By Richard Asselin, Life Member No 94, Red River Zone patroller, and friend (richard.asselin@skipatrol.ca)
On Wednesday, May 21, 2025, our friend, teacher and leader George Kryschuk passed away after quietly battling ill health for many months.
His family, colleagues, friends and many thousands of members of the Canadian Ski Patrol whom he taught and inspired and now leaves behind will forever remember his gentle manner, quick smile and memory that was impervious to the passage of time.
George was a skier who combined his passion for the sport with the selfless ethic of a volunteer and the expertise of a health and safety expert in industry. He brought these skills to the small but enthusiastic group of alpine skiers at Falcon Lake in southeastern Manitoba in the early 1960s. It was indeed early – George was providing first aid at the area before the Canadian Ski Patrol had a presence and even before there was electricity at the area.
George was a founder of the CSP Red River Zone in 1961, and it wasn’t long before the Canadian Ski Patrol became a lifelong commitment. As a first aid volunteer, instructor, officer in various roles of Red River Zone and later the CSP Manitoba Division, George had an impact in every aspect of the Canadian Ski Patrol in southern Manitoba. There was no task that he wouldn’t take on with eagerness, from carrying boxes of training materials several flights of stairs, to folding triangulars, to guiding a new patroller as they applied their first sling to a patient, to stabilizing hundreds of wrists, to thanklessly compiling decades of detailed operational statistics.
In the past 60 years, George provided thousands of hours of first aid service at sporting, cultural and community events and treated an incalculable number of adults and children. These events include the 1999 Pan Am Games; the 2002 North American Indigenous Games; the Canada Summer Games in 2017 and many charitable runs, walks, cycling and other events. The list goes on.
As an instructor for as many years, George trained and mentored easily more than 1,000 men and women to be first aid providers. He was one of the first non-professionals to train lay persons to perform CPR. His first aid skills were passed on to many others, and each one of those people may have helped many more.
From one life came so much. The care and comfort at a moment of injury or suffering; confidence in learning a critical skill; the inspiration to give beyond yourself.
Thank you, George. We miss you.
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