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Who will tell our stories?

When Whistler visitors, residents and the world media gather around the 2010 campfire, what stories will they be telling about our mountain-town?

Crack out the cake and spark up the candles. There’s a party in the works. August 27 is the fortieth anniversary of the renaming of Whistler Mountain, ditching its "London" moniker for good and clearing up a period of official ambivalence that lasted nearly 40 years.

Karl Ricker clarifies the historic record. "The locals always knew it as Whistler. It was never known as London Mountain," he says. Ricker was a member of the party of legendary climbers and mountaineers who first skied the Spearhead Traverse in 1964, alongside Mrs. Phyllis Munday, Dr. Neil Carter and Dr. Roy Hooley, all of whom had completed first ascents in the region in their climbing careers.

Ricker, then 28, saw the potential for the Spearhead Traverse as a ski-tour once the chairlifts were in, "but the trouble was, there were not enough geographic names to make the traverse palatable in case people got in trouble." So the group gathered throughout the summer of 1964 to suggest names for the un-christened peaks in the area. While they were tossing names like Harmony Basin, the Musical Bumps, and Fissile around, group elders Munday and Carter, whose most prolific climbing had been done in the 1920s and 30s, decided the group should agitate to have the name Whistler reinstated.

Explains Ricker, "When the B.C. Mountaineering Club got the Garibaldi area gazetted as a park, the government sent a surveyor out to make a map." A.J. Campbell, a world renowned photogrammatrist mapmaker, spent the summers of 1927 and 1928 shooting images from the peaks to get survey points, and plotting out the park. Once the fieldwork was done, the political interference began. Government officials angling for a shot at posterity wanted their names on the map, and ended up securing mountains like Troy, Pattison and Weart for their egos.

"Part and parcel of this game was all the mining claims in the area, and lo and behold there was the London Mining Co. with a big claim on Whistler and somehow it was put on the map to be commemorated," Ricker recalls. Despite the fact that the local usage of Whistler was well-established.

The committee submitted their suggestions to the government at the end of 1964, and by August 1965, as Franz Wilhelmsen was overseeing construction of the first chairlift, Whistler’s little identity crisis had been resolved.

This re-christening kicks off a season of reasons to party. Whistler Mountain celebrates its accumulation of gravitas with its 40th year as a ski operation, and Blackcomb laughs in the face of grey hair at 25. Really, the numbers are irrelevant, except for the basic fact that anniversaries are great excuses to reminisce, get drunk together and tell stories. Remind ourselves how far we’ve come, whose shoulders we stand on, of the close calls and the embarrassing moments we’d rather forget.

"Tell your stories," urged Raymond Grant when he addressed a roundtable of Whistlerites last month. Digging into his experience as the Artistic Director for the Salt Lake City Cultural Olympiad, Grant shared: "Start to tell your stories now. If you don't have them ready when the world's media come, then they'll find their own and they’ll be the ones you don’t want told."

Sounds like advice as easily gleaned from more than a few 21 st bashes I’ve attended, where best mates who had been planning on winging their way through a speech find their lips limbered up by alcohol, and ply secrets from the Censored Pile, to cringes from the audience and tears from mothers and former girlfriends.

Damage control is so much tougher after the stories have been let loose.

David Jensen, of D Jensen & Associates, has been exploring Whistler’s stories over the last few months, as a consultant to the Whistler Museum and the Spo7ez Cultural Centre. His consulting career spans more than 28 years working with museums, institutions and science centres, developing concepts and designing exhibits. Through that career, his focus has been on telling great stories.

"This foray into storytelling, for me," says Jensen, "started with getting involved in the Northwest Territories pavilion project for Expo 86." The incredible diversity of residents, just 50,000, spread across a vast territory, all with completely different opinions and values, meant the story of the area could not be told with a few sweeping statements. "There were too many clashing opinions. So we focussed on the individuals; tell bits of their stories in quotes, and open up visitors to the conflicts on how they viewed the world."

Jensen recalls the way those individuals’ quirky thought processes stuck with viewers. Through snippets, people were given insight into entire ways of seeing, differing perspectives. "It was a way of dealing honestly with people. To say – we all have opinions. Everyone is right and no one is right, at the same time."

With library construction underway at the site of the Whistler Museum, the organization is taking stock and planning for the future. Through ongoing community and stakeholder consultations as part of their market research, Jensen has personally been able to peek behind the Whistler veil and discover a rich, soulful place. It was a discovery that frankly surprised him.

"One thing I marvel at in Whistler is that the story here is so rich and the passion so strong. But so little of this gets to the visitor. No one has a chance to touch that. There’s a big disconnect between what you feel and experience as a visitor and what’s really here in the community."

