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I took the opportunity presented by the week between the Olympics and the Paralympics to visit Whistler.

I caught the Greyhound at Abbotsford on Monday afternoon, changing buses at Vancouver. The 2010 Winter Olympics had closed only on the night before, and there were still dozens of people travelling from the venues back to the airport, some of them officials or athletes in team colours and others simply spectators. I saw one glum-looking middle-aged man wearing a Russian team tracksuit and a security pass waiting for the bus – it later turned out that the Russian Government has fired many of its officials in response to the country’s below-average performance at the games. Security was still tight, particularly on the buses going to Bellingham and Seattle in the U.S., although the guards didn’t seem too concerned with the people actually going to Whistler.

Obviously quite a few other people had the same idea I did, and there was quite a crowd for the Whistler-bound buses. Mostly young people, coming up from either Vancouver or Seattle. We all packed in and set off up the renowned Sea-to-Sky Highway. It was a spectacular drive – the late afternoon sun lit up the waters of Howe sound to our left, and beyond it the snow-covered slopes of the Coast Mountains. A single speedboat followed us for a while, until we reached Squamish at the head of the sound and began to head inland. Garibaldi stood ominously over the other peaks, until it was hidden by the steep fir-covered slopes that closed in around us. As we climbed higher we began to pass odd piles of snow and frozen puddles beside the road, and the bus struggled a little on some of the steeper slopes.

Finally, as evening was falling we began to pass neat little lodges and holiday houses nestled in the woods – the outskirts of the Resort Municipality of Whistler. Many had obviously been rented for the Olympics, and the flags of a dozen nations hung from their windows and balconies. We pulled into Whistler Village, and all spilled out onto the sidewalk into the cold (although not freezing) evening air.

Whistler Village exists purely for tourism – beyond a few basic amenities its businesses are hotels, ski and snowboard rental shops, clothing shops and restaurants (over ninety). It is fairly new, but built deliberately to try and capture old-world charm. And I have to say it succeeds – it really is a charming place. It is built around a pedestrian-only street, called the Village Stroll, which leads from the shops and hotels up to the base of the Gondolas going up the mountains. It is lined with beautiful light displays, and at the time I was there was still decked out in Olympic splendour, with flags and banners and, of course, the Olympic Rings themselves in the centre of the village.

A few skiers were still winding their way down the final runs in the fading light, and dozens of people carrying skis and snowboards were walking down the stroll. Some were heading in groups to pubs and cafes, others making their way back to their accommodation. Walking through the village, two things hit me about Whistler straight away. One is that it is a very young town, not only young in the sense of being new (the site was a popular summer holiday spot for years, but it has only grown into a ski resort over the past few decades), but full of young people. It looks and feels like a university campus. The other is that it is extremely cosmopolitan; the most diverse place I’ve ever seen in my life. If not for the Canadian flags, it’d be hard to tell that you were even in Canada.

The people walking down from the slopes and working in the shops, restaurants and hotels spoke in every accent. Most of the workers are foreign; at least half from Australia. Jokes about ‘Whistralia’ are not far off the mark – I hadn’t been around so many Australians since I left Australia last May. The place is also teeming with young temporary workers and tourists from Ireland, Britain, and South Africa. Americans were abundant, and I met some from as far away as Texas and Washington, D.C., and heard conversations being carried on in German, Japanese, Russian and especially in French. I even saw a man in an Estonian team ski jacket – I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen an Estonian in person before in my life. As one American I spoke to on a ski lift the next day said, it really was the United Nations there.

Eventually (and with a bit of difficulty) I found my hotel, the Aava. My room originally cost $179 per night, but they had a third night free special so I paid only $120 a night for a three nights. As beds in hostels within walking distance of the village cost around $90, I thought it was great value to pay only $30 to be in the village itself and have my own bedroom and bathroom. Neither being particularly wealthy or much of a traveler, it was a bit of a novelty to stay in a hotel anyway. I was especially impressed with the little coffee machine in my room, and I even had cable TV.

On Tuesday morning it was time to hit the snow for my snowboarding lesson. I assembled with a small group of first-time snowboarders at the base of the Whistler Gondola. And we weren’t the only people – there were instructors in blue jackets mustering their classes, mountain patrollers in bright yellow, and of course, crowds of skiers, snowboarders and sightseers. North Face gore-tex jackets were everywhere, and plenty of people were still wearing gear with either team colours or Olympic insignia on it. The snow began literally where the village ended, and skiers and snowboarders would periodically shoot down the final run and come to a stop just before the cobblestones.

Our instructor was a laky, easy-going Greek-American named Kostas. Dreadlocks erupted from under his helmet, and in between teaching snowboarding he was part of a reggae band. He led us to the Whistler Gondola, and we were pulled up the cloudy slope.

The village sits in a valley in the shadow of two mountains; Whistler to the south and Blackcomb to the north. They were originally operated by two separate resorts, now both bought by a company called Intrawest and merged together as Whistler-Blackcomb. With 38 separate lifts capable of carrying some 65,000 people per hour, over 8,000 acres of ski slope and over two hundred runs, it is easily the largest ski resort in North America.

