In the latest issue of ML Coast Mountains, the monsters are ready to rumble. Next up: Whistler. Words :: Leslie Anthony.
The Sea to Sky Royal Rumble continues! 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 Les Anthony’s Whistler entry! –Feet Banks
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: My first view of Whistler was through the windshield of a beat-up van driven cross-country from Ontario.
It was pea-soup foggy that March day in the late 1970s, so the view took in very little: a gas station that doubled as a grocery store and post office and, across the “street” (because it hardly bore the mien of a highway), a muddy parking lot, gondola base and skanky bar. The only consolation lay in being assured there was nothing else to see.
This was certainly the case when, after parking at the UBC hostel so we could poach its ice-water showers, we spent the next two days skiing a fog-bound mountain with a patroller friend from back east who constantly extolled the virtues of all we couldn’t see. Pilgrims that we were, and despite the zeal of its denizens, Whistler hardly seemed a promised land.
It would take several more visits (and decades) before I actually understood, immersing myself in the heady late-’90s vibe of what was, at the time, the undeniable centre of the North American ski universe. That advent changed everything. Enough that Whistler’s combination of ancient glaciers and youthful energy would eventually exert its siren call on me, as well.
Part of the draw had to do with the oceanic wilderness in which the town floated—so vast as to render the resort an island within, while always lapping its foreshore. Riding lifts over the years, I’ve seen mama bears just out of hibernation with their nose to the wind, newborn cubs rolling playfully at their feet; I’ve watched mountain lions and bobcats trot across pistes. From the resort’s paired summits of Whistler and Blackcomb, where the village is reduced to the size of a thumbnail, it can seem it isn’t there at all.
For visitors from abroad starved for true wilderness, that’s a potent draw—the reason today’s town has gone from a beat-down gas station to a bustling Tower of Babel awash in the lilt and twang of a dozen languages. This ethnic vibrancy makes Whistler the most international and cosmopolitan of places—another point of appeal reflected in the culinary diversity of 200 dining and drinking establishments. Is there another resort in North America where the see-and-be-seen establishment for celebs and site of legendarily debauched parties, where one can earn street cred for life through employment, could be a Japanese restaurant?
With Whistler’s one-stop play distractions (a partial list includes heli- and cat skiing, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, ice skating, dogsledding, bungee-jumping, zip-lining, tubing, bobsledding, hiking, mountain biking, rock climbing, kayaking and rafting); significant cultural offerings like the Audain Art Museum, Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre and surfeit of live music, film, photography, arts, culinary; and action-sport events which, in pre-Covid days, reached an apogee every spring in the legendary World Ski & Snowboard Festival followed by late-summer’s global Crankworx Whistler Mountain Bike Festival, you have the stimulus and variety of a big city in a small-town package—with the former’s implied entreat that if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.
All of this acted as catnip for a city-bred outdoor journalist like me who craved the authenticity of a ski town but couldn’t see himself in any of BC’s quaint backwaters or neighbouring bergs of the Sea to Sky corridor. Squamish might be the self-proclaimed “Adventure capital of Canada” and Pemberton has adopted “Adventure begins here,” but Whistler didn’t need a tagline. It was all so obvious.
Happily for those who settled here, and despite its Disneyland veneer, Whistler is also a community whose vibrant mix of art, culture and outdoor enthusiasm has always dovetailed well with tourism. But in dreaming big and cultivating a life apart from the industries that keep it afloat, Whistler created something even more meaningful to share with visitors—character. Young or old, citizen or passing through, one thing was always clear: In Whistler, exploring was just what you did. You went to the edge, and there you often stayed.
In dreaming big and cultivating a life apart from the industries that keep it afloat, Whistler created something even more meaningful to share with visitors—character.
For decades, the centripetal force Whistler exerted on dreamers, schemers and fun hogs was matched by the centrifugal force of its effects on first the snowsports then mountain bike industries.
