be pinned back together, and his ankle was broken. He received multiple deep lacerations and stitches on every knuckle on both hands.
“I had no business being alive, but I was,” recalled Campbell.
Campbell said while in hospital, in Kamloops, the first few weeks were filled with fear and uncertainty. He was surrounded by friends and family during his hospitalization, which he cites as paramount to his recovery.
One nagging thought on his mind was what his future as an athlete would be finished. Just two months after the accident he took to the trails again. But it was too soon, and he had to spend time in a wheelchair again.
“I learned to accept that entire recovery process and not set arbitrary goals for myself that I must be better by this date,” he said. “I pushed myself a little bit, but I also realized there were some days I just had to lay down and that’s part of the recovery process as well.”
Before the accident Campbell, who lives in Canmore with his wife Laura Kosakoski, explained running was his emotional coping mechanism. Without his ability to move through the mountains during his recovery, he looked for different emotional outlets.
He started to embrace more of his creative side and began to write and sketch images of the mountains he once climbed. Kosakoski remembered choosing to walk along the banks of the Bow River instead of running up Mount Lady MacDonald.
“Before the accident Adam was very singularly minded in terms of being a high performance athlete and it was very interesting to see him branch out after that,” said Kosakoski. “It was like a forced slow down.
“I think he has a lot more perspective now and appreciation for things beyond competition and achievements, and how important it is to have relationships and family when you really need it.”
Today, three years after his accident, Campbell can still be found on numerous adventures in the mountains from trail running and climbing in the summer, to ski mountaineering in the winter.
“It allowed me to dial the pressure back on myself a little bit. These days I still enjoy moving fast in the mountains, but it’s much less about the competition than it is just being outside,” said Campbell.
He admits he will never get back to where he was, but he hasn’t taken his name out of the hat in regards to competing in races. Just 10 months after his accident, he competed in one of the most difficult ultra marathons, the Hundred Mile Hard Rock Marathon, in Colorado.
For Campbell, races serve as a training tool for his new personal adventures, where as before he would use the adventures as training for the races. Now he is motivated by personal adventures and looking for new routes to link together.
Despite his comeback, Campbell admits he is still not fully recovered, both physically and mentally. He still deals with aches and pains while out in the backcountry and in everyday life. He says he still gets flashbacks to the accident when he finds himself in similar terrain.
“Occasionally I get scared. I get the odd flashback to my accident and I have to kind sit down and either turn around at that point, or just have a little internal conversation about wether or not it’s a rational fear.”
Campbell’s latest endeavour saw him spend two days running in the Purcell Ranges, using the Purcell Mountain Lodge as a base. He found himself nearly face-to-face with the very same mountain he fell off three years ago.
“It’s really fitting to be here now, I mean it’s almost three years to the day when I had the accident,” said Campbell as he pointed out the Sulzer Tower from across the valley.
His drive to continue adventuring can be traced back to his passion for being outside. He is still drawn to challenges that push his limits.
“I think because the accident was so severe and I was just so fortunate to be alive, I kind of made a conscious choice not to focus on the things I lost and celebrate what I was able to do.”
Jenna Hauck / The Chilliwack Progress
The Making of Medieval Armour
Dale Rosamond stands in his small kitchen apartment rifling through a cupboard looking for a plate. His tall frame makes it easy for him to see everything on the top shelf without using a step stool.
It’s not a dinner plate he’s looking for, or even a smaller dessert plate. Rosamond is searching for a square sheet of copper, about six inches by six inches, on which he can engrave words.
He’ll be using it as part of a medieval shield he’s making for a friend.
The heavy metal shield stands half-finished on a workbench beside Rosamond whose home is filled with helmets, plate armour and swords, all of which he’s lovingly handmade out of scraps of metal he’s brought home from work.
This is Hamster and Elderberry Armory.
There are two fascinating things about Rosamond’s new-found hobby: the fact that he bends, hammers, cuts and finishes every single metal piece by hand; and the fact that his workshop is located entirely within his tiny apartment… more specifically his dining room.
It all began about a year ago. He was trying to get his mind off of the recent loss of his two horses and dog, and at the same time he was recovering from two workplace injuries.
“I needed something to occupy my brain,” says Rosamond. “Because as soon as I stopped, everything would come forward. I would cry about my dog, my horses, and develop a series of bad luck.”
A cowboy at heart, he started by making belt buckles. From there he built a metal table and then his first shield.
He shared a picture of that shield with a medieval historical society group on Facebook, which didn’t go over very well. People started slamming him stating traditional medieval shields were made of wood, not steel.
Despite the criticism, something good came out of it though — the name “Hamster and Elderberry.”
Rosamond was joking back and forth with a man in England on that Facebook group quoting the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It was the line by the Taunting French Guard “your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries” that was the inspiration for the name of his armoury.
Over the past several months, Rosamond has been spending his spare time making helmets, plate armour, shields, swords and other medieval items. He’s created ornamental pieces that folks hang on their wall or place on their shelf, and heavy-duty armour for people who take part in re-enactments and have real one-one-one battles.
