Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

The Sea To Sky Highway: Saying goodbye to a legend

It’s not like I’m going to really miss the old Sea To Sky Highway.

It’s not like I’m going to really miss the old Sea To Sky Highway. Like all long-time users who have had to suffer its slings and arrows over the years, I don’t know how many times I wished the highway was twinned, or straightened — or even updated a little. I made deals with God (hard to do when you’re an agnostic). Damned the engineers who designed it — and the bureaucrats who didn’t give them enough money to do the job properly. I vowed I’d never drive fast again. Even promised I’d never drive again, period. Whatever it took — just as long as I was delivered from the hell that Highway 99 had flung me into...

But that’s all in the past. Now that it’s happening, now that we’re finally getting our new four-lane ribbon of asphalt, I can’t help but wax nostalgic for that old cantankerous winding road that made the trip to Whistler such an exciting adventure.

It was our very own magic looking glass. And like Alice, every time we got to Wonderland, we marvelled at the impossibility of it all. The highway was like a guardian — anybody who dared challenge its off-camber curves and blind corners would be pushed to the limit of their driving skills. And if it happened to snow or rain — lookout! Only the worthy would succeed. OK, so maybe I’m getting just a little too romantic about its demise. Still, it’s one of the most dependable story topics to broach with old-time Whistlerites. No matter who, no matter when they came to Whistler — everybody, it seems, has a Sea To Sky Highway story to tell.

I remember my very first trip to Whistler in the early 1970s. Being from Quebec, I came to Canada’s westernmost province with a certain tolerance for high-speed driving. But I wasn’t driving that morning. My buddy, who was also a Quebecois, was at the wheel of a power-challenged VW bug whose best days were long-passed. Yet the frailty of our ageing chariot didn’t faze him one bit. He kept the accelerator pedal pressed to the floor from Horseshoe Bay to the Cheakamus Canyon. That’s when we met our first “Slow to 15 Miles Per Hour” sign. Or at least, that was the first time we noticed one…

Remember that sign? Remember the hairpin curve in the road it warned about? Well, being from the relative flatlands of Eastern Canada, we’d never seen a “Slow to 15 mph” sign before. And having recently learned how slow B.C. drivers were, we really didn’t take its warning too seriously. Besides, we were in a hurry to get to Whistler and sample its legendary powder snow. We didn’t have time to slow down to 15. Bad decision.

I will never forget the feeling of sheer panic as I looked out the driver-side window and saw the blue waters of the Cheakamus River beckoning up to us. By this point, our car had slid across the other lane and its tires were scrabbling hard against the gravel. My buddy was yanking on the steering wheel for dear life. To no effect. The tug of centrifugal force was inexorably pulling us towards the great yaw of air between the river and us. Of course, there was no guardrail to stop our sideways progress. To me, the reluctant passenger, it was all happening in slow motion. And I can still recall exactly what was running through my head as all this was unfolding: “Damn! We’re nearly there and we’re going to die. I’ll never get to ski Whistler after all…”

Somehow (it’s still a mystery to me 35 years later) my buddy managed to wrestle the old VW back onto the road without flipping the car. As we negotiated the rest of the route to the mountain — carefully heeding all “Slow To…” signs now — I can still hear our nervous, teenaged laughter reverberating around the car. So close. So close.

But the road wasn’t just tough on teenagers. There’s a popular story shared among the members of my wife’s family about an early trip to Whistler in which my father-in-law — a decorated war hero and strict law abider — lost control of the car during a particularly fierce snowstorm while driving down the infamous hill into Britannia Beach. “I don’t know how many donuts we did down the highway,” recalls my wife Wendy. “But if there’d been another car coming up the road we would have all perished. When we finally stopped spinning at the foot of the hill, my dad pulled the car to the side of the highway and turned off the ignition. It was clear he too was shaken. All he said was: ‘We’re going to have to analyse this.’ And that was the last we ever heard of the incident…”