Whistler’s ascendancy didn’t just happen, of course. Most gravitational bodies take a while to reach critical mass, and many dedicated individuals worked long and hard to this end. That much is obvious in the town’s many history-making legends: Dag Aabye, Jim McConkey and Hugh Smythe from the early days; the balls-to-the-wall racing style pioneered by the infamous Crazy Canucks on the Dave Murray Downhill course, leading to a hometown World Cup win by Rob Boyd in 1989; groundbreaking first descents in the surrounding Coast Range by Eric Pehota, Trevor Petersen and others in the early 1990s; invention of the twin-tip ski and subsequent park-and-pipe revolution sparked by Mike Douglas and his New Canadian Air Force
cohorts during the Horstman Glacier’s summer freeride camps; the mountain bike freeride ground zero that led to the development of the world’s first bike park (see sidebar, p.44); a litany of male and female big-mountain freeride staples and world champions; ditto the ranks of Olympian and FIS World Cup moguls, ski cross, pipe and slopestyle heavyweights.
Predicting such a diverse mountain culture epicentre would have been difficult back in 1914 when Alex and Myrtle Philip mounted horses to follow the Pemberton Trail from Squamish into a low, lake-filled pass in the Coast Range and built Rainbow Lodge, turning Alta Lake (Whistler’s original name) into a popular summer fishing destination. Reflecting the hubris of many settler enterprises, it was, of course, already a summer fishing destination for the land’s original inhabitants. The coastal Squamish people and Interior-dwelling Lil’wat shared a seasonal village—Spo7ez—just south of the valley, where they gathered to trade, hunt, fish and forage. (The Pemberton Trail itself was an old First Nations trade route, expanded in an ill-fated attempt to drive cattle from the BC Interior to the Pacific; on the one drive that happened, most of the cattle died.)
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It wasn’t until 1960 that the Garibaldi Lift Company formed with the intention of building a ski area to bid on the 1964 Winter Olympics. The bid failed, but the ski hill, Whistler Mountain, opened in 1966. Despite a hellish five-hour dirt drive from Vancouver (now reduced by a modern highway to a smooth 1.5 hours), Whistler was an instant hit. With the newly minted Resort Municipality of Whistler coordinating development, phase one of the main village was completed in time for the opening of neighboring Blackcomb Mountain in 1980. The two ski hills were originally separate but competed like college fraternities, leaking one-upmanship and enterprise into the surroundings. In 1986, resort-development company Intrawest purchased Blackcomb, adding Whistler a decade later to create the slick, dual-mountain behemoth that today flies under the dubious banner of Vail Resorts.
When, after three unsuccessful bids, the five-ring circus of the Winter Olympic Games finally did hit town in 2010, Whistler completed a full-circle story and received several high-profile legacies that have only added to the town’s function and appeal. Proof that if Whistler can lay claim to any credo, it’s “Never say never.”
During my two-plus decades here, the resort’s transformation included the addition of a small country’s worth of accommodation and real estate as well as continued development of the world-leading bike park and upgrading of ski operations, including the engineering-marvel Peak 2 Peak Gondola (P2P)—akin to taking a helicopter ride while still attached to the ground. Naturally, the P2P was opposed by many crusty Whistlerites (mea culpa) who preferred the $55 million cost go to expanding terrain. But we were wronger than wrong and, once again, had to hand it to the visionaries who saw the writing on the wall; beyond its convenience for skiers, the P2P is a tourist draw extraordinaire that has virtually climate-proofed the resort.
Such gewgaws are what a global fleet of ski magazines annually point to while singing Whistler’s praises. Like these words from the 1996 POWDER Resort Guide: “Given the hyperbolic publicity it receives, there’s a danger Whistler Blackcomb could become the most overrated ski resort on the planet. The truth, however, is that the size of these mountains, the access to glaciers and high alpine, the sheer scope and diversity of terrain, and the spectacular setting, combine to make it an untouchable experience.”
Like many glowing reports rendered by ski writers who needed to make a buck, I wasn’t entirely convinced when I wrote those words. Today, I look back on them as understatement: Even the hype can’t live up to the reality—or the influence.
Sure, there are problems—taxes, housing, over-tourism—that can’t be solved by ham-fisted government, but you almost take a sick pleasure in it. Kind of like New Yorkers in the 1970s bragging about their crime rate. As a purpose-built resort town, for years Whistler was alone in the corridor in trying to establish a natural balance between tourists and locals.
