Two legends of Haliburton County have been retired after a combined 97 years of wintertime service to the Highlands community.

The ‘Red Rocket’ and ‘Eagle View’ chairlifts at Sir Sam’s Ski/Ride were dismantled over the summer, closing the book on the story of the facility’s two oldest conveyers. David Bishop, whose family founded the local recreation hub that he now manages, said the machines had been used sparingly in recent years.

The Red Rocket, installed in 1971, ran only once over the past two seasons, during the busy Family Day long weekend in 2024. The Eagle View was operational last season, but wasn’t busy, Bishop said.

“I think it was time – both lifts have been around for a lot of years, so it is a very bittersweet moment saying goodbye. I wouldn’t say there were tears, but a few moments of reflection for sure, just knowing what they meant to so many people – particularly the Red Rocket,” Bishop said.

“When I was 16, my very first summer job was painting the Red Rocket.

“Lots of memories, lots of great times – but the reality is, there’s only so much you can do with these machines once they get up there in age. They do have a shelf life,” he added.

Bishop said the decision to close the lifts was made earlier this year by a new modernization committee, which he said is looking to make improvements at Sir Sam’s.

One of this summer’s jobs was recommissioning the upper tunnel and pony lifts, which Bishop said was vital for improving hill access and beginner training. The upper tunnel, constructed in 2009, once again offers a protected route to the top of the hill, while the pony lift supports novice skiers. In total, Bishop said there will be five lifts in use this coming season.

The support poles that held up the Red Rocket have been chopped down, meaning the hill will be safer for skiers. Bishop said it will also be easier for staff to move and pack down snow from its snowmaking machines.

While Bishop said Sir Sam’s has a higher uphill capacity this year, due to the upgrades, he noted there are plans to install a brand-new chairlift.

“The question is when and where… there’s no timeframe at this point, but within the next couple of years would be lovely,” Bishop said, noting it will serve the busy side of the hill facing the chalet.

People interested in owning a piece of local history can purchase one of about 100 Red Rocket or Eagle View chairs, which are available for $1,000 if they have legs, or $750 without. Bishop said he’s planning to keep one of the Red Rocket chairs for a memorial he hopes to install at the top of the hill next spring.

With winter right around the corner, Bishop said things are ramping up at Sir Sam’s. There have been new hydrants and underground piping installed to help with snowmaking, which Bishop said means he won’t have to close any runs this season. He’s hoping to open the weekend of Dec. 13-14.

“As snow farmers, we are completely tied to the weather. The first year, in 1965, we were opening on Christmas Day and on Christmas Eve it was raining. Even back then, you didn’t know what you had and it’s even less predictable today,” Bishop said. “We need temperatures below -4 Celsius to make the snow and about 14 days of consistent cold weather to get everything ready.”

For more than 100 years, an 1888 edition of the Minden Echo sat crumpled in a knot hole, providing insulation behind siding at the back of Banks General Store in Haliburton.

It was located during renovations by a woman who then turned it over to the Haliburton Highlands Museum.

Former employee Steve Hill said he put it into a moisture chamber overnight to soften it up. He was able to lay it flat and put it under glass to hold it so it didn’t spring back up.

“That’s the best we can do with it,” Hill told people at the public launch of the Haliburton Highlands Digital Archives Oct. 22.

At the front of the room, digitization committee member, Ted Brandon, showed the oldest paper in the archives on a projector, replete with an ad for the Dominion Hotel.

“You might say that’s only half there,” he commented. “We’re excited because it’s half there. It’s pretty darn good.”

After scouring basements, back rooms, galleries, museums, and newspaper offices, the committee had Toronto-based company MES Ltd. digitize more than 7,000 Haliburton County newspapers, under some 12 mastheads. Brandon reckons it translates into about 140 years of Highlands history.

Committee member Barb Bolin said the project began as they realized a fire could wipe out much of the Highlands history as recorded in newspapers.

The committee (Jim Blake, Carol Moffatt, Adele Espina, Andrea Brown, Steve Hill, Tom Whillans, Brandon and Bolin) got to work figuring out how to do it, including finding private donors, and service clubs, to help with the cost.

Brandon recalled finding some 1977 editions that were so large they had to be folded twice. It created discoloured waves. Hill remembered how they tracked down 19 editions from 1892 that were used as kitchen flooring, found under linoleum. Former publisher of the Highlands Express, Bob Mann, had editions stored in a garage without climate control, rendering them quite dark. Brandon said they weren’t sure they’d be usable.

However, he said MES did an “amazing job.” Brandon said the papers were in Toronto for 10 months, the first three under a press to flatten them out and getting the yellowing out. They were pleased with the quality of the scans.

