As I set out from the top of the gondola on my way to the peak of Whistler the first rays of the morning sun sent wisps of mist rising from the road still damp from the night's rain. The air was crystal clear and every detail of the distant peaks and glaciers was etched against a dark blue sky. That was last summer and as Mountain Host-of-the-day it was my job to greet the few visitors who made it all the way to the top – answer their questions and give them information about the mountains and the village.
A lady from Kansas was among the first to arrive at the top that day. She was breathless, not so much from the climb, as from the view. "It's beautiful," she kept repeating "It's just beautiful! I've always dreamed of coming to the Canadian Rockies but it's even more beautiful than I imagined."
I didn't have the heart to tell her until much later that she wasn't in the Rockies. To this lady it didn't matter whether the Peak of Whistler was in Timbuktu or the land of Oz. To her, at that moment she was standing on top of the world, utterly spellbound by the majesty of her surroundings. "You're so lucky to live in such a beautiful place," she told me, and I had to agree.
It sometimes takes a visitor to remind us just how special our mountains are. In the winter, when getting to the top is just the beginning of another run down, when catching that last patch of untracked powder is more important than stopping to look across the valley, the view gets little more than an appreciative glance from most of us. But things are different in the summer. When the skiing is over and the pace of life on the mountain slows down it's the view that lures people to the top. And it's the memory of that view that visitors take back to Kansas and a thousand other places around the world.
In the old days, back when winter endowed us with enough snow to last well into summer, early-season sightseers could hitch a ride to the peak in a snow cat. In recent years experiments with Hummers and horses got a few folks to the top but for most getting there meant a long hike up the service road from the top of the gondola. This year things are different. Hang on to your hats folks! For the first time ever the Peak Chair is whisking summer sightseers up to the top. And for those brave enough to launch back off the summit, it will take them down again.
Barb Sittlinger, Summer Sightseeing Operations Manager for Whistler-Blackcomb, admits some people may be intimidated. "It truly will be an exciting ride," she says. "Definitely not for the faint of heart." But both she and Product Development Manager, Jeremy Roach are confident that the "Peak Adventure" will be a big hit with summer visitors. And for those with a distrust of heights, the road is open, ploughed and dry, providing a pleasant down-hill hike from the peak back to the Roundhouse and gondola.
Last September Roach, who is in charge of promoting the program, gave it a test run using a focus group of randomly selected visitors. The lucky few who made the round trip were wildly enthusiastic about the experience. "There were shrieks of delight on the way down," says Roach, "but people just couldn't stop smiling."
This summer, for a nominal extra charge, sightseers can add the Peak Chair to their gondola ride from the valley. The ticket is good for the day and thrill-seekers can ride the open-air chairlift as often as they wish. But Arthur DeJong, Whistler-Blackcomb's long-term planner and environmental watchdog, sees access to the peak as an opportunity to teach visitors about the high alpine environment. "For many people, particularly those from large urban centres, the peak of Whistler is as close as they'll ever get to nature. We want them to enjoy the experience and use it to learn about the mountains. If they understand how fragile the alpine ecosystems are they are more likely to respect them and stick to the trails," says DeJong.
He acknowledges that bringing more people into the alpine presents some challenges but is confident that a combination of education and well designed trail systems can protect and sustain the natural environment without detracting from the visitor's experience. His vision of the "Peak Experience" includes a network of low-impact trails leading to four principal viewpoints around the rim of Whistler. "We won't be building viewing platforms," says DeJong. "Our goal is to minimize the impact by using natural rock locations that overlook the very best viewscapes. And we intend to keep the interpretive panels low and unobtrusive."
Construction of the Rim Trail began last fall and when completed later this summer each of the four viewpoints will have an interpretive panel with a different theme: alpine flora and fauna, geology, large alpine mammals, and culture and history.
Most visitors will probably be content to stroll around the "rim" and take in the views but for the more adventurous hiker the Peak Chair gives access to almost 50 km of alpine trails. And for those not comfortable hiking on their own a 2.5 hour guided tour is available. According to the company website, this comes complete with a backpack, packaged lunch, and a "true Whistler local" as guide.