But now Squamish and Pemberton, themselves mobbed in hitherto unforeseen ways by visitors and their de facto economic umbilicus to Whistler, are juggling the same. Where it was once all Whistler’s fault, now everyone is on the carpet. Which makes the corridor’s halting but long-standing bumper-sticker war in which one community creatively slags the other—one famously stating “Whistler: This Way” with a middle finger pointing up—kinda moot. Whistler may be the glue that binds or bristles, but now we’re all in this together.
Random Measurements: The Cord
Firewood—dry firewood especially—is its own type of currency in any mountain town, but that value amplifies even more up at the “top of the pass” (aka Whistler), where chalets need to be heated and hotel lobbies need that crackling ambiance. A full cord of split, dry (or “seasoned” in the parlance of the industry) and delivered firewood can fetch as much as $800 in Whistle-town, but what is a “cord” anyhow?
“A cord is a stack of wood that’s four feet high, four feet wide and eight feet long,” explains legendary Whistler bartender and hand-splitting firewood enthusiast Greg Pondelicek. “I don’t know why; it’s just always been that way—ever since they stopped using bushels, you know, like on the Led Zeppelin album cover?”
The name “cord” likely comes from a length of rope or string traditionally used to measure with, but no one knows for sure. “It’s always been measured in cords,” Greg says. In the 1990s he and a couple of buddies used to run a firewood business in Whistler. “We called ourselves The Sandwich Bros. We’d go get wood and pick some pine mushrooms at the same time. The days before we had kids. It’s a lot of work—cut, load, unload, split, load it again and drop it off. But it’s also nice to help people out—drop a free load of wood for someone who’s injured or too busy or not expecting it. A cord of wood is a good gift, especially if you have kids to stack it for you.”
The Future of Fast
Talia Melum grew up hanging around the Whistler Sliding Centre, watching athletes (and the public) speed down the same icy track where Canadian women bobsleighers took gold and silver in the 2010 Winter Games in Whistler. “I knew I wanted to try it,” she says. “And once I did, I loved it right away.”
Talia is 15 years old and already in her third season solo-piloting the monobob (single-person bobsleigh) competitively. At the end of January (just a week after this magazine went to the printers), she competed for Canada at the Youth Olympic Games (YOG) on the 2018 Olympic track in PyeongChang, South Korea.
“I’ve raced that track twice before,” Talia calmly explains. “The first time wasn’t great but the second time I finished fourth.”
One of only two youth monobob athletes in Canada, Talia’s top speed on the Whistler Sliding Centre track (the fastest track in the world) is 130 km/h, so far. She trains 5 to 6 days a week at the Sliding Centre during the season, and another 4 to 5 days in the gym at the Whistler Athletes’ Centre. And she’s not alone.
“Approximately 385 local children currently participate in competitive programs at Whistler Sliding Centre and Whistler Olympic Park, with thousands more next-generation athletes inspired by our community and recreation programs each year,” says Melanie Bitner, communications manager at Whistler Sport Legacies. “For some, it’s about exploring a different kind of sport and fun in the Sea to Sky. But for those with Olympic-level aspirations, the opportunity exists through our world-class facilities, coaches and collaboration with provincial and national sports organizations.”
Since the Winter Games left town, Whistler has seen no fewer than 15 young local athletes go on to compete on the global stage in bobsleigh, luge, biathlon and ski jumping, including Caitlin Nash and Natalie Corless, who nabbed silver in Women’s doubles luge at the 2022 YOG. (The duo also made history in 2019 in Whistler as the first women to compete in a World Cup race against the men.)
“I love it,” says Talia. “Nothing I have ever done comes close to the speed and the feeling I experience out there on the track.” www.whistlersportlegacies.com
Toughest Gang: Creekside Mob
Exhibit A: Whistler Pique Newsmagazine story from January 6, 1994:
“The most visible activity at Creekside comes from a loose-knit group of youths who call themselves the Creekside Mob. They are believed to have been involved in burglaries and graffiti painting. [Whistler Bylaw Enforcement Supervisor Clint] Logue says the Creekside Mob is far from being a gang. Rather, it is a ‘group of young men trying to establish themselves…We know who they are and they’re just a group trying to hang the gang label on themselves, but they aren’t really a gang.’ The Creekside Mob seems to identify with the snowboarder subculture, but the problem seems to exist more with the group mentality than snowboarding.”
