Mountie in viral mountain-top hockey photo now has 'keepsake for life' (Photo)
Two Canadians, one a British Columbia Mountie, playing hockey on a mountain-top ice rink. It truly is the “most Canadian photo ever”.
This is the Tweet that the B.C. Royal Canadian Mounted Police feed sent out last week:
We may be Mounties, but we are all still kids at heart with @NHL dreams pic.twitter.com/8dm7sQ9NA6
— bcrcmp (@bcRCMP) March 19, 2015
Cpl. Shaun Begg, the Mountie in the photo, didn’t imagine the Tweet would turn into a viral sensation, but it did. He thought the photo could serve as a screen saver or be used as a picturesque Christmas card. Instead, the shot of the game of shinny on Shamrock Lake has been retweeted nearly 4,000 times as of Monday afternoon.
So how did it all come together?
Begg plays recreational hockey with Kaslo's Afterburners and had an opportunity to fly by helicopter into a remote area of the Purcell mountains to play shinny with his teammates and a few others.
He and his teammates played for four hours at 9,000 feet before he put on his uniform, with his supervisor's approval.
The magnitude of the photo's reach didn’t hit Begg until the day after the Tweet went out. He told ABC News he soon began receiving texts from friends asking if he was the Mountie in the photo.
Whatever becomes of the photo from here on out Begg has a memory for a lifetime.
"It's definitely going to be on my wall for sure in a nice frame," he told the CBC, "obviously a keepsake for life for me."
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Sean Leahy is the associate editor for Puck Daddy on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Sean_Leahy
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