Jensen draws parallels between themes the museum is grappling with and where the resort community is at. "It’s really interesting, the overlap between developing the content for the museum and evolving a new face for Whistler."

And it all comes down to story.

Story-telling has experienced a revival amongst organizational and communications professionals. Yair Landau, the Vice Chair of Sony pictures, told Wired magazine in 2004, "There are three basic human entertainment experiences that go back to the cave: storytelling, game-playing and music. People are looking for a hybrid of those things."

Added Rob Glaser, chair and CEO of Real Networks, "There’s a fourth, which is being part of the tribe."

These are things we yearn for. Song. Challenge. Connectedness. Story.

Story is an ancient art – the first thing we develop fluency in as human beings. Going back to the cave, it was a way of pooling the tribe’s information about how to hunt the woolly mammoth, where to watch out for the saber tooth tiger, why to avoid those tasty-looking gut-rot berries.

Even in post-tribal days, story creates common conversations. Mowgli. Luke Skywalker. Robin Hood. Through exposure to these stories, we all share an understanding of what it is to be raised by wolves, an aspiring Jedi, a bandit redistributing the wealth. We’ve worn their capes and danced around. Across generations, the stories connect us back to each other. Back to the fire-pit.

Most importantly, when we hear stories, we are participating in the act as much as the teller. Our imaginations contribute to the tale, collaborating with the teller. Storytelling, then, changes the mode of corporate communications from battle to a dance.

As a tool in museum programming, stories democratize history. Used in the way Jensen did with the Northwest Territories project, they allow everyone’s experiences to be accounted for. History becomes participatory, instead of being the revised version of events drafted by the winners.

This participatory aspect of story is as important for a tourism economy as it is for developing museum programming. Tourists, for too long, have been reduced to being simply consumers, cynically viewed as walking wallets to be milked. But none of us aspire to be tourists. We choose to identify as travellers. We want to explore, be transported, to discover a place. We want to engage. Story enables visitors to share, to contribute, to be part of a narrative. Jensen says, "We’re so busy being observers and consumers. We go up to the mountains to sightsee and go for lunch, and we expect good service and good scenery, and we come away getting what we paid for, but we miss that human connection that touches you."

Perhaps it’s this disconnect that leaves tourists complaining about feeling ripped off. They came to experience the much-hyped Whistler full of anticipation and a desire to be swept away. But something was missing. They weren’t invited to engage.

Couching this in terms of "value" seems like a magic-hands misdirect. When I experienced my first season in Whistler, I didn’t leave thinking, Wow! That was great value! I left thinking, How do I reconcile this place, this chapter, with the rest of my life? It was incredible. The mountains are awesome – I’ve been converted. My credit card is maxed out. But how can I get back?

Whistler’s story then became part of my story, and I dug deeper because I wanted to understand what it was I had chosen to adopt, to give some purchase to my roots, even though they’re shallow here. Story has been the tool. It is a way of communicating the values of a place.

The tourist fatigue many of us on the frontlines suffer might be a consequence of not having told stories, not having communicated the values of the place, to our new resort employees, to the guests.

After a month of picking up after house-guests, it recently occurred to me that I should have told them from the outset that I’m anal about recycling, composting, and not keeping the water running when I brush my teeth. I didn’t think to, because they’re just habits. No big deal. Actually, yes, big deal. Tripping over other people’s habits, I realized I’m not actually easygoing at all, and that these little habits are a reflection of my values. Co-habiting would have been easier if I’d shared stories early on about the things that are important to me.

As residents and workers of a tourist community, it’s unfair of us to get frustrated at visitors who can’t let go of their currency, their coffee-brands, their lift-line etiquette, if we haven’t made an effort to share our values with them. Invited them to try something different. To participate in the story.

Especially when we are sharing the things we are passionate about. When someone leads you down a path you’ve never been before, you are hitting paydirt. You have found the little gold nuggets amongst the mountains of scree. You know, as a traveller, that you are getting more than you paid for. That this is what you travelled hundreds of miles for.

We need to share the stories of Whistler with the resort visitor. With our front-line staff. And with ourselves, to keep reaffirming why we are here, why we’re working two jobs and trying to explain to our parents the lack of suits in our wardrobe, why we’re already looking towards winter with a defiant optimism. We need to start gathering our stories, from amongst the community, amongst the people who live here, the people who have chosen this place, rather than feeling strangely unsatisfied with the fast-food spin that professional public relations weavers are putting out there.

So, gather round Whistler. The fire’s crackling. Stars streaking overhead. We’ll keep the wolves at bay. Tell me a story…



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