“Haha,” says one founding member of the Creekside Mob (CSM), who still lives in Whistler. (Editor’s note: All Mob affiliates requested anonymity.) “Really it was just a bunch of us wasted youth playing cee-lo [a dice game] for shots of Crown Royal or collecting [marijuana] roaches for the month leading up to opening day so we could make a ‘ganjala’ royal roach.”
“We know who they are and they’re just a group trying to hang the gang label on themselves, but they aren’t really a gang.”
Certainly, with an influx of young men pursuing a new sport (snowboarding saved Whistler), there was the odd kerfuffle—mostly fights over girls with resident skiers, or putting some brash “citiots” in line (this was right around the inception of the Whiskey snowboard videos)—but for the most part, the core Mob crew were mainly interested in “getting up early—half wasted still—and shredding pow all day down to Dusty’s so we could do it again.”
Their criminal influence was somewhat overstated (and most of the graffiti was done by outsider mob wannabes anyhow). In fact, a number of Mob members have gone on to successful local careers as snowboard icons, film directors, artists, entrepreneurs and more.
“We weren’t violent,” our OG contact says, “We were just poor. But for sure, we certainly didn’t speak to skiers, other than a very select few. That was definitely a big no back then.”
Nicest Gang: Old School Initiative
Growing up in Whistler, especially in the 1970s and ’80s, meant being part of a very small group—every kid knew every other kid and everyone’s parents kept an eye out. It truly was that classic “it takes a village” attitude.
“It was a tight community in those days, out of necessity,” says born-and-raised Whistler kid Beau Jarvis. “And Pemberton, too. When I was really young, that’s where the medical clinic was, that’s where we all went to high school. Everyone was in it together.”
So when Beau and his daughter rolled up to the Whistler Skate Park in the summer of 2020, what he saw reminded him of that old-time spirit. “The place was full of young girls and there were these local teens there who called themselves the Real Wild Kittens, and they were just there to help other girls learn to skate. Every Friday they’d show up, volunteer their time and help their community. They even had energy bars they’d bought to hand out.”
A few weeks prior, Beau had been speaking to young alpine ski racer Broderick Thompson about the cost involved to support a World Cup career. (Jarvis grew up racing with the Whistler Mountain Ski Club and four of his five children still race there.) “Between Broderick and these young skater girls, I just felt inspired to help,” Beau explains.
First, it was just t-shirts for the skate coaches. “The kids made their own art and I got my brother to print them cheap,” Beau explains. “Around this time the Whistler Skateboard Club started up and we bought them merch as well. One day a family showed up with three kids and only one board, and the coach decided they needed gear, too—pads, helmets, decks. We continue to supply gear to both those programs. They are wildly successful programs—their camps are always full—but they needed assistance to be sustainable.”
Jarvis reached out to some old friends. “There are a lot of people who’ve achieved some success in their lives that are still tied to this area and this community,” he says. “Since we were a bunch of old-schoolers, I called it the Old School Initiative.”
These days the Old School Initiative supports the Whistler Skateboard Club, the Real Wild Kittens (named such because they are the children of some of Whistler’s infamous Wildcats snowboard crew of the late 1990s/2000s) as well as Whistler Community Services Society. They also help fund Thompson, slopestyle snowboarder Juliette Pelchat, skater/snowboarder Truth Smith and ski cross racer Emiline Bennet.
“All four of those athletes are competing at the World Cup level,” says Beau, “but also really community-oriented, that’s a component that we want to focus on. There are a lot of other local athletes who have applied and would qualify, I just need to get more funding in the door. I still fund a lot of it myself and just phone my buddies to ask for help. But I love the energy. I saw an Old School Initiative hat on someone at the Caminetto last week. And I saw two kids at the airport with the stickers on their board bags, probably going to Japan to shred pow. It was so awesome growing up here when the Sea to Sky was undiscovered. I want to make sure the kids and the communities stay connected that way.” www.oldschoolinitiative.com
My Scariest Moment: Shoot Out
Originally, we reached out to ex-Whistler Mountain ski patroller and Blackcomb founding father Hugh Smythe to talk about that time the only bank in Whistler was set up in a trailer on blocks in Creekside and someone showed up with a set of wheels and stole the whole bank (!!) but within five minutes of chatting, Hugh mentioned something that’s got to be up there for scariest Whistler moment ever.
