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Weathering Whistler’s image

It’s fickle, often frustrating and can change in an instant, but what does the world see of Whistler’s weather?

In December I stood in the rain in Whistler Village to watch the live national broadcast of cold[er] >play, Jian Ghomeshi’s CBC special about winter in Canada. Images shot both in Whistler and across the country blossomed on the inflatable screen, all of them white, blue, crisp and cold looking. Farley Mowat and Anne Murray, icons of Canadian winter, shared their thoughts on the season. The cameras were then supposed to capture the crowd live in Whistler’s winter playground and simulcast the scene back across the country. The few dozen souls in the square, many in wet sneakers and duck boots, left plenty of open space where the increasing rain splashed up from the paving stones in a mockery of the pristine images on screen.

"We’re here in Whistler Village," Ghomeshi said, trying to sound chipper and not too ironic, "What better place to explore winter?"

The disparity between the Whistler we project to the world and the one we periodically find ourselves living in has always fascinated me. More often than not, the weather manages to almost gleefully reveal that disparity. Our image is that of a ski resort, perched high in the pristine mountains where crystalline flakes float down onto a bed of white. Our reality is that we live in a rain forest, 20 kilometres as the crow flies from the Pacific Ocean, on the path of the pineapple express and the El Niño current, like a deer caught in a warm flood of headlights.

If global warming or climate change are for real Whistler’s image as a winter playground could become even soggier. But then, that could be the case for a lot of other winter resorts too. Most Colorado resorts, for example, had some rainfall over the Christmas-New Year’s period this winter. But regardless of weather realities, the images on brochures for ski areas always show clear skies, fresh snow and smiling faces.

I have other recollections of Whistler’s fickle weather. In 1975, the world watched as Whistler prepared to host its first World Cup downhill race. The course was set, the sponsors’ banners were flying and the racers were ready; then a warm Pacific southerly rolled in and swamped the course in a downpour. Again in 1979, with the Crazy Canucks at the top of their form, the inevitable warm melt occurred prior to the race and then froze into bullet proof concrete on race day. The European officials, in their infinite wisdom, cancelled the downhill in favour of an exhibition super G because they said the course was too fast and dangerous; the Crazy Canucks straight-lined it to prove them wrong.

One of my favourite stories involving our unco-operative weather and another big TV production unfolded when Much Music broadcast a special called Snowjob live from Whistler in the early 1990s. After Randy Bachman played a set, an up-and-coming glam band known as Sven Gali took the stage at the bottom of Whistler Mountain. The lead singer, clad in tight black leather pants, no shirt and a long poser hairdo, introduced a song by claiming he’d been up on the mountain that day snowboarding in his leathers when… Whack! a snowball flew out of the crowd and hit him. It was a rather hard snowball, the kind that can only be made with rained-on snow. Who was this unknown singer telling an unlikely story about taking air on his snowboard in his leathers?

Another snowball flew, then another and another. The band threw a few back before realizing they had a severe lack of ammunition. They hid behind amplifiers as the crowd began to enjoy themselves. Terry David Mulligan emerged to tell everybody there was a lot of expensive sound gear up here and really we shouldn’t… Whack! Right in the balding head of one of Canada’s first VJ personalities.

The whole thing was broadcast live on Much Music, and a friend who went home early to watch it on TV told me the cameras unsuspectingly filmed the start of the fiasco before cutting to other programming.

Were the snow-throwing Whistlerites so disgusted with the obvious lie this rising rock star was feeding them, or was it the lie we were feeding the world, the lie about our winter paradise while we stood in the mush packing snowballs that oozed water? (You can always detect the lie factor when a production of this magnitude is in town: the discrepancy between the near side and the far side of the camera.) Perhaps the crowd was intent on shattering a false image which the lead singer of Sven Gali had unwittingly brought to light.

The distance between image and a deeper sense of reality is interesting to watch, whether in a town, a nation or an individual. The health of any of those entities is related directly to their ability to keep image and inner reality integrated. It’s an often rocky road to travel for the suddenly glorified rock singer, actor, writer, etc. once the media gets hold of them. Some can handle it; perhaps the ones who can keep the image of themselves in perspective, to continually weigh it against the other aspects of self and see how it measures up; or to try to ignore it completely and recognize that it’s a fabricated image: the far side of the TV camera that was never meant to resemble reality.

But back to the weather. While waiting for the transit bus in Alpine Meadows last November, I talked with a newly arrived young man from Quebec. The snow from early November had disappeared and a cold drizzle swept across the highway.

"I expected a lot more snow around ’ere," he said.

"It’s still early," I told him. "In November the snow comes and goes in the valley." I didn’t want to tell him that it also sometimes does this in December, January and February before it really goes in March and April.

"I thought it would be different," he said.

I told him about our proximity to the ocean, about the undeniable fact of the rainforest and how all this rain was likely snow up on the mountain. He brightened up.

"Yeah, I heard it’s going to be a big snow year!"

I laughed a little and realized that everyone coming here for a week, a season or a lifetime believes it will be the best snow year ever; human nature loves to hope. To his credit, he recognized the absurdity of what he’d just said. I could almost see him drop through a layer of illusion and look around at the green trees and the moss on the ground for the first time.

"Well, it should be decent anyway," he said.

"Absolutely." We both boarded the bus, firmly grounded in our west coast valley.

Whistler’s weather has always been shrouded in mythology. The late ’60s and early ’70s are often spoken of by old-time locals as the hay day of big snow years: "We had to dig down to the front door to get in the cabin!" or "The gondola couldn’t open until we dug out the first 20 yards with shovels!" But if you talk to a yet older generation of local, it was the ’40s and ’50s that always saw 10 feet of snow in the valley. "You could count on it."

One might turn to environment Canada’s weather statistics to get a more accurate gauge, except the town of Alta Lake didn’t keep weather statistics, and Whistler didn’t start recording them until 1976. Young places don’t have a history, the thinking goes; it must be created, or fabricated, and so the young town is perfectly situated to create its own image. But as it gets a little older, and wants to know itself, it might just begin to yearn for the unvarnished truth.

The weather in Vancouver matters less. The wet greys of late fall blend into winter and then unfold gloriously into spring. Before the first buds on the Japanese plum trees blossom in March, the dark months are wet and grey and sloppy. Everyone knows it; that’s Vancouver’s image and often its reality. The odd snowfall is odd indeed and the cold snap of minus-15 is an even greater oddity, though it does occasionally happen.

In Whistler, the calibration of the temperature is much more critically set. A degree up or down can change the appearance of the whole town, not to mention the economy. Whistler-Blackcomb recently expanded, without lifts, into the high alpine bowl of Flute basin. In interviews company representatives mention the threat of global warming as one of the reasons for opening up more high alpine terrain. It also gives Whistler-Blackcomb more skiable terrain, which looks good in magazines and brochures.

But for those who tire of the spin - for the seasoned local or the newly arrived one who suddenly drops down to the mossy earth and sees Whistler as it is - it’s fascinating to watch the place from both sides of the camera. As I stood in the rain in Village Square in December, I wore a hat and a coat and a bit of a smile on my face. Some of the people in the thin crowd looked painfully aware of the hypocrisy we took part in, and of the cruel joke the weather had played on us (the valley had been snow-blanketed and sunny the day before). I shuffled my duck boots on the wet paving stones and listened to Anne Murray try to tell us that Snowbird was a drug song in the ’70s. And I had no problem believing the smiling faces of the skiers who walked by and told me how great the conditions were up top - like winter, they said.



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