Vachon back to beginnings, enjoying rural retirement in Montana

The NHL and conservation non-profit Ducks Unlimited Canada are teaming up to tell stories of current and former NHL players and how access to community ponds and the outdoors helped shape their love for the sport. Today, a visit with goalie Rogie Vachon, who reflects on his youth playing outdoors on his parents’ farm in rural Palmarolle, Quebec. Vachon would win the Stanley Cup three times and the Vezina Trophy once with the Montreal Canadiens, then through much of the 1970s become the face of hockey in California with the Los Angeles Kings on his way to 2016 Hockey Hall of Fame election.

Until now, the best Rogie Vachon breakaway story has dated to Feb. 18, 1967, the Canadiens’ 21-year-old rookie goalie making his first NHL save on the first shot he faced in his maiden game, foiling Detroit Red Wings legend Gordie Howe, who had burst in alone at the Montreal Forum.

It could be argued that the one that follows is even better, from years earlier on a springtime pond on the family dairy farm in Palmarolle, Quebec.

“With the sun in the spring, you’d see water forming on the ice but you’d just keep playing,” Vachon recalled. “I was in goal one day -- I was always the goalie -- and here came my brother, Anicet, on a breakaway.

“But before he got too close, the ice cracked under him and he dropped into the pond. We got him out of there, soaked head to his skates, and walked up to the farmhouse. It was pretty far away, so by the time we got him there, he was frozen. He could barely move his legs.”

Rogie Vachon circa 1968 with the Montreal Canadiens, and in a Hockey Hall of Fame portrait, November 2016.

Vachon, and others from the game that had ended in a watery mess, took a large steel grill and placed it over the enormous furnace that would heat the farmhouse, laying Anicet atop it.

“He was on there for a half hour so he could thaw out,” Vachon said, laughing at the memory. “That was funny.”

It seems that Gordie Howe got off lucky with his failed breakaway attempt.

In some ways, Vachon has come full circle, even if pond hockey is no longer part of the equation. Today, at age 80, he is living on a farm in Montana with his son and daughter-in-law, Nick and Renee, and their daughter, Chloe.

Rogie Vachon at home in Hamilton, Montana on Sept. 26, 2025.

Vachon is about 2,000 miles southwest of Palmarolle, again loving his days under a big sky after NHL tours of duty in Montreal, Los Angeles, Detroit and Boston between 1967-82.

Like it was for many of his contemporaries, the great outdoors was a joyful, vital part of Vachon’s youth -- endless games and frozen fingers and toes, frostbite just an inconvenient intermission between periods.

He is one of four boys and four girls born to Joseph and Lucia Vachon, the children raised on a dairy farm in Palmarolle, an agriculture-rich village in the Abitibi region about 425 miles northwest of Montreal.

“Luckily, we’re all still here,” Vachon says of his siblings.

Joseph Vachon had maybe 15 milking cows on his land, along with sheep, pigs and plow horses that preceded a tractor.

Rogie Vachon (front row, center) with the 1961 Palmarolle Braves, and with N.D.G. Monarchs junior teammate Jeff Tapping in 1964.

It was on this farm at about age 5 that Rogie Vachon played his first hockey, games of shinny played on a homemade rink that the brothers and their cousins fashioned by hauling well water for the flood.

“My mother wasn’t very happy when we almost emptied the well for the rink,” he remembered. “The water was meant for the animals in the barn during the winter.

“We’d water an area -- it wasn’t very big -- and make up some kind of game. I was always the goalie, for some reason. I was the smallest so they’d put me in net saying, ‘We don’t want you to get hurt, so you play goal.’ And I’d stand back there and nearly freeze to death.”

Nets were chunks of snow for goal posts; stray pucks were dug out of snowbanks, many discovered only in the spring.

Rogie Vachon defends the Montreal Canadiens net during a 1967 game against Toronto at Maple Leaf Gardens.

For equipment, Vachon wore thick mittens and department-store catalogs strapped to his shins for goalie pads.

The eight children would hike two miles to school, threading their way through snowbanks that towered over them.

“There was an outdoor rink in the village so a bunch of us would sometimes leave the farm, brothers and cousins, and go there to use that ice,” he said.

Better still was the huge pond a long trudge from the farmhouse, the one that nearly swallowed Vachon’s brother.

“It seemed to carry for miles,” Vachon said of the pond. “There was so much room, the ice was nice and thick in the winter. Sometimes, we’d go out and just skate for miles.”

Rogie Vachon in late 1960s action with the Canadiens at the Montreal Forum.

By age 12, the young goalie was playing loosely organized hockey in Palmarolle. In a heavy wool sweater, the youngest by far, he was facing teams made up of farmers twice his age and older “because they needed a goalie.”

Three years later, Joseph Vachon sold the farm and moved his family to the mining town of Rouyn-Noranda, about 40 miles south of Palmarolle.

The area was a hockey hotbed, the birthplace and developmental springboard for future Hall of Famers Dave Keon, Jacques Laperriere and Pierre Turgeon, with Dale Tallon, Rejean Houle and another host of NHL players also hailing from Rouyn-Noranda.

In 1961, at age 16, Vachon was playing intermediate hockey in Rouyn, facing 50 and 60 shots per game. No longer was he standing frozen on a farm’s makeshift rink, cows the only spectators, or skating dawn until past sunset on a Palmarolle pond.

N.D.G. Monarchs goalie Rogie Vachon foils Grant Moore of the Toronto Marlboros during a 1964 junior game at Maple Leaf Gardens.

Gilles Laperriere, whose brother, Jacques, would within a couple of years be playing defense for the Canadiens, got word down to Montreal about a hot goaltending prospect the team needed to see.

The Canadiens dispatched Scotty Bowman, then the team’s eastern Canada scout, to have a look, and the future winningest NHL coach of all time liked what he saw.