“It was the Friday of Thanksgiving so most of the people working in town had left for the long weekend. I guess this was 1970. I was ski patrol leader on Whistler and we’d been on the mountain all day piling and burning brush. I was sitting having dinner in the cafeteria, just around the corner from the bar—L’Après, which later became Dusty’s. There were only about five or six other people in there and suddenly we heard this bang go off—it was really loud. There were only two people working behind the counter that night, a young Greek kid named Dino and a young waitress who I believe was named Mary.
“So right after this bang, Mary comes crawling out from behind the servery. She’s covered in red—no one knew it was blood at that point—and screaming, ‘He shot him! He shot him!’ So I flipped the counter up and ran in behind to the serving area and lo and behold there’s a man there on the other side with a large pistol. And I’m staring right down the barrel as he yells, ‘I missed him, I missed him!’ Dino was on the floor with a hole in his neck the size of a coffee cup, there’s blood everywhere and this fellow keeps waving the gun at me, screaming, ‘I missed him!’
“At one point he ended up putting the gun on the countertop, so I grabbed it and stashed it behind the counter—it was a Colt .45. By this point, one of the other people from the cafeteria side rushed in—an Aussie who had once been a beach inspector (we would call them lifeguards) so he knew first aid—so we set to trying to stop the bleeding and save Dino. The other people in the room grabbed the shooter and set him at a table in the corner. He was still mumbling, ‘I missed him. I missed him.’
“We couldn’t save Dino, so we got a blanket from the ski patrol room to cover him. Whistler had no police force, so we had to call one up from Squamish. What had happened, I found out later, was this fellow had come in trying to cash a cheque to buy dinner and Dino had said no. So he’d gone back to his trailer, got his gun and came back. Dino still said no. There was no management there or anything, it was just them. So he shot Dino.
“I was supposed to interview that fellow the next day for a lifty job. He was a prospector, so the gun was registered, but later they found two more high-powered rifles in his trailer. The court-appointed psychiatrist told me he had diagnosed the murderer as a paranoid schizophrenic. I don’t think he served that long of a sentence. But one thing I think about is, I had already decided I wasn’t going to hire him as lifty and was set to tell him at that interview. So who knows, maybe it would have been me the next day.
“That day cycled through my head for at least two years. Dino was someone I knew quite well; I ate at the L’Après cafeteria every day. I was only 23 when that happened—pretty young to see someone murdered. Pretty young to be looking down the barrel of a gun. That was the scariest thing that ever happened to me, in this town or anywhere else.”
Blown Spots: The Secret’s Out
Mikey Nixon dances the fine line of telling us about Whistler’s most blown-out spots without further blowing them out.
The difference between sacred and overblown isn’t quite as distinct as Sea to Sky rumblers might like. Humans—both the ones who live here and the ones who visit—have proven time and time again that we just can’t have nice things.
Take for example that ribbon of flowing water that starts at the north end of Whistler’s Alta Lake and meanders its way through a relatively pristine pocket of wetlands. On the right day, a float down the river can be a tranquil affair disturbed only by a symphony of birdsong. On the wrong day, you might come across a flotilla of booze-soaked morons blasting club anthems out of iPhone speakers, shouting obscenities at the geese and leaving popped plastic rafts in their wake.
What a difference a day makes.
Something similar happens up on the mountain as well. There exists a hallowed strip of snow that cuts through a towering V of granite just outside the boundary of the resort. If the same line were anywhere but the Coast Mountains, descents would be reserved for rare periods of snow stability. But with its proximity to civilization and a notoriety fed by both word-of-mouth and social media, the run sees more traffic than it should. You might skin (or bootpack) to the top of a would-be top-notch backcountry experience only to be greeted by a crew of tourists (sans avalanche gear) smoking darts at the top of the couloir before they sideslip 1,000 metres back into the resort. So it goes in the Sea to Sky it seems.