“My first target audience was the re-enactors and that is truly where my passion is,” he says.
He has “no idea” how he got the training for working with metal — it all just came naturally to him, though he thinks it’s in his blood thanks to his father who’s a handyman and his brother who’s an artist.
“I am doing it very slowly because I love my job and I don’t want to turn my hobby into a job,” he adds.
Rosamond was recently hired to make props for a Vancouver theatre company for its production of Hamlet. His apartment was “mayhem” while making the eight shields, two swords and three helmets for Palme Russian Theatre. Made from aluminum, the stage pieces are lightweight.
His friend James Zoral does all the woodwork for him, like pieces of the shields and sword handles.
Everything Rosamond makes is built within the confines of his seven-foot-by-seven-foot metal shop. Instead of a kitchen table in his dining room, he has a work bench and power tools.
To help absorb the noise of the hammering and grinding, he’s added multiple layers of foam and cardboard to the floor of his work space for the benefit of his downstairs neighbour.
“He didn’t even know I had a drill press. These people don’t even know I have power tools, and my neighbours don’t even hear me hammering,” says Rosamond, who approached his neighbours beforehand to tell them he’d be making noise. Respectfully, he gave them his phone number in case they wanted him to stop.
He says you have to respect your neighbours — that’s part of communal living.
Rosamond does all the quiet work at Hamster and Elderberry Armory late at night. The noisy jobs like grinding and hammering take place during the day on weekends.
“I do a lot of hand filing. I’m in an apartment, so I can’t be all the time on the grinder. I do most of my stuff with hand files.”
“Here’s the thing, I don’t have any of the proper tools, or the molds, or anything, so I need stuff to shape this metal… that’s a trailer hitch,” he says pointing to a metal sphere in the corner.
He uses an old cobbler’s anvil which he found at a second-hand store to shape the metal, as well as a small chunk of railway track. He even uses the top of a metal-backed chair to bend some pieces, and his oven to temper the metal.
“I have baked more metal in that oven than I have pizzas,” Rosamond laughs.
Though his hammers are not the highest quality, they’ll do for the time being.
“For now I’m building stuff that looks like it’s already been in the melee,” he says. “I believe, if a woman finds a knight in shining armour, chances are he’s never been in a scrape.”
Regardless of what makeshift forms he uses to shape the metal, making armour puts him into the zone. And he always listens to Templar music while working the steel.
“When I sit down and I’m shaping a piece of metal, it just shuts off all the background noise,” says Rosamond. “I think it’s a beautiful art form.”
Jesse Winter / Torstar
As Vancouver moves to clear Oppenheimer Park of homeless people, one man struggles to find his place
VANCOUVER—A heavy rain beats a staccato rhythm on the overdose prevention site’s tented roof. Inside, Reece Draayers sparks up a cigarette and chats with a friend loading a tiny rock into a glass pipe.
The conversation ranges from family and friendship, to Draayers’ Indigenous Wuikinuxv ancestry on B.C.’s central coast, before finally settling on the issue that’s been taking up space in everyone’s minds here at Oppenheimer Park: the impending closure of the long-standing homeless encampment.
It’s Wednesday morning, and a deadline looms. The city said an increase in fires, violence and drug dealing at the site has forced it to close the tent city. On Monday, Vancouver’s parks board told the roughly 200 campers here they had three days to pack up and leave.
“The city needs to handle this with love, with open arms,” Draayers says. “Everyone here is somebody’s someone.”
Draayers spends hours every day at the overdose prevention site, which everyone here simply calls the OPS tent. He leaves only to get some food, pick up his social assistance check or sleep.
His only home at the moment is a space in a tent a few feet away that he shares with local activist Chrissy Brett. The two are among a handful of people who staff the OPS tent 24 hours a day, keeping watch as their friends and neighbours use drugs amid the worst overdose crisis in Vancouver’s history.
Star Vancouver followed Draayers as he joined the many campers vying for space in one of the 140 units of subsidized housing and shelter beds the city said are available through non-profit providers.
The day before, on Tuesday morning, the scene across the street at the Atira Women’s Resource Society intake office is tense. Nerves are frayed. Intake workers sit with prospective clients, trying to help people find a place to go after the camp closes.
Atira’s director Janice Abbott told Star Vancouver her organization was in the dark about the city’s plans until “the eleventh hour.” Ultimately, Atira refused to help inform campers they had to leave, opting only to work around the park’s edges trying to find housing for people who wanted somewhere else to go.
Outside the intake office, Draayers meets with Fiona York, an advocate with the Carnegie Community Action Project. She’s helping him navigate the paperwork required to hopefully get a space in one of Atira’s buildings.
After a brief meeting, Draayers is told there is a space available at the historic Gastown Hotel. It’s a single-room-occupancy building, meaning tenants get one small room to themselves and must share bathrooms and kitchens with others on their floor. SROs constitute the lowest rung on the social housing ladder, providing minimal space to some of the city’s most marginalized and vulnerable people.
