Whistler & Blackcomb – August 22nd

From Renton, we headed up the Interstate and over the border back into Vancouver, where we met up with Anna, muchly grown up Finley, and Anna’s parents at a café. From there we headed up towards Whistler, a couple of hours north.

Finley with his 'First Kiwi' from NZ

Can you get much cuter? (aside from our nephew and nieces that is :P)

Anna, Finley, & Anna's parents

On the way there we decided we should probably ring up first to see if there was any room at any campgrounds there for any of the next couple of nights – needles to say, we should have probably checked that a couple of weeks earlier, being Whistler (which seems to only have one actual campground listed in our book), so we decided to stay at Squamish, about an hour away.

The road up to Squamish and Whistler is pretty amazing – it’s called the Sea to Sky Highway, and for good reason – it runs from the coast in Vancouver up into the mountains, alongside one of the coastal sounds, and there are lots of amazing views (unfortunately not really many/any nicely placed viewpoint to stop to see it, so we tried to make do with photos out the car windows, including lots of concrete barriers alongside the road!)

Lawrie at a viewpoint along the road

One of the views from along the road

We saw some pretty serious training for kids’ BMX racing, and found a nice quiet campground with lots of bear warning signs and information – however, of course we didn’t see any bears (we’re a lot less worried about the warnings these days it seems…).

We headed up to Whistler much later than we planned in the morning, and found ourselves rather confused when we got there – it’s not the most obvious layout in the village to see anything, but eventually we discovered that we were in the upper village, which has lifts up to Blackcomb mountain (adjacent to Whistler), and picked up a few free maps. Much better once we found a proper park and were able to go check out some things, now having at least a faint idea of where they were! So we checked out a few different shops and worked out which one Lawrie would hire a downhill bike from, then Lawrie retired to the car for a sleep while I got together a few things for hiking around at the top of the mountain.

A few of the many MANY bikes in Whistler

So our afternoon was spent somewhat differently to one another – Lawrie had one of the most fun afternoons of his life, decked out in body armour and a full faced helmet (as were about half of the people I saw that day!). His lift pass included unlimited rides to the main area of the mountain (not the summit, but there’s not a whole lot of bike tracks up there!), and the mountain bike park, which includes a ridiculous number of awesome downhill tracks and jumps, is open until 8pm – so much fun was had there! By most people I saw anyway, although I saw one guy do a most impressive face plant in front of many people watching from a restaurant down at the village… I’m sure there were many stacks though!

Random guy doing a jump at the mountain bike park

Lawrie decked out in his downhill riding gear

How the bikes get up the hill

Lots of jumps, from the chairlift

One of presumably many stacks... This one looked quite decent.

My day was a little less exciting than Lawrie’s, but still great – I went up to the top of the mountain on the gondola chairlift, and went on a few short little hikes at the top, including at the summit, from the Peak chairlift there. Then I headed over to Blackcomb mountain on the Peak to Peak Gondola, which is pretty amazing – it’s the longest and highest above the ground, in the world apparently. It’s about 4km between the terminals at Whistler and Blackcomb, and between the 2 supporting towers it’s a 3.024km length, of dangling wires… So the cables hang down quite a way in the middle from where the start, but at the lowest point in the middle you’re actually 436m above the ground and creek below! Anyway the ride is over very quickly, and seeing as the gondolas can each fit 28 people in them (fantastic for at the snowfields there in winter!) they say 2050 people can travel each way in an hour.

Just going up the chairlifts from the villages (Whistler Village to get to Whistler peak, and the Upper Village for Blackcomb) takes about 30 minutes – kinda different to the little fields in Australia and New Zealand! Also a little different to home is that the altitude of Whistler Village, which gets covered in snow in winter, is only about 600m above sea level!

Heading up on the gondola

Looking back at Whistler from Blackcomb (showing the Peak to Peak gondola)

From the top of the gondola at Whistler

Awesome views from the top

Little inukshuk - there were lots of these around!

Big inukshuk from the 2010 Winter Olympics

The Peak to Peak gondola

And although we’ve heard that Whistler is pretty much populated with employees from Australia and New Zealand too, it wasn’t quite true – we heard a reasonable amount of English accents too… But it was a little strange to suddenly hear a whole lot of Aussie and Kiwi voices for the first time in a couple of months!

As we couldn’t return Lawrie’s hired downhill bike that night, we had to stick around until the next morning, so finding a place to stay was going to be kind of difficult if we didn’t want to pay through the roof for a motel room! (Well that would probably have been pretty difficult too actually…) – We didn’t want to head back down to Squamish, nearly an hour away, and the town to the north wasn’t too close either. They close their car parks at 3am to make sure nobody sleeps there, and there’s no unrestricted on street parking either. Even in the nearby tiny town we discovered there are parking restrictions overnight along the streets! So luckily we discovered a nice sheltered park behind a corner store, which even had toilets as well as food for breakfast! Best night’s sleep we had in ages!

Would be a pretty nice train trip I think... Between the highway and the views, on the way back to Vancouver