Pemberton Waterfall, BC - Ashleigh McIvor

What's so interesting to me, is that we all have so many watermarks of our own, and that makes it so hard to choose just one. Especially since I grew up on a lake, at the family cottage. You may be expecting me to say something about winning my Olympic medal on frozen water, which wasn't even really frozen that year up at Cypress in 2010.

In reality the emotions I felt that day were nothing compared to when my husband, which you may know as former Whitecaps captain [Jay DeMerit], proposed to me. So my watermark is a very personal story, thanks Jay for being cool with me sharing it here.

Basically, I grew up in Whistler, and my whole life I'd always heard of this incredibly spectacular waterfall up above the village of Pemberton in this beautiful lush ravine. The first time I got to lay eyes on it in was with Jay, and from then forward it became my happy place. So whenever I needed to relax or feel at peace, I would envision sitting on the mossy riverbank, staring up at this beautiful waterfall. I guess at one point when Jay was on the road with the Whitecaps and I was missing him, I sent him a photo of the two of us up there and he somehow noticed that it was titled 'Happy Place' and so he decided to plan a weekend in Pemberton when he decided that he wanted to marry me.

The crazy part of the story actually is when we woke up in our tiny cabin in Pemberton, and he crawled down the ladder from our loft and started making tea, I yelled down to him, 'I had the craziest dream about auntie Shirley last night.' He kinda said 'oh yeah?' Now this is my great-aunt shirley, my mothers aunt, who had just passed away. Little did i know though, Jay had her beautiful diamond ring in his pocket that he was going to hike up to this waterfall to propose with. So he asked me about the dream, and I said 'I don't really remember but she was trying to tell me something, she was trying to have a conversation with me and i was running around and I figured i would sit down with her and have a visit later. What is so vivid in my mind is that it was this way younger version of herself, this total picture of health, totally happy looking at our family cabin.

So anyways we started off on this hike, and of course I had been inviting friends on this hike all week, because that's what I do you know? Jay and I, we're both very social and we always like to include everybody in everything. So it was a little weird to me when he said, 'You know let's just do this hike the two of us'. But when one of us says this, we respect it. So anyways we hike up to this waterfall, and in my mind it is the most beautiful in the world. Sure enough Jay got down on one knee and pulled out my late great Aunt Shirley's ring out of his pocket, and as you may have gathered I said yes. And that's how that waterfall became Jay's happy place as well. So of course, it's a very very special place, for both of us, and the fact that the Pemberton ice cap drains into that is you know, I can't imagine a world without that. So let's protect our waters, and hopefully, the Pemberton creek continues to fall, and we can visit the waterfall together for the rest of our lives.
 

Waterbody
Other
Organization
Fraser Riverkeeper
Collector
Jesse Kitteridge
Contributor
Ashleigh McIvor

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