It is also the most popular, and one of the most popular ski resorts in the world. And it’s hard to imagine a more ideal situation for a ski resort. The village is low, at only about 600 metres (2,000 feet) above sea level, making it easily accessible and ensuring that altitude sickness is a non-issue (unlike at, say, some resorts in Colorado). And both the mountains are big, rising to over two thousand metres, giving skiers hundreds of metres of vertical drop and kilometers of runs without needing to deal with high-altitude conditions. The coast of British Columbia is warm, and temperatures below minus ten degrees Celsius (fourteen degrees Fahrenheit) are considered unusually cold. This keeps the snow soft and makes skiing pleasant. And despite the low altitude and mild climate, the region gets abundant snow, with skiing opening in November and skiing sometimes continuing into June (although the official season ends in April).

Anyway, our destination was the Olympic Training Area on Whistler Mountain, so we got off the gondola at the halfway station. The high-speed gondolas are the main highways up and down both mountains (and via the recently-finished Peak-to-Peak gondola, between them), while numerous smaller lifts take people up to the top of runs from their stations. We didn’t need to catch one, though, as the flat bit of snow where we would start learning was right ahead of us.

Snowboarding is a fairly simple exercise – in theory. You put your weight on your front foot, drop your shoulder, drop either your toes or heels to catch the uphill edge of the board in the snow and point in the direction you want to go. And as Kostas regularly reminded us, “no swimming [ie. waving arms], no booty shaking, and control your ride, brother!”, the latter aimed at me right before I crashed to avoid running into the ski lift.

We took a break for lunch and went up the gondola (or, as Kostas liked to call it, the ‘gondie’) to its terminus at the Roundhouse Lodge, a little below the peak. It was well and truly snowing up there, with little visibility. There were two cafeterias there, packed with people, as well as shops and the Whistler station for the Peak-to-Peak Gondola. Supplies were sent up by gondola from the village every evening, and every now and again the rubbish would be sent down by gondola as well.

We returned to the training area and stuck at it for the rest of the afternoon. We were working on the slope accessed by the ‘magic carpet’, an airport-style travelator. Plenty of other classes were running there as well – skiing for the disabled, for the blind, and for kids. Inevitably, as soon as I crashed a six-year-old would glide past me as if they didn’t have a care in the world.

One ski instructor took his three students to the top of the slope.
“OK everyone, we’re now going to go down controlled.”
“Yeah, that’s what he thinks” said the first one as she started to follow.

For my final run down the slope I almost got to the end before I crashed. I had got the hang of everything…except stopping.

That night I saw Avatar at the village theatre before going back to the Aava. I was finding it a little hard to sleep, though, because I’m not used to sleeping in a heated building and there were occasional raised voices from the surrounding rooms.

The next day I toddled off to ski school. There couldn’t have been a bigger contrast in the instructor or the weather. Marlene was a retired accountant from Manitoba, and it was a clear, warm, sunny day. We still went back to the familiar Olympic training area and the magic carpet, though. Soon we were all sliding around in a circle on one ski.

I was going fine until we had to start learning how to stop. When going straight at gentle speed on skis you slow or stop by bringing the points of the skis together and angling them down to make a ‘snowplow’. I’m a bit duck-footed, and my feet don’t quite bend the right way. So once I started I kept going.

We went back to the Roundhouse for lunch, where Marlene pointed out the bear prints in one of the slabs. The bear had walked across it while the concrete was still soft. There is a large black bear population on Whistler and Blackcomb mountains, although they were all in semi-hibernation when I was there, having been fattened up well on the bumper berry crop after the warm summer. They usually wake up in late March, when they can cause issues by wandering onto the ski runs.

We continued skiing into the afternoon, when we worked on turns. It took me a while to get the hang of it – you turn on skis by putting your weight onto the outside ski and pointing that foot inwards, and I didn’t quite get it until I got into the habit of slightly picking up the inside foot. My right turns were good, but my left turns remained shaky. By now it was warm enough that many people were skiing around in T-shirts.

I stayed at the training area until it closed, getting to the bottom of the run without mishap but still unable to stop without falling over. At the time I thought skiing was a little harder than snowboarding, but in retrospect I think the poles even things up a bit. Plus I could turn on skis – on the snowboard I often ended up doing 360s or facing the wrong direction, which was fun but not exactly helpful when it came to not running into things.

On Thursday morning I went back to the training area for a bit of snowboard practice, but the carpet wasn’t yet running and the snow was hard in the cold morning, so I went up to the Roundhouse and across the Peak-to-Peak Gondola for sightseeing. I returned to the slope, but the sun was still hiding and it was still cold, and a couple of falls from the snowboard dampened my enthusiasm. I went back down to the village, returned my rented gear, and went for a last walk around before boarding the bus.

As we left, we passed a lot of streetlights decked out in rainbow banners. ‘Winter Pride’, Whistler’s annual gay and lesbian ski festival was on. In retrospect I might have gotten a better deal on the ski pass or rental if I had said I was gay.

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