In the latest issue of ML Coast Mountains, the monsters are ready to rumble. Final entry: Pemberton. Words :: Lisa Richardson.
The Sea to Sky Royal Rumble enters the last round! And no, there are no actual giant monster Kaiju lurking in south Coast Mountains anymore.
It’s all just a visual technique we’re using to set up our weirdest Coast Mountains issue yet—the idea is to let each of the three mountain towns in the Sea to Sky region battle it out so the world can finally know which is the best.
At the end you can vote on the winner. In the meantime, let the rumble continue with Lisa Richardson’s Pemberton entry! –Feet Banks
Wayne Andrew, Líl̓wat horseman and a legendary rodeo rider in his prime, told me recently how Pemberton got its name. A story his grandfather told him. Passed on from his grandfather. The first white people paddled into the valley in birchbark canoes. Pale with scurvy. “We used cedar dugout, not birchbark, canoes—so it was shocking on lots of levels,” Andrew shared.
“What is this place?” the newcomers asked. ‘‘Puwámten’,” replied the Líl̓wat, meaning “the canoe log where the canoes beach, where people would pull up and berth their canoes.” (“Puwám” is the sound the canoes make when they beach on the log and “ten” is the tool used.) “Oh, that sounds like the name of the surveyor general,” they said. And so they called the place Pemberton, after a mustachioed dude in Fort Victoria—the boss of the boss of the boss, the biggest honcho in the Hudson’s Bay Company.
The sáma7 (pronounced “shama,” meaning “white folk”) were low on food and unwell, so the Líl̓wat welcomed them, shared dried meat and berries. Later, after a rockslide came down to where they’d set up camp, the newcomers moved further upstream, up the valley, closer to what is now settled as Pemberton. In Ucwalmícwts, the language of the Líl̓wat, the word for Pemberton, nkúkwmá, means “north.”
The Líl̓wat were spread all through the valley and hillsides, Andrew told me, but a smallpox epidemic decimated so much of the population it made it easier for the RCMP and Indian Agents to round them all up and move them onto a reserve.
Pemberton has its share of nicknames, depending on the era you landed—Spud Valley, Pemberhole, Pemberbush, Pemberdise—but October 2023 was the first time I heard “Puwámten.”
People tend to start the story of a place the moment they first arrive there themselves. As if nothing of real significance happened before you. Thus, my version of Pemberton starts around 2001, even though the Lil’wat have oral histories of connection with this land for 11,000 years and archeological sites dating back at least 5,500 years.
In 2001, my partner and I were arguing endlessly about where we should live. Whistler was too expensive, so the Squamish vs Pemberton debate was fierce. His requirements hinged on being able to do everything he loves—recreation-wise—out his back door, and at a world-class level. I scoffed at the audacity of such an expectation from life. But he was right. As a slew of pro athletes and lifestylers who landed in waves can attest.
Twenty years after Pemberton won our coin toss, the Village has doubled in size and is on track to reach 5,000 souls sometime within the next ten minutes. (It’s closer to 8,000 if you include the surrounding areas, and I’ve started to sound like the crusty locals who once greeted me with an, “I don’t recognise half the people around here anymore.”)
In my two decades, I’ve also learned a little more about the forces that shaped the place before I “discovered” it.
A volcanic eruption and biblical-level flooding 2,400 years ago left behind an incredible growing medium that now supports thousands of pounds of potatoes, incredibly potent garlic and the sweetest carrots and greens. Once the growing season begins, weekly harvest boxes from five different community-supported agriculture (CSA) growers roll out in blue bins to feed (and perplex) people up and down the Sea to Sky. (What do I do with a kohlrabi?)
The geology has other beneficiaries—mountain bikers, sledders, trail runners, skiers, anyone who likes going straight up, straight down, very fast, with speed.