Of course in the very early years of Whistler, the road up from Squamish wasn’t even paved. Indeed, the highway had been patched together from various logging roads that were already in place. There was even a portion where the Daisy Lake Dam bridged two sections of so-called highway. “I’ll never forget those Friday night trips to Whistler,” remembers Pique editor Bob Barnett. “There we were, the whole family packed into our well-travelled station wagon. The road was turny and twisty, and between the curves and the car exhaust seeping through the floorboards we’d all feel pretty carsick by the time we reached the canyon. Invariably, one of my brothers would puke — OK, so I did too a few times. I still remember the little mounds of vomit-laden tissues we’d leave on the side of the road.” He laughs. “I always worried that people would think we were littering…”

For Binty Massey it was all about the road closures. “Every weekend I’d pray that on Sunday night the highway would be closed due to avalanches or rock falls or some such thing. And it happened a lot during those years.” He smiles. “You see — a road closure on a Sunday meant two things: we’d miss school and we’d get an extra day of skiing in…”

Ask Rob Boyd about his Sea To Sky Highway adventures and be ready for serious excitement. “I’ve got a bunch of them,” he told me, a wide grin spreading across his face. “But I think the best story is the morning I totalled my dad’s pickup truck.”

Say what? “I had an early morning trip to Vancouver for a dryland testing camp — and I really wasn’t looking forward to it,” he recounts. “There was probably 10-15 cm of new snow on the ground and my dad had decided to lend me his new four-wheel drive pickup. I guess he thought it would be safer than using my old truck.”   Rob had just passed the Daisy Lake Dam and was fiddling in the glove box for a new tape to slip into the deck when he suddenly felt the back end of the truck start to go. “I had taken my eyes off the road for barely a second — but that was all it took. And it was all happening in super slow-mo,” he says. “I was going sideways and no amount of counter-steering was going to correct it.” Slowly but surely the truck made its way towards the ditch. Slowly but surely he felt himself tipping and finally going over on his side. “The truck was lying sideways in the ditch. The canopy of the truck had come off and my stuff was all over the highway. First thing I thought of was: ‘Great. I’m going to miss the testing camp.’”

No such luck though. For a car he’d passed earlier stopped and its passengers helped the young ski racer flip the light Japanese truck back onto its wheels and onto the road.

“So I’m back on the highway and thinking that I am going to make it after all,” he says. But it was not to be. Rounding the curve just above Brohm Lake, Rob was confronted with one of the most chilling sites in his young life. Hydroplaning across to his side of the highway was a beaten-up old Datsun 510 with bald tires and absolutely no chance of recovery. “We hit head-on,” he said. “I can still remember that surreal feeling of being completely suspended in the air and then coming down really hard.” He stops talking. Then bursts into laughter. “In some ways,” he says, “the second accident was a relief for me. For one, I knew I was going to miss that testing session after all. And two, I didn’t have to tell my parents about the first crash…”

Of course, the smarter ones among us never bothered to drive the Sea to Sky Highway at all. “There was no reason to,” says Whistler-Blackcomb’s Linda Ellis. “In the ’60s and early ’70s, we’d take the Whistler train up on Friday nights and go back home the same way come Sunday.” She pauses. Giggles. “There would always be a gang of us — 14 or 15 teenaged girls — and we’d rent this marmot-infested old hunting cabin behind the Husky. It might take us two or three trips from the station to get all our gear to the cabin. No lights, huge snowbanks — it was pretty daunting sometimes.” Still, she says they had a ball. “Can you imagine? A cabin full of high school girls right at the foot of the lifts. The place was heated by a big woodstove and there were pots catching the water drips all over the place. Sometimes there’d be a marmot — or a mouse — drinking directly from the pot. It was definitely an adventure…”

Funny how the existing rail connection was never considered as a viable transportation option for 2010…

But enough said on that. No doubt the new highway will cease to deliver the kind of horror stories we’ve come to associate with this terribly dangerous stretch of road. No doubt the trip from Vancouver to Whistler will become a humdrum affair no different than negotiating the Upper Levels or driving from Burnaby to Langley. But no matter how urban the driving experience becomes — no matter how fast you can get to the lifts from downtown — the trip from tidewater to mountainside will always remain an epic for those who lived through the first 40 years of the highway’s existence. And if only for that, Highway 99 is a Whistler icon well worth honouring.