According to Barb Sittlinger the "true Whistler locals" will include both paid staff, who will run the guided tours, and volunteer Mountain Hosts, who will be stationed at various viewpoints to answer questions and give information. "We want to make education about the mountains and especially the high alpine environment a memorable part of our visitor's experience," she says. "And getting staff briefed and up to speed is a top priority."
It can be tough living up to the image of an informed Whistler local. The questions people bring up the mountain would challenge Google. They ask about the bioclimatic zonation of the forest, the age of a rock, the name of a flower, the history of the village, the habits and habitats of wildlife, and the best place to take the kids for dinner. Even when we're not hosting or guiding, the inquiring tourist has an uncanny ability to pick locals out of a crowd. Somebody once said, "you can spot ’em because they walk that way even when they're not in ski boots." And it's assumed that anyone with the four-buckle-shuffle is a source of unlimited local knowledge.
Having done the hosting job for quite a few years now I can vouch for the intellectual and diplomatic challenges of fielding visitor’s questions. They range from the banal to the profound and handled badly can leave either the guest or the "true local" looking stupid.
There was the excited fellow who called his children and wife over to see the beaver. "Look! Look! It's eating flowers," he exclaimed, and, warming to his subject, went on to tell them, and anyone else who would listen, how it could cut down trees and build dams, and that it was Canada's national animal.
Do I tell him it's not a beaver? No. At this point he doesn't really want to hear about marmots – Whistler's namesake – noted more for their ability to sleep than cut down trees. Maybe later he'll stop at the interpretive sign and get his rodents sorted out.
I remember explaining to an indignant woman with no concept of treeline that Intrawest had not stripped the mountains of trees to accommodate skiers. I'm not sure she believed me when I told her they just don't grow up here. And at least once each summer I'm asked if the red spring snow is the aftermath of ski accidents. I wonder what vision of carnage these people imagine we inflict on one another during the winter – a sort of Canadian version of the Roman Colosseum? But maybe if you come from some less fortunate parts of the world a bit of spilled blood seems a more logical explanation than the bizarre life cycle of snow algae.
But don't underestimate the visitors! You patronize them at your peril. There was the 12-year-old boy who brought me a chunk of shale he found near the Roundhouse. It had some markings which I started to explain were the fossil imprints of a plant stem that had been buried....
"I know," he interrupted, "it looks like sequoia to me. Do you think it's Tertiary or Cretaceous?"
Smart kid! The young woman who asked me about lichen turned out to be a graduate student doing her PhD thesis on the stuff, and the chap who enquired about trim-lines was a glaciology professor from Norway. You never know who you may be talking to on the top of Whistler. Most of them know far less about the Coast Mountains than you or I, but even if you're a "true local" its prudent to remember you could be talking to a visiting world authority.
The interpretive signs on Arthur DeJong's Rim Trail should take some of the pressure off but I expect anyone resembling a local who ventures up to the peak this summer should be prepared for a barrage of questions. So here are some tips. In past summers three of the most commonly asked questions at the Peak were:
• "How old are these here mountains?"
• "Is that (pointing to the Black Tusk) an extinct volcano?" and,
• "Where is the glacier?"
Any one of these can be answered with a single word or expanded into a 20-minute lecture. The trick is to watch their feet. When they start to shuffle or kick at a rock it's time to stop. And explaining the age of mountains is guaranteed to lead into a quagmire of boredom.
Most visitors have trouble getting their heads around the incredibly slow processes of plate convergence, tectonic uplift, and erosion that have shaped and continue to shape our mountain landscape. Compared to the worn down bumps they call mountains back East the Coast Mountains are geological infants, barely out of mother earth's womb. In fact the mountains we see from the top of Whistler are still growing – works in progress – poised between the competing forces of tectonic uplift and erosion. We live in an active orogenic belt where erosion can barely keep pace with uplift. That's why the mountains are here. If uplift stopped erosion would ultimately reduce the magnificent Coast Mountains to the sorry state of the Appalachians.
People are beginning to shuffle but I persist.
"The rocks the mountains are made of are a lot older than the mountains themselves." I tell them. "Here on Whistler they're 80 to 100 million years old. The granitic rocks across on Blackcomb are Jurassic, 150 million years old and...." but everyone has left.