Ray Mason, aka Pemby Iceman, has been sledding the region since he drove into the Pemberton Valley from the Hurley and his jaw dropped. He’d been skiing Whistler since it first opened—his dad was a part owner in the Mount Whistler Lodge—but here he found land with enough quiet space for horses, a private runway for his plane and a few groomed cross-country trails out his back door. He bought 60 acres in 1991, raised a family, ran a sled-guiding business for 15 years and still hasn’t tired of the landscape or “exploring the endless backcountry that only a few people get to see. I was mainly a skier, but once you get a sled…” He has shared beta and loaned his toboggan to a host of pro skiers and riders questing for their own first descents, including godfathering the late Dave Treadway’s 2013 mission to ski Mount Monmouth—the only peak apart from Mount Garibaldi above 10,000 feet in the Coast Range. (Check out the short film Let’s Go Get Small, which documents the adventure.)
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Home to a solid concentration of female mountain guides and super-fast ultrarunning moms, Pemberton boasts the hardiest souls. In this land, weather is not abstract, and rivers have mood swings that keep everyone on their toes. It’s an intimate experience of heat, mosquitoes, wildfire haze, floods, collapsing mountains and debris flows as a warming climate and receding glaciers melt the permafrost holding a lot of rock together. (When I worked at the Squamish-Lillooet Regional District, our emergency services manager told me that a crack in Mount Currie had suddenly appeared, making it the fourth existential threat in the Pemberton valley. He’s since moved away.)
As an ecosystem unicorn where the Coast meets the Interior, we also have wilder residents—grizzly and black bears, great blue herons, western screech owls, red-listed sharp-tailed snakes and a unique species of salmon, the Birkenhead chinook.
Diehard ski and snowboard pros are still eking out a life in the mountains—Ian McIntosh, Joe Lax, Dave Basterrechea, JD Hare, Delaney Zayac—mixing up some combination of growing food, making things, banging nails and continuing to explore, while the next generation are making their own waves—Trinity Ellis on the World Cup luge tracks, her sweetheart Lucas Cruz on a mountain bike, cyclocross champ Ethan Wood, second-generation ski star Logan Pehota. But they’ve been the lucky ones.
Every time another family moves away in search of more affordable climes, or a retiring farmer sells to wealthy buyers and speculators who are thrilled to discover land at $35,000 an acre, I wonder just how hardy the next generation will have to be to grow their futures here. Are we just the last in a long line of “discoverers” who wreck what we found? Are we too far gone to listen to the wisdom that kept the Líl̓wat flourishing here for thousands of years? K’úl’tsam’, take only what you need. It’s not a novel idea. My yoga teacher pointed me to 3,000-year-old texts from the cultures of the Indus Valley that teach the same thing: ahimsa, do no harm, and brahmacharya, non-excess.
You can find the medicine still. Out on the land. Or in amongst the crowds. Go stand at the Remembrance Day parade, the Signal Hill pit cook, or a PORCA enduro race with volunteers in costume. Or at BMX night when the gate drops for the toddlers on run bikes, the Children’s Centre’s annual Christmas Bazaar, or the Lil’wat Rodeo—and you’ll see. You’ll see who and what is worth fighting for. Each other. And this land. Which has shaped us more than we’ll ever truly know.
Community Nourishment
Stay Wild Natural Health
Known for ages as Spud Valley, it goes without saying that one of Pemberton’s most beloved foods is a potato. “Helmer’s fingerling potatoes should win,” says Leah Gillies, owner of Stay Wild Natural Health Food Store & Juice Bar. “They are insane—buttery and delicious. I pretty much don’t eat potatoes those few months of the year when Helmer’s are sold out.”
Equally popular, however, are Leah’s Stay Wild peanut butter cups, a healthy(er) alternative to everyone’s favourite childhood snack. “I found a recipe online and we just tinkered with it,” she says. “We made it healthier—it’s vegan, it’s gluten-free, we don’t add refined sugar. It hits a lot of the boxes. They were an early hit when we opened in 2016 and, if I look at the numbers, we’ve sold 11,000 of them since then. We sold 40 this week, and those are two-packs.”
Beyond the delicious wares inside, Stay Wild is also notable for Leah’s commitment to providing her employees with a living wage. She’s part of a national program designed to provide workers with an hourly wage that meets their basic expenses and helps them move beyond basic poverty and help them participate in social, civic and cultural aspects of life. Currently, for the Sea to Sky region, the living wage is calculated at $25.68 per hour (minimum wage is $18 per hour).
