Museum Musings

A few weeks ago, we took a look at Bill Bailiff and his column in the Community Weekly Sunset , the newsletter of the Alta Lake Community Club, which featured information about the history and environment of the area, alongside personal anecdotes.

Next Thursday (June 11), the Whistler Museum & Archives Society will be hosting its 2020 Annual General Meeting online beginning at 5 p.m.

The Whistler Museum and Archives is collecting donations of objects, photographs, video, and other documents to record Whistler’s experience during the pandemic. We’re accepting items Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

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