Mann said the Express copies came out “beautiful. I’m very impressed.”

Brandon added there are probably still thousands of newspapers that the archives don’t have.

“We are reaching out to the community, asking them to search their basement, their attic, their garage for old copies of local newspapers in the hopes that we will be able to start filling in the gaps.”

People can bring pre-1980 local newspapers to a library and they will be taken to the Haliburton Highlands Genealogy Group. They are also looking for other missing editions.

As to the name that appears in the archives the most, it is Dysart et al mayor Murray Fearrey followed by former real estate agent, Bill Kulas.

As to the community reaction to date, Bolin said, “we’ve just had wonderful, wonderful feedback about the resources available in Haliburton County.”

Go to hhda.ca

There will be a free online information session Nov. 12 at 2:30 p.m. Register by visiting HaliburtonCounty.ca/SALC

Haliburton Forest’s Thomas McCay stands at the gravesite of two young girls – sisters who died from diphtheria on consecutive days in 1889.

He is not in a graveyard, but the ghost town of Kennaway, a settlement that existed in what is today, Haliburton Forest, near Harcourt.

He is with members of the Ghost Hunters of the Grand River, a show that airs on APTN, as well as a crew associated with Sasquatch University, who track evidence of Bigfoot. It’s all part of new episodes on season three of Sasquatch University, now airing on Wild TV+.

“You see a place like this and it’s inherently spooky,” McCay says of the graves and the abandoned village, a result of the collapsed white pine industry and missing out on railways and highways.

The ghost and sasquatch hunters recently visited the Forest, camping out in search of paranormal and Bigfoot activity. They finished over the Thanksgiving weekend.

Ryan Willis of Sasquatch University said the ghost hunters brought their paranormal communications equipment. He added the crew recorded the entire stay and went back and listened to see if they had picked up disembodied voices.

“We had some voices come through the spirit box,” Willis said. “A voice said ‘let them breathe’.” Diphtheria affects breathing. “It was really creepy.”

Willis said the recorders picked up some Bigfoot evidence, too.

“We managed to get a very definitive tree knock on the recorder and audio of a really loud bang. It sounds like something throwing a log almost.” It’s believed Bigfoot communicates through tree knocking.

“It was just a good investigation all around and big thanks to Haliburton Forest for having us up.”

On Oct. 11, the Sasquatch team did a reveal for Tegan Legge, general manager, tourism and recreation at the Forest.

Legge said she didn’t think the ghost town of Kennaway was well known to most people, although “any ghost hunters would; anybody that’s really into the history of our County would. I didn’t really know about it until (Haliburton Forest) bought the property.”

Legge said she interviewed Willis for a job and that was when they first connected. “During the interview, he had kind of pitched ‘I do this Sasquatch University show; I think it would be really cool to do it in Haliburton Forest’.”

It piqued Legge’s curiousity. “I was a bit of a Sasquatch, alien encounters kind of nerd when I was a kid and into early adulthood.” She said she is a believer in the paranormal.

Willis reached out in the spring about a mashup with the ghost hunters and Sasquatch University. Legge said she had the perfect place for them. She thought of the ghost town of Kennaway and reached out to McCay, who was open to taking the crews there.

Legge said she was really excited to hear their findings. “It did not disappoint. I definitely had goosebumps from the voices they revealed to me and the knock. All those memories of all that reading and shows I’ve watched in the past came back to me. I had tears in my eyes and goosebumps and thought this is just crazy, but cool.”

Legge said working with the ghost and Bigfoot hunters was a really fun experience “I hope and anticipate they will be back.”

It’s been more than six months of “painstaking” work for about 20 Countybased volunteers, but the Haliburton Highlands Land Trust (HHLT) has reopened its seven trails around Dahl Forest nature reserve.

The 500-acre site was closed to the public following the March ice storm, with HHLT’s Joan Duhaime saying hundreds of felled trees had to be cleared from the roughly five-kilometre trails system, while several “danger trees” – still standing, but at-risk of falling – also had to be cut down.

Duhaime said that’s brought on a new-look for the reserve, which reopened Oct. 9.

“The red pine plantation was very badly impacted – there were literally hundreds of trees down,” Duhaime said. “We’re leaving the limbs where they are. The forest will regenerate, which is a good thing. This all seems really bad…but this is a very natural thing. We think this might increase the diversity of the forest.

“It didn’t happen in a way that we would have chosen, but we can already see new growth in there because there’s so much more light coming in now,” Duhaime said.

The Land Trust raised $16,000 for cleanup, with about half of that spent so far. Duhaime said HHLT hired Geeza Road Mini Excavation Co. to help clear trails.

