101 Olauses headed your way! And other Winter Carnival news...

A 2011 model Olaus. 100 more to come this year...

Thirty members of Olaus Jeldness's family will carry a banner in the 115th Winter Carnival Parade on Friday, Jan. 27, at 6:30 p.m., followed on their heels by "101 Olauses" vying for best impersonator as adjudicated by Jeldness's great-granddaughter Randie.

"I don't know if we'll get 101 to dress up like Olaus, but we'll see!" said Lisa Wegner, the PR and marketing manager for the Winter Carnival and the event coordinator for the Spirit of Red, the group running the 101 Olaus competition. The Spirit of Red is an organization dedicated to keeping old Red Mountain and Rossland traditions alive and prospering, and they are currently raising funds to put a bronze statue of Olaus on the corner of Columbia and Washington.

Those interested in winning the grand prize, "a sur-prize," for now, Wegner told us, can learn more at the Spirit of Red website. Contestants should assemble at 6 p.m. along with other parade participants. Take note, a 2012/2013 season's pass is on the line for a lucky parade participant as well, so get your floats built and costumes on.

"Winter Carnival has changed so much since I left 17 years ago, in January of 1994," Wegner said. "Back then it was a waiters' race, pie-eating contest, stuff up at Red—and now it's huge!"

The carnival began as a ski race organized by Olaus Jeldness in 1896 up to the top of Red for a swig of something hard, and back down to Columbia Ave. Since that time, the carnival has evolved in many ways.

For contemporary Rosslanders, some events really stand out as core traditions, like the Sonny Samuelson Bobsled Race down Spokane, the King of the Mountain ski-snowboard-telemark triathlon on Red, The Game Rail Jam right downtown all weekend on Queen Street, the Olaus Invitational BC Cup Luge Race on Red, the World Championship Bigolfathon, the John Heintz Relay where contestants ski, bike, cross-country ski, snowshoe, and run their way from the top of Red to the Lions Campground—and so much more.

So much more, in fact, that we need a new run-on sentence just for the food, drink, art, music, and merry-making that define the weekend. There's the Variety Show at RSS on Thursday evening, fire dancers and fireworks after the parade on Friday, the classic Firefighters' Pancake Breakfast on Saturday morning to kill the hangover, ice sculptures all over town, live music, the ever-popular ice palace beer garden on Queen Street facing the Rail Jam, jam night at the Legion, youth art exhibits, delicious borscht and burgers, snow volleyball, the Rotary Club's 22nd Annual Wine Festival, the Kid's Carnival at the campground—and so much more.

Keeping our deep roots in mind, the Rossland Museum will be open both Saturday and Sunday, from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m., but the 115 year old tradition has two particularly exciting new elements this year.

First, it's hard to remain an objective journalist when describing the excitement that surrounds the triumphant return of Ski Bum: The Musical! to the town of its conception. The musical was created by the spectacularly-talented Iron Mountain Theatre—without hyperbole, "the Kootenay's hottest professional theatre company"—and debuted and toured widely last winter.

The musical will run both Friday and Saturday evening, from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. For those who have yet to collapse in tears and exclaim in unrepentant bursts of laughter at this spectacle of musical theatre, jam-packed with smash-hit tunes and thigh-slapping one-liners, don't wait another minute: grab a ticket.

If you've seen Ski Bum and already know the searing talent of Iron Mountain Theatre, it's time to go again. New cast member Grant Waters has taken the classic role of the cultural anthropologist studying the intricacies of ski-bummery, Monsieur Richard Posseur, previously played by the remarkable Mark Pollard.

The second event that really catches our fancy is the GT Race down Spokane Ave. after the classic bobsled competition. For obvious reasons, kids participating in the GT race must wear a helmet and have a waiver signed by a parent—waivers are available ahead of time at the Rossland Chamber of Commerce.

Find out all you need at the Winter Carnival website. The schedule of events is up now, and posters and brochures will be flying around all next week.

"Over 115 years of Winter Carnival, there have been ups and downs," she continued. "At one point, Winter Carnival wasn't even going to happen. And to see that it's at this capacity now, since I left, when it was almost gone? It's amazing. It was because of Kelly [Acheson, a core Winter Carnival organizer] who put an ad in the paper: 'We aren't having a Winter Carnival this year!' There was just an influx of people to make it happen. Because it's a huge, huge tradition in Rossland."

For Wegner, Winter Carnival is all about community spirit.

"Rossland is the pinnacle of community, the epitome of community," she enthused. "Community spirit has carried on for 115 years. There are few communities in Canada that can say we're part of this, and it doesn't change. That's why we have the volunteers come in, have the organizers come in—people are very dedicated to the cause and getting the word out there. And also the businesses, they also reap the benefits. Everyone in Rossland. It's so deeply integrated."

To that end, the call out for volunteers is still in effect. Wegner reports a "very good response" on their Jan. 15 volunteer drive, and they'll be out there again at Ferraros on Jan. 19, "but we still have a couple of areas that we're showing deficiencies in."

One is a need for "snow stompers" to pound out snow for sculptures on Thursday night—maybe it's for you?

There are fringe benefits. "Last year we did hats," Wegner said, "and this year we're featuring the matching scarf. So it's not just participating and keeping the Rossland spirit alive, it's getting that darn wonderful scarf that goes with the hat you would have got last year. If you didn't volunteer last year, you can start up the set this year, because who knows what we'll do next year? Collect 'em all!"

A massive amount of volunteer effort goes into making Winter Carnival happen. Across town, hats and scarves are off to the event coordinators who work on a very large scale to organize the events, the volunteers, and the logistics, but also crank out posters and brochures, and drum up funds in sponsorship drives.

"Right near the end, it's just like a circus. You think: How are we going to put this on?" Wegner said. But she knows how it will happen: it's the same magical spirit that brought her back after 17 years in places as disparate as Edmonton, England, Pakistan, and New Westminster.

"I came here for the summer, went into Powderhound and bought skis. I'm home," she said. "People leave, but they always come back!"