Word also comes in through York that a space might be available at a different SRO run by the Lookout Housing and Health Society. It’s closer to the Downtown Eastside and it caters to queer and trans clients. For Draayers, who identifies as two-spirited, it sounds like a promising location.
“How can you say no to that?” he asks. “It’s closer to my friends. I wouldn’t have to hike from Gastown every day to get food. It sounds great.”
After finding someone to cover his shift at the OPS tent, Draayers gets a tour of both buildings. At the Lookout building, Draayers meets with the on-site manager, who shows him around.
Safe-space posters and rainbow flags hang on the walls and in the common kitchen area.
Draayers likes the atmosphere immediately.
On the top floor, the manager shoos away two young men who are using drugs in a stairwell. The building is low-barrier, which means drugs are allowed. Harm-reduction supplies like clean needles and pipes are available for free, but tenants are asked not to use in shared spaces, the manager explains before showing Draayers the building’s rooftop garden.
“What a view!” he shouts, spinning around on the patio. “It’s like Sex and the City!”
Back downstairs, the door to the common laundry room is locked from the inside. The manager bangs on it, shouting at whoever is inside that she is calling the police. She suspects it’s someone who isn’t a tenant.
“People are always sneaking in here,” she says.
Later, at the Atira building in Gastown, a man is hunched over in the entranceway with a needle in his arm. Others congregate around the first-floor elevator.
Draayers is told to wait by the reception desk while an Atira staff member double-checks that the available room has indeed been vacated.
On the 5th floor, the doorway to one unit is open, with a man splayed out unconscious on the floor. A woman next to him prepares a syringe of her own, surrounded by piles of belongings and trash.
Many of the SROs in Vancouver are notorious for bedbug infestations. Earlier that day at Oppenheimer Park, a man who said he was a resident of a different Atira building spread out white glue traps on the ground. They were caked with dead cockroaches, bedbugs and other pests.
The man — who would not give his name — said he brought the traps from his room to the park so campers would better understand the kind of buildings they were being asked to move into.
Abbott confirmed that Atira often uses glue traps to try to control the spread of pests at some of its buildings. All Atira buildings have constant pest-control responses in place, but larger buildings often present the biggest challenges, she said.
She also said Atira staff have since late 2016 encouraged tenants to use drugs in shared spaces rather than behind closed doors because it is safer.
“The priority is keeping everyone alive, and to do that, people must use where they can be seen” in case they overdose, Abbott said.
The drug use in the buildings doesn’t bother Draayers; he’s seen as bad or worse at Oppenheimer Park. It’s why he’s so committed to his work at the OPS tent.
Having seen the two options, Draayers says he’d still definitely prefer the Lookout building.
Draayers says he moved to Vancouver from Chilliwack, where he was working as a road construction flagger. He says he had to leave because he couldn’t find a landlord who would rent to an Indigenous person.
In the four months that he’s lived at Oppenheimer Park, he says, all his possessions were stolen, including the steel-toed boots he needs for work.
But late Tuesday afternoon, he discovers there isn’t a space available at the Lookout building after all. Frustrated, Draayers returns to the OPS tent, set on staying in the park rather than moving into the Gastown building.
“The place is full of bedbugs,” he said. “Did you see the toilet? It doesn’t even work. The sink was hanging off the wall.”
The day of the deadline arrived, bringing with it heavy rains. City workers dragged away soaking tents they believed to be abandoned.
It was also “cheque day”: when social-assistance payments are handed out across the city, sparking a rise in overdoses. Draayers spent most of the day at the OPS tent, keeping vigil while other campers used.
As the 6 p.m. deadline neared, Fiona York arrived with news. Atira workers had identified a new unit at the Gastown SRO, one near the top floor with a view of the harbour. She urged Draayers to reconsider.
Meanwhile, dozens of campers and activists gathered near the tent Draayers shares with Chrissy Brett. They were planning a protest march along Vancouver’s Hastings St., into the heart of the Downtown Eastside — pushback, they said, against the city’s plans to evict campers from the park.
Draayers weighs his options and comes up with a compromise. He’ll agree to move into the Gastown SRO — bedbugs and broken sinks be damned — but he wants to maintain a tent at Oppenheimer Park in protest and keep working at the overdose prevention site.
As the clock ticked down Wednesday evening, TV news crews began setting up on the edges of the park. While journalists were preparing to document a mass eviction that never came — 6 p.m. passed without incident — Draayers was leading around 100 demonstrators through Vancouver’s streets.
They blocked the busy intersection at Main and Hastings streets for 20 minutes, shouting demands like “House keys, not handcuffs!” and “Hands off Oppenheimer!” Draayers bellowed the anthems until his voice gave out.
The procession ended with a prayer circle back at the camp. Linking arms with fellow campers and activists, Draayers made a vow.
“I’ll be down here until every last one of these people is housed,” he said.
The list of all 2019 NPOY nominees.