“It took them four full days with a tractor and grappler to get through everything,” Duhaime said, with limbs pushed back into the forest. She said Outram Tree Services were drafted in to deal with the danger trees – with one more felled last week.

The big stumbling block to reopening was dealing with downed hydro lines, which connected to a house Peter and Jan Dahl were using at the time of the storm. Duhaime said HHLT opted to remove the poles and wires and leave the property without a hydro connection.

Because the Dahls donated the land to HHLT, in 2009 via the federal government’s ecological gifts program, Duhaime said the Land Trust has to get approval before it makes any changes to land use.

“We’ll be talking to see what we can do with the house, if we can still use it,” Duhaime said.

The Dahls, who lived at the house for part of the year, have opted to relocate permanently to British Columbia.

Duhaime said the aftermath of the ice storm has been the most significant event the Land Trust has ever had to deal with – saying volunteers assisted with fundraising, contractor visits, project estimates and budgets, and dealing with insurance.

Work will continue, she said – there’s leftover funds to deal with any problematic trees, while a partnership with U-Links could be right around the corner.

“We’ve put in a proposal to have someone study the regeneration process of the plantation. It’ll be quite interesting noting the impacts,” Duhaime said. “I live across from Geeza Road and there was a red pine plantation beside our driveway. We’re now seeing a lot of different trees we didn’t even know were in there.”

She said public response to the reopening has been strong, with many taking to the trails over the past couple of weeks.

“We know people are keen to get out there and hike on the trails again, but we are warning folks to be cautious,” she said. “It’s not like there’s anything in there that will be toppling frequently, but the forest took a battering. As snow starts to fall, or we have a windy day, new things arise. So, we’re keeping our eye on some areas and how things develop.”

Duhaime confirmed ‘Discovery Days’ will be back in 2026, with HHLT receiving another grant from the TD Friends of the Environment Fund to run the initiative. “We’re planning a great schedule of events for next year”

While social service agencies provide outreach from offices in Haliburton County, dedicated spaces to help people facing complex challenges, such as poverty, homelessness, and addiction, are missing, the 2025 Haliburton County Housing Summit heard last week.

Christina Alden of the John Howard Society of Kawartha Lakes and Haliburton was one of the speakers in a ‘reaching out and raising up’ panel. Alden works in the Minden office.

“I hand out sleeping bags, tents, clothing; anything else (clients) may need that we have available at the time. I offer a place to heat up the (SIRCH) meals we give out, charge their phones or tablet, and use WiFi, distribute harm reduction supplies, naloxone kits and training.”

Alden also does outreach, including to housing units. She said when people get used to workers coming on a regular basis, they are more likely to open up and ask for help. ‘Alden said people are living in tents and couch surfing. They may need help getting ID, which is crucial to accessing health care or housing to provide stability. A lot of this work is done at the Minden courthouse.

“Even with all this work, and all of the different services providing outreach … one of the biggest needs we see is for a dedicated space in each community; a place where someone can not only access our services, but also have a meal, take a shower, and do their laundry. These are basic needs that restore dignity, build trust, and make it possible for people to take the next step forward, like employment, so they can afford food, clothing and proper shelter.” Alden said.

She noted the John Howard Society is working on that in Lindsay now, “so it would be awesome if we could have that in Haliburton County, too.”

Donna Matthews is with the Eagle Lake Church ladies, who provide food to people on Highland Street in downtown Haliburton.

“Last winter was so cold; we worked outside of my car with no warming area or no washroom facilities. With the cold, there’s little or no time for them to chat and sometimes they won’t even come up because they’re just so cold. They go in for what they need, and away they go. So that is not working,” Matthews said.

She added they looked into renting a space with a small kitchen, washroom and warming area but the cost was “way above our means to support.

“Haliburton is high needs, but low resources. We could be more effective if we had a physical space where we could go in, they could be warm for an hour, use the washroom, wash your face, brush your teeth, sit and have a conversation.

They need to have a space that is warm, welcoming, friendly and safe to come to.”

David Barkley, of Coming Full Circle (CMHA HKPR), said his peer support outreach encourages people to attend dropins. “It’s important to have a safe space for people to come in and feel like it’s okay to do that and to connect.”

During her talk, Sue Tiffin, director of community outreach for the County of Haliburton, noted how the Highlands does not have a shelter for men or a shelter for homeless in general. The closest is in Lindsay.

Others speakers included: Brenda Manser with Housing First, Haliburton Highlands Health Services; Chris Parish, commander of the Haliburton County Community Paramedics; and Joel Imbeau of the Haliburton Highlands OPP mobile crisis response team.