If Vachon was eager to sign the day’s C-form that committed a player to an NHL team, Lucia Vachon wasn’t so sure.

“We had trouble talking Rogie’s mother into letting him leave for the evils of the big city,” Bowman told reporters following the goalie’s 1967 NHL debut.

Rogie Vachon (front row, far right) with the junior 1965-66 Thetford Mines Aces.

Vachon laughs about the hard sell.

“Yes, my mom hesitated,” he recalled. “She wasn’t sure that I would survive in Montreal but everything was fine.”

Vachon would play for Bowman’s Montreal-district junior Notre-Dame-de-Grace Monarchs, the Montreal Junior Canadiens, then a junior team in Thetford Mines and the minor-pro Quebec Aces and Houston Apollos.

He would make his NHL debut at the Forum, summoned from Houston of the Central League with Gump Worsley injured and backup Charlie Hodge struggling.

Rogie Vachon in a late 1960s pose with the Montreal Canadiens, and with the 1965-66 AHL Quebec Aces.

The acrobatic 5-foot-8, 165-pound goalie would be a member of Canadiens’ Stanley Cup champions in 1968, 1969 and 1971, with Worsley sharing the 1967-68 Vezina Trophy that then was awarded to the team with the League's best goals-against total.

But with Ken Dryden about to own the Canadiens net through the 1970s, not yet a rookie when he won the Conn Smythe Trophy as most valuable player of the Stanley Cup Playoffs in leading Montreal to the 1971 title, Vachon's request for a trade was granted. On Nov. 4, 1971, he was sent to the Kings for goalie Denis DeJordy, defensemen Dale Hoganson and Noel Price, and forward Doug Robinson.

Vachon played nearly seven seasons for Los Angeles, then two each with the Red Wings and Bruins before retiring in 1982. In 795 NHL regular-season games, he was 353-293 with 128 ties, a 3.00 goals-against average, .896 save percentage and 51 shutouts. In 48 playoff games, he was 23-23 with a 2.78 GAA, .907 save percentage and two shutouts.

Rogie Vachon in goal for the Los Angeles Kings at the Checkerdome in St. Louis during a 1977 game.

Internationally, Vachon helped Canada to victory in the 1976 Canada Cup with a 1.39 goals-against average, .941 save percentage and two shutouts in seven games, selected to the All-Star team, named the tournament's best goalie and Canada's most valuable player.

In retirement, he returned to Los Angeles to serve as goalie consultant, assistant coach, twice interim coach and team president before stepping down as an ambassador in 2008.

His biggest headlines in Kings management came while serving as general manager from 1984-92, team owner Bruce McNall acquiring Wayne Gretzky from the Edmonton Oilers in a monumental trade Aug. 9, 1988.

Thirty-four years after his final save, the Hall of Fame called in 2016. Vachon had long given up any hope of a ringing phone.

Rogie Vachon’s Hockey Hall of Fame plaque, installed in the shrine’s Esso Great Hall as a member of the Class of 2016.

"It was really a proud moment," he said of his Hall election. "You look back and say, 'Well, I'm in the Hall of Fame. How many have played the game over the years and how many are here?' The percentage is so low. You feel good to be part of a special group."

Nicole, his wife of 44 years, died nine months before induction. He'd remained in their home in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Venice until a change of scenery slowly began to appeal.

After decades of big-city living, Vachon returned to the country in early 2021, leaving the bustle and gridlock of L.A. after more than 40 years to settle on an eight-acre spread under the big, unhurried sky of Montana, where he shares a spacious home with Nick, Renee and Chloe.

Rogie Vachon with miniature goalie sticks and with his pipe collection early in his NHL career, circa 1967.

Calvin Vachon, Nick and Renee’s 20-year-old son, is playing goal this season for the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

"It feels great to be here,” Vachon said. “I can go out and smoke my cigar, cut the grass, work in the garden and breathe fresh air all the time."

Jerseys of each of his four NHL teams are framed in the house, Vachon's No. 30 having been retired by the Kings in 1985, the first so honored by Los Angeles.

There are small reminders of his hockey career throughout the house but Vachon is happiest now in a flannel shirt. The game in his rear-view mirror, family and a country life are the center of his life, far from the city lights of his NHL stops.

Coverage of Rogie Vachon’s first NHL game for the Canadiens, a 41-save 3-2 win against the visiting Detroit Red Wings at the Montreal Forum on Feb. 18, 1967, and Palmarolle’s sign celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2025.

"My Hall of Fame jacket is in a closet," he said shortly after having moved to Montana. "I'm very proud of it, but you know, I haven't worn it since induction weekend."

Vachon spends his days golfing, fly-fishing, tending to the animals -- he gets a kick out of his role as “goat-tender” -- or doing nothing at all.

There remains a strong part of small-town Quebec in his heart, 75 years after he was drawing water from a farm well to help his brothers make a rink.

In 1994, Palmarolle named its arena for its most famous native son, Rogatien Vachon Arena taking his full name; in 2005, a permanent exposition in the arena lobby was unveiled to showcase the life and career of a local legend.

Rogie Vachon with the Detroit Red Wings in 1978, and with the Boston Bruins in 1980.

Vachon sent the modest museum’s curators pieces of memorabilia, which they added to their own clippings, small statues, photos and trophy miniatures. It has become a popular attraction for residents and even a detour destination for visitors passing through the Abitibi region.

Today, Vachon considers a memorable body of hockey work that began on a small rink and a large pond.

“It was fantastic,” he said of his start outdoors. “I have very fond memories of those days, not knowing at the time where they would lead.”

Top photo: Rogie Vachon relaxes at home in Hamilton, Montana on Sept. 26, 2025 with Frankie (left) and Max.