A local fundraiser that started in a snowy highway ditch has grown into an event that refuses to slow down, and now includes wheeled riders in the desert. 

We follow the history of Yorkton’s Snowarama from a 1977 ride sparked by the pro wrestler "Whipper" Billy Watson to a multi‑chapter effort that supports SaskAbilities programs including Camp Easter Seal, the summer fun program, and adaptive technology services that enhance the lives of clients with various challenges. 

A number of those who built and grew the event talk about why they did what they did, and still do! Founders, fundraisers, and next‑gen riders share how Yorkton's Snowarama kept growing while those in Regina and Saskatoon didn't make it into this century.

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Duval Lang, known to many as Duve, has been immersed in Calgary live theatre for 46 years now. He ended up there for university, and has called it home ever since, other than when he travelled the world as an actor.

But in Yorkton, in the 1960s, he was one of the players on a provincial high school championship football team, representing Yorkton Collegiate Institute; not a big guy to be playing on the line, but fast and pesky for the opposition to deal with. 

His dad, Elmer Lang, owned a plumbing business among various endeavours, and was involved in baseball, hockey and curling in the city; his mother Meta volunteered for many community organizations, including the Yorkton Arts Centre and its art gallery.

We talked about his life in Yorkton as a youth, and his long and well-recognized, rewarded and rewarding career in live theatre.

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To the many newer residents of Yorkton, the name Ruth Shaw likely isn’t recognizable. But to those who lived here in the latter half of the previous century, the name, and the woman who bore that name, was an unassuming but powerful force and voice in helping the province and beyond know about Yorkton through at least three major roles she played in the city.

For 16 years she was the reporter and bureau manager of the Regina Leader-Post, a job she took over from her husband when Cliff died unexpectedly at an early age. She was then the manager of the Yorkton Chamber of Commerce for 22 years. 

During all that time, she was an active promoter of Yorkton events, and was involved in the formation of the Yorkton Arts Council and the Yorkton Film Society, which became the Yorkton Film Festival.

In retirement when she was in her 80s, she learned to use a computer and wrote 113 historical vignettes, recalling Yorkton happenings and people.

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They were typical teenage boys when they lived in Yorkton in the 1970s, 80s, and into the early 90s. They came from different backgrounds, attended school here, took part in a variety of activities, pursued different goals, and left when they completed high school, four ending up in Alberta and one in Saskatoon.

A common factor for these five young men from Yorkton is that they ended up at higher levels of politics – three are now members of Parliament, one was an Alberta cabinet minister, one is an Alberta cabinet minister. All of them represent conservative parties, although they were definitely exposed to a wider range of political views back then, as is inevitable when we’re talking about Saskatchewan. 

They are Members of Parliament John Barlow, Brad Redekopp and Burton Bailey, as well as Alberta MLA and cabinet minister Searle Turton, and former Alberta MLA and cabinet minister Dave Rodney.

We agreed, from the start, that this podcast would not be about partisan political issues. Instead, we talked about their youth in Yorkton, their influences in life, and their views of how politics happens today. 

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Dan Calef was, and sometimes still is, Dan the Storyman, known locally as the story-telling head of the Yorkton public library from 1983 to 1999. He looked after story time for kids, and told stories on local television in a show that ended up being shown nationally, and then also on American television.

We turn the tables on him in this podcast by telling his story. 

Here in Yorkton, he was also regularly seen to be running on the streets of Yorkton, easily recognizable by his long-ish hair and beard and his steady gait. Dan wasn’t just jogging. Less well-known than the story telling and the local running was the fact he took part in marathons in Canada and the United States, as well as what is known as ultra running – 100 kilometre runs, and events to see how far one could make it in 24 hours of continuous running.

We sat down with Dan and asked him to tell us the story of Dan the Storyman. But obviously his story is not complete without also taking a much closer look at the television show in which he appeared for five years, a local CICC/CTV production called Poetree and Friends.

Taking it one step further, any story about Poetree would not be complete without others who were closely involved: the show's producer Greg Popowich, and writers and puppeteers Debbie Hayward and Joyce Bagley. We talked with Greg, and thanks to Saskatoon-based actor Kevin Power, we were able to use audio clips from episode 92 of his podcast, SaskScapes, which prominently featured Debbie and Joyce.

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In the summer and fall of 2025, several factors came together, one of them out of the blue, to tackle and do more about hunger and food insecurity in Yorkton.

The first was in early summer when the city of Yorkton hired a barriers to access co-ordinator, someone who was tasked with helping to set up local committees to address various barriers in the community. There was already a social housing committee dealing with homelessness and housing, but other needs and opportunities were identified, including food security.