But if you hang a Roger where the tourists took a Larry, there are still a few un-trampled pockets to be sniffed out—for now. –Mikey Nixon
Innovation: What’s a Bike Park?
It took only a few grim housekeeping shifts back in 1985 for Eric Wight to seize on a better way to spend his summer. Wight approached his ski school boss with an idea to do mountain biking on the hill. When that went nowhere, Wight bought a fleet of rentals to seed the sport at valley level. By 1989, however, on-mountain summer product was a resort-wide priority, and Wight was asked to run guided biking on the hill. In response, Hugh Smythe’s forward-thinking Blackcomb Mountain allowed bikers up without a guide—but only to ride on pre-existing roads.
By 1996 trail-building keeners like Rob Cocquyt, Paddy Kaye, Dave Kelly and Tom Prochazka were scratching out an ever-expanding network of singletrack that would coalesce into something that existed nowhere else. In 1999, the Whistler Mountain Bike Park officially opened with Jason Roe as manager. Kelly took the development helm, constructing the world’s first machine-built trail, B-Line. Pros loved this “beginner” descent so much that planning for an expert-level A-Line began immediately; 1,200 machine hours and two summers later, the 50-jump classic became the park’s claim to fame, changing the face of the sport forever.
In 2001, legendary rider Dave Watson won the first Joyride, organized by Whistler Summer Gravity Festival founders Paddy Kaye and Chris Winter. By 2002, locals were raising the stakes for international World Cup downhill riders who came to compete. In 2004, the Crankworx festival debuted and Garbanzo Zone opened, tripling the park’s vertical with the alpine Top of the World trail. The outdoor press declared Whistler’s park the “benchmark for lift-accessed mountain biking.” Crankworx soon became the place to see and be seen, a global crucible of mind-blowing, freeriding firsts that continues to this day.
From humble beginnings, the Whistler Mountain Bike Park transformed into the biggest, best, most cutting-edge success in the mountain bike world, surpassing the million-rider mark a decade ago. With the recent opening of the Creekside Zone and 2023 addition of a new high-capacity Fitzsimmons chair at the original bike park base, those numbers are set to skyrocket. –Lisa Richardson
Perfect Day: Ian’s Dual Day
Ian Morrison is a born-and-raised Whistler skier and mountain biker who sees little to no reason to ever leave his hometown.
“For me, there is no better place to be. Every time I go somewhere else,” he says, “I come home and realize this is still the best. Even Squamish and Pemberton, sure they’re nice but the only reason anyone lives there is because of Whistler.”
It’s one of those April days where it’s spring in the valley but we somehow still get a foot of fresh up top, then it cracks blue. It happens every year, and it’s always still a pleasant surprise. I’m up at the crack of 7 for a quick breakfast and a coffee. That’s homemade eggs benny and quadruple-shot cappuccino, 30-minute turnaround—spring casual. You gotta relax before skiing pow.
“Then it’s straight to lot eight and unload on the best hill in town. Meet a buddy or two and hit the Excalibur gondy. Zip up and get a few mid-mountain laps; on a good snow year the Excelerator zone will deliver. Maybe ski The Bite a few times while we keep an eye on Glacier Chair—need to be on that as soon as it cracks.
“As usual, the Blackcomb alpine will be open earlier than Whistler so it’s straight to Spanky’s. I’m forging my own trail up there 100 per cent of the time, the ‘Dirty Line’ for sure. On a good day we’ll get two laps in Spanky’s then toss the skins on and head out for D.O.A. or Husume. Some people think D.O.A. is blown out, and it is, but only if you’re old and slow—get there earlier and it’s the same old D.O.A.
“By around 1 p.m. it’s time to rip back to the parking lot, refreshment up, then head home for the bike stuff. Head to Function to snack out on a quick ride on those trails, then over to Coast Mountain Brewing, to get some vitamin B’s for après. And if it’s really the perfect day that means you get a chance to shower before your reservation at Sushi Village to get into some Dumbo [sake] with the crew. Is it Ski and Snowboard Fest? There’s probably something going on if so. If not, good night.”
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