“My husband saw a ‘Living Wage’ sticker on a food truck in Tofino,” Leah says, “And I looked into it right away. I was always embarrassed to hire people at minimum wage anyhow. This is not an affordable part of the world.”
After a year in the Living Wage program, Leah says she thinks her employees feel happy and respected. “I take a hit on the bottom line—I didn’t feel it was fair to just raise prices and transfer that over to our customers. This is a small town, everyone is everyone’s neighbour. I think customers like coming here knowing how we treat our employees. Day-to-day, everyone seems happy to be here. I don’t see any drawbacks to it, and I’ve never had so many resumes.”
She also gives them a staff discount on groceries and anything else in the store (even peanut butter cups).
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Blown Spot
Joffre Lakes
“Nice, but busy.” –Tripadvisor
That’s Tripadivsor’s top review of the 545 entries for Joffre Lakes Provincial Park. (For context, Squamish’s Stawamus Chief Park has just 337, despite being less than an hour from Metropolitan Vancouver.)
On Instagram, there are more than 95,500 posts tagged #joffrelakes. Whistler’s Pique Newsmagazine reports the park “accommodates up to about 200,000 visitors per year, with 1,053 day-use passes available every day.” While the BC Parks website adds, “Bring your own toilet paper.” And dogs are prohibited.
But actually, it used to be worse before the Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua Nations began working with BC Parks to monitor, manage and limit the number of people heading into Joffre. Instigated in 2019, the Joffre Lakes Park Visitor Use Management Strategy expanded parking and created safer access so tourists could stop meandering around a blind-corner highway.
“I’ve seen everything up there,” says local resident Seija Halonen, who’s been hiking Joffre for more than 20 years, sometimes three times a week. “Perfumed fancy girls with stereos on their shoulders and shivering dudes in trench coats and dress shoes. I’ve seen people literally poop on the trail. I don’t go much anymore, unless I leave at 4 a.m.”
In September of 2023, the Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua Nations even closed the park to the general public to prioritize access for Nation members and to host a harvest celebration (though they did reopen it to tourism for the Labour Day weekend).
The popularity is understandable—the park features a stunning trio of supersaturated blue alpine lakes with highway access to a high-elevation starting point with a manicured trail that provides big-alpine vistas with much less elevation gain than a sea-level hike. Best to go early in the warm months, or get out the snowshoes and go now (note the upper campground is closed in the winter due to avalanche risk).
Toughest Gang
The Dead Prime Ministers
Using the adjective “tough” for Pemberton is redundant, but the greatest gang to come from the valley is known for humour rather than grit. The Dead Prime Ministers (DPM) formed in the late 1990s, a teenaged skate and snowboard posse named after the popular Hughes Brothers bank heist film Dead Presidents. This was, obviously, the Canadian version.
“That was back in the times when it was cool to make your own gang,” explains DPM godfather Ben Davies. “It was really just a bunch of buddies snowboarding and telling jokes and having fun, but this is when gangster rap was colliding into Pemberton’s regular hesher/rocker/construction worker vibe.”
Comprised of Ben and his brother Justin Davies, John Coleman, Caine Heintzman and Leigh Grant (with youngster Richy Hartl jumping in a few years later), the Dead Prime Ministers definitely kept it rural. They also produced a number of published snowboard photos, but their true legacy was spreading Pemberton’s unique sense of humour and practical jokes into the ballooning snow/skate scene in Whistler.
“I think when you are broke it makes you funny,” Ben explains. “You need something to fill the time. Plus, a lot of us were working with older people and soaking in maybe more adult humour than kids in the other communities. And the Natives in Mount Currie were a huge influence on everyone’s life. Their sense of humour on the Rez is so awesome and different. Very deadpan and patient. It added to the bouquet of humour in the high school.
“There were no real gangs,” Ben continues. “But there were crews you would ride with. Except the ski kids from Whistler that had way nicer cars… The skiers were too soft to even be considered a crew.”
Random Measurements
The Acre
As mountain towns (aka towns surrounded by mountains), space is at a premium in all the Sea to Sky communities. But Pemberton has the most space, and therefore is the town where larger chunks of land must be measured in acres. But what the heck is an acre anyhow?