What was definitely not anticipated by the group as it was getting its feet wet, was an email received by the Yorkton Community Fridge on August 13, 2025 from Second Harvest, a national food rescue and redistribution organization. 

It asked if Yorkton would like to receive potatoes – 15 tons of unwashed, Burbank Russets. The committee agreed to take on the opportunity, and the associated challenge of distributing that many potatoes.

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Those working in the field of psychiatry and mental health treatment across Canada and the United States came to Yorkton in 1964 and 1965 in large numbers to see for themselves how a new way of treating mental health patients was being implemented at the new Yorkton Psychiatric Centre.

The new facility was a radical departure from what had been standard mental health treatment facilities in Saskatchewan: large impersonal buildings at Weyburn and North Battleford that, from the outside, could easily be mistaken for jails.

The new Yorkton Psychiatric Centre came about in large part to a new way of thinking within the provincial government, and the work of an architect who went to some lengths to understand the mindset of patients with those issues.

The Regina-based architect Kiyoshi Izumi had experimented with LSD in the late 1950s, long before it became part of the lore surrounding Timothy Leary and the 1960s "turn on, tune in, drop out" counterculture. He used his LSD experience to try to replicate the mindset of the mentally-ill so he could design a facility that was not a frightening place for psychiatric patients.

His ideal design was not adopted by the provincial government for Yorkton -- it was felt too many practical obstacles stood in the way. But a version of it was built, and remains there west of the hospital on Bradbrooke Drive. 

It was cutting edge. In fact, this year (2025), more than 60 years after it was built, it was one of three recipients of the Prix du XXe Siecle award, an honour bestowed by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and the National Trust for Canada to recognize "significant modern Canadian architecture from the 20th century".

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Kristopher Grunert was born and raised on the family farm on Orkney Road, a short drive northwest of Yorkton. His parents, sister and he lived on land first established as the Grunert homestead in 1888. Farming, however, was not in Kris’ future. As a teenager he developed a keen interest in skateboarding, then a relatively new sport in Yorkton, and that led him to Vancouver to pursue that dream.

As it turned out, the skateboarding dream clashed with reality, but it did lead to a career and wide recognition in the field of photography that now spans 25 years, in which time he has won numerous international photography awards, has worked for large corporations and architectural firms, and has shown his work around the globe. 

Kris is now back in Saskatchewan, with his wife, where they have expanded their business and struck out in several new directions. 

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Dr. Sigridur (Sigga) Christianson Houston and her husband Dr. Clarence Joseph (CJ) Houston operated a medical practice in Yorkton for nearly 50 years, after a year in Watfort City, North Dakota. Both were graduates of the University of Manitoba College of Medicine. 

In their practice in Yorkton, she had a well-known and well-deserved reputation to make babies thrive, which brought mothers and children from a hundred or more miles away. 

What most people at the time did not know was this: when she graduated medical school in 1925, she was only the fourth woman of Icelandic descent to become a doctor, and the first Icelandic-Canadian woman to achieve that. Although we haven’t been able to verify this, she was very likely also the first female doctor to practice in Yorkton.

Not to forget about the secret she kept for most of her life. Or the Icelandic bean soup recipe. And on our website at www.yorktonstories.ca you will also find almost 90 minutes of 8mm film shot by CJ recording the life of three generations of the Houston family from 1936 to 1976, including scenes and events in Yorkton.

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The hockey career of Yorkton’s Metro Prystai has been well documented. He had a storied career with the Chicago Blackhawks and Detroit Red Wings over a span of 12 years in the 1940s and 50s, scoring the Stanley Cup winning goal for the Red Wings in the 1952 finals, back when there were only six teams and only the very best made it to the top, let alone the Stanley Cup playoffs. He won two Stanley Cups with Detroit, and was named to the NHL All-Star team three times.

He was not the first with a Yorkton connection to make it to the NHL; he was one of several dozen. But he was Yorkton’s own, born and raised in a house on Ontario Avenue close to St. Mary’s Church, the second-youngest of seven children born to Harold and Annie Prystai, Ukrainian immigrants.

Metro and most of his contemporaries have passed on. But in 2003 he sat down with Terri Lefebvre Prince, then the city archivist, and they recorded two hours of conversation during which Metro reflected on his life. 

And Frank Block wrote and recorded an audio book, The Metro Prystai Story, in 2015. With the permission of both the City of Yorkton and Mr. Block, we have used that audio, as well as information gleaned from online sources, to produce this podcast remembering the life of Metro in and outside hockey, much of it in his own words, with insights from those who knew him well.

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