Dealing with the Black Tusk is easier. "Yep, it's a volcano all right and it surely is extinct, hasn't so much as passed gas in the last 170,000 years, just been sitting there falling apart all that time. But before the glaciers got at it the Tusk was a good looking cone in the Pacific Rim of Fire, same volcanic belt as Mount St. Helens." Pointing out the other five Pacific Rim volcanoes visible from Whistler usually grabs people’s interest and, because Garibaldi and Ring Mountain are ice-age volcanoes, it leads right to a discussion of glaciers.
"Where is the glacier?"
Every time I get that question I'm tempted to say, "You're too late. It melted." I don't know what these people expected to see but obviously Cheakamus and Fitzsimmons, Overlord and Armchair and a dozen others do not fit their image of "the glacier."
"Well" I say "the really big ones, the ones that filled these valleys during the ice age, started melting about 14,000 years ago and they kept on melting until there wasn't much left, just little alpine glaciers mostly on the shady north-facing slopes of the higher mountains." Look north and except for Armchair the mountains are free of ice. Look south and nearly every north-facing peak has an ice-filled cirque. "Weather cooled down during the Little Ice Age and the alpine glaciers began to grow again until about 1850," I tell them as I point out the trim lines that mark the limits of the Little Ice Age advance. "Since then the glaciers have been steadily receding – melting back from their 1850 trim lines so rapidly that the newly exposed rock is still free of lichen and other vegetation."
This invariably prompts someone to ask about global warming and with the memory of last year's brief winter still etched prominently into my consciousness and the base of my skis I'm convinced the big thaw is upon us. If the present weather trend continues Whistler may come to rely increasingly on summer tourism for its economic base. And opening the Peak Chair for sightseeing has enormous potential for summer ecotourism.
While Jeremy Roach grapples with the logistics and marketing aspects and Barb Sittlinger gets her cadre of Guides and Mountain Hosts briefed and ready for the "crowd at the top," Arthur DeJong is well on the way to turning his long-range vision into the reality of trails, viewpoints, and information stations. But everyone involved is acutely aware of the challenges – aware that the safety of both people and the environment can be an issue.
"We're going into this with a clear vision of how fragile the alpine environment is," says Jeremy Roach. "We want to give people a chance to see the alpine ecosystems up close but we also expect them to stick to the trails, tread lightly, and respect the natural beauty of the meadows and alpine tundra."
As for the safety of guests, Charlie Buchanan, head of the Whistler summer patrol, says his teams are trained and ready to handle just about anything. "Our greatest concern," he says, "is people heading into the backcountry without proper clothing, equipment, and know-how. We don't want visitors in open-toed sandals and T-shirts getting off the Peak Chair and disappearing into Singing Pass."
In order to avert problems before they happen, one of his patrollers will be stationed on the peak to watch for people who need help, warn them of potential dangers, and steer them into safe areas. While it's unlikely they will be called on for more heroic measures, Buchanan's crews are thoroughly trained in mountain rescue, lift evacuation, and emergency first aid. By simply being there and answering questions Buchanan hopes his patrollers will help even the more timid visitors to relax and enjoy the experience of being high in the mountains.
After last winter's spring and this spring's brief flurry of winter the seasons are, one hopes, back in phase with the calendar. Summer in Whistler is usually a time of crisp sunny days that beckon us onto the mountain and this year those of us who are fortunate enough to live here will be sharing the peak with thousands of tourists from around the world. They are the people who sustain us in our mountain lifestyle. "I hope they enjoy the experience and take away a greater understanding and appreciation of the natural alpine environment," says Arthur DeJong.
Last week the first summer visitors who rode the Peak Chair to the top were treated to a flawless view. Far below them the village resembled tiny dollhouses clustered into the valley. The lakes, now free of ice, were sporting their summer colours of amethyst and emerald, and the golf courses were already green. And above the forested valleys, stretching to the horizon in every direction, the peaks and glaciers of the Coast Mountains, still emerging from the winter's snow, were a glistening kaleidoscope of white and black. Whether you're a "true local" who has seen it all before, or a visitor like the awestruck lady from Kansas seeing it for the first time, the view from the top is truly magnificent.