“An acre is 43,560 square feet,” explains Kitt Redhead, a Prairie-girl-turned-ski-guide who made the move up to Pemberton in 2019 to get back to the land. “Traditionally, land was measured with 66-foot chains and an acre was ten square chains. With farming, there’s also a “section,” which is 640 acres. Or a “quarter” is 160 acres. That’s how people measure in the Prairies—by sections—but out here we use acres because the land is less open; it’s a tight mountain valley.”
Kitt and her family run Za Ropa Ranch, raising sheep and hay for their horses as well as Šarplaninac dogs (“the greatest working farm dogs in the world,” Kitt says). “An acre in a perfect square would be 208.7 feet on each side, but I think the advantage of the acre is its versatility,” she says. “It could be 66 feet by 660 feet, or any other square dimensions that add up to 43,560. An acre can fit into all the weird spaces of nature more easily than, say, a square kilometre.”
My Scariest Moment
Oh Crap…with Brad Knowles
A born-and-raised Pemberton fella, Brad Knowles is best known as “The Pemberton Fish Finder,” guiding anglers from around the world into the lakes, rivers and streams he grew up with. But it was a day off, fishing with his then-girlfriend Taya on Duffey Lake, when Brad looked true fear in the eye.
“It was a beauty day and we had the boat out on Duffey Lake—catching fish, enjoying the views—until I realized I needed to take a crap. This is back when there was still an old cabin at the end of the lake, and I knew there was an outhouse there so we motored over and I headed up the trail.
“It was a decent outhouse, a bit hippie-ish with a half-moon shape cut in the door and a couple stars. I’m doing my business and suddenly I hear this crunch outside and deep, heavy breathing and all I see through the moon-shaped hole is golden hair going by. A huge grizzly passed within two feet of the door. And that moon is shoulder-height, at least if you’re standing up straight.
I’m doing my business and suddenly I hear this crunch outside and deep, heavy breathing and all I see through the moon-shaped hole is golden hair going by.
“Right away I was worried about my girlfriend, who is like 50 feet away and I don’t know if she’s on the boat or on the dock or where she is. So I shout out as loud as I can, ‘Hey Tay, be careful, there’s a huge grizzly up here!’ Then I just sit there listening.
“No kidding, not 10 or 15 seconds later here comes Tay up the trail, saying, ‘I got the toilet paper, Babe.’ She had heard me but she hadn’t heard me—she thought I was calling for toilet paper! So I pull her into the shitter with me. We waited, then just made a mad dash for the boat. Fastest I’ve ever run in my life I bet. Getting attacked by wolves up by Meager Creek was a scary day, too, but I think that day on the Duffey was the only time I’ve literally had the crap scared out of me.”
Ben Davies from the DPM says: “One of my scariest moments in the old Pemby Secondary was walking past the bathroom when Brad Knowles was in there taking a dump, so I feel for that grizz… “
Perfect Day
Tatum’s Home on the Range
Tatum Monod is a professional big mountain skier, an ace fly fisher, a hunter and a lover of baking pies. She’s called Pemberton home since 2015, but as an Alberta girl born into a family of guides and national team skiers, Tatum’s first love was riding horses. As she grew up and began skiing full-time, filming video parts and shredding larger and larger mountains, a move to Pemberton checked all the boxes.
“I’ve always had this thing,” Tatum says, “I’m drawn to it. Where farming and freeskiing meet. Pemberton has this relaxed, cow-town aesthetic but also some of the most incredible backcountry on earth.”
And despite the increase in mountain folk and Whistler expats moving in, Tatum says Pemby still delivers the mountain adventure and down-home vibes that lured her in the first place. “There’s so much terrain right at our fingertips, you can explore for the rest of your life. But it’s still sleepy sleep-ville, too. I try to have a dinner party every other week and I am the only one who shows up.”
It snowed a foot, what’s the plan? I know a place that’s close where we get this beautiful long vista of all the farmland and Mount Currie with all the great skiing you could ever dream of. But first, I love hitting Al’s shop for oil and parts—grabbing whatever we need for the day. Arrive at the spot just before 8 a.m., maybe 7:30 to be safe. Unload the sled and take in that early morning excitement when you know everyone. Usually someone’s truck gets stuck so that’s always fun.
