Museum Musings

There is an often-told story of the first meeting of Stefan Ples and Franz Wilhelmsen of Garibaldi Lifts Ltd. on Whistler Mountain. Apparently Franz arrived at the top of the mountain by helicopter to find Stefan there on skis.

Well before people started to pay for lift access and a day's skiing, skiers were climbing Whistler and the surrounding mountains, either in search of skiable terrain—such as the George Bury expedition in 1939—or simply to spend time outd

Living in a place with such a beautiful landscape, where people spend a lot of time enjoying activities outdoors, environmental concerns are always relevant.

This week, we're continuing the story of Dick Fairhurst, who first came to Alta Lake in 1943.

When describing summers spent at Alta Lake, Florence Petersen (founder of the Whistler Museum & Archives Society) once explained how she, June Collins, Kelly Fairhurst, Betty Atkinson and Jacquie Pope (her fellow Witsend residents) would plan the

Many of the people we learn about at the museum are introduced to us through the stories of others. Sometimes these stories are told as oral histories and others come from documents in our research files at the museum.

While some of the stories we hear or read about at the museum provide only a glimpse into the lives of individuals who lived in the Whistler Valley (such as Josef Janousek, the subject of last week's article), others provide a much more complete pict

While cataloguing the Griffith Collection (a collection of roughly 50,000 images donated by photographer Greg Griffith), our assistant archivist Stephanie recently came across slides of a fire at The Keg building that we had previously only seen in b

Bringing television access to Whistler was no easy feat before cable and satellite, but Walter Zebrowski can be credited with bringing it to the valley.

This past week, the Whistler Museum opened a temporary exhibit on the Sea to Sky volunteers of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The exhibit will run through March as Whistler continues to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Paralympic Games.