“Then everyone’s machine fires up and the energy escalates for the climb up into all this terrain that I still can’t believe is in our backyard. Depending on the day and the snow, we may stay in the trees and check the stability later for a possible punch into the alpine. That’s the beauty of Pemby though, it doesn’t have to be extreme. You can do fun road laps, noboard laps, or tour up high if you want. It’s all accessible, but also I love doing hippy turns in the trees here all day long.
“As the day winds down I’ll probably try to get my sled stuck somewhere, because sledding is so fun. Then watch the sun set over the valley, reminiscing about the day with my friends and neighbours before trying to take shortcuts down the road without hitting trees. It’s a tailgate party at the parking lot while we wait for all the crews to get down safely, then a short drive and you’re home in time to go to bed early…’Cause we’re gonna poke out to Bralorne tomorrow for more of the same.
–Feet Banks
Climate
Apocalypse Often
More than a couple Hollywood films have chosen Pemberton as the backdrop for their end-of-days stories (The Last Winter, Sheltered, The X-Files movie) but the truth is not much stranger than fiction—Pemby is used to natural disasters.
On paper, the autumn floods of 2003 were the largest on record. After an already wet week and a half, October 15 to 20 saw enough rainfall to force Pemberton measurement gauges offline, essentially drowning them out midway through the storm. Rainfall estimates those days were as high as 20 mm/h. But it was another huge deluge of water in 1984 that stands as the community’s worst disaster for property damage. With nationwide newscasts reporting on the event, then-mayor Shirley Henry was able to go to the provincial government to fund further investment in diking. (Originally, river-straightening and diking began after a large flood in 1941.)
Floods—the ones caused by rain and snowmelt—are only half the story of impending doom. The other lurking catastrophic event is Qẃelqẃelústen/Mount Meager. In 2010, a “large catastrophic debris avalanche” brought an estimated 45 million cubic metres of mountain down to block Meager Creek, wash out bridges and roads and erase access to some of the most accessible hot springs in the Sea to Sky. (Somehow, they’re still pretty busy, though.) It was one of the largest landslides in Canadian history and made a seismic impression as far away as Alaska and Washington State.
The Qẃelqẃelústen/Mount Meager massif remains capable of producing a range of major volcanic hazards including what some experts call “highly explosive eruptions.” In a worst-case scenario, violent debris-flow “lahars” could flow all the way to the end of Pemberton Meadows and ash could fill the sky as far away as Williams Lake. But even without an eruption, the threat of another huge landslide due in part to climate change and glacier retreat creates another, perhaps more pressing, hazard.
“In view of the history of landslides on the massif, including the 2010 landslide, future collapses are certain,” explains a paper from no fewer than 11 top scientists, including Dr. Glyn Williams-Jones, professor and chair at the Department of Earth Sciences at Simon Fraser University and the co-director of the Centre for Natural Hazards Research. The paper continues: “Of the 27 slopes with signs of instability that we identified, nine slopes have been recently deglaciated and eight are at elevations where permafrost degradation is likely to be happening. Glacier retreat and permafrost thaw could destabilize these slopes. Meltwater from snow and ice can infiltrate slopes and increase pore water pressures, conditioning them for catastrophic collapse, as happened at Mt. Meager in 2010.”
“Glacier retreat and permafrost thaw could destabilize these slopes.“
If another massive landslide (or volcanic debris) came down and blocked the Lillooet River, water could potentially build into a giant lake. Should that blockage suddenly dislodge (as it did in 2010), all that water would come rushing into the Pemberton Valley and wreak all kinds of havoc. No bueno either way.
The last major environmental threat to Pemberton is the same as pretty much any other community in the province: wildfire. In his 2023 book Fire Weather, author John Valliant explains how decades of increasingly warmer and drier summers are creating “fire storms” unlike anything Canadians have experienced before. “Don’t think of this as the hottest summer in the last 100 years,” Valliant said during a reading at the Whistler Writers Festival. “Think of it as the coolest in the next hundred.” Welcome to the “Pyrocene” era.
But don’t worry, Pemberton, Squamish has all those doomsday scenarios and more to contend with. You might want to build a wall.
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