From outpost to world host, Whistler is ready for the games

ON A WET, snowy day in March 1960, three men squeezed into the small bubble cockpit of a helicopter in Squamish, B.C., for a day trip with an outsize mission.

The helicopter zoomed up the Cheakamus River Valley and its rich carpet of cedar, past the snow-encrusted horn of the Black Tusk and the 8,700-foot Mount Garibaldi until it landed on the 6-foot snowpack at the base of a then-obscure peak called London Mountain.

The trio — a pioneer of the heli-ski industry, a prominent Vancouver dentist and a Montreal construction magnate — were part of an exclusive set of Canadian ski enthusiasts who'd caught a sort of fever a few months earlier at the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley: If the Americans could build a world-class resort in the Sierra Nevada, why couldn't we do it in the Garibaldi Range?

Looking up the timbered peak that would soon be renamed Whistler Mountain, the three could see it all: Deep snow. A thickly shouldered mountain. A broad, flat valley dotted with alpine lakes that could cradle development.

"The runs down from the top . . . would have a 4,000-foot vertical drop, and we are satisfied that all events should be held in this one location," Sidney Dawes, the Montreal builder and member of the Canadian Olympic Committee, wrote later.

That was the day — March 3, 1960 — Whistler was conceived.

The trio — Dawes, pilot Glen McPherson and dentist Dave Mathews — were acting as a scouting party for the wealthy ski enthusiasts, and civic boosters who schmoozed at Vancouver's Scotch-and-cigar Terminal Club. What the men had in mind was nothing less than a top-drawer destination resort magnificent enough to attract the 1968 Olympic Games just eight years away.

The hurdles were immense. Whistler at the time was little more than a few rustic summer fishing lodges. There were no real roads. No systems for power, sewer or water.

Nonetheless, the boosters, operating under the Garibaldi Olympic Development Authority, embarked on a whistle-stop campaign, whipping up support from the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, the Idaho and Washington legislatures and Canadian journalists they plied with whiskey during morning news conferences.

But it wasn't enough. Whistler lost to Calgary as Canada's bid for the 1968 games; and in the end, Grenoble, France, got the job.

After hope and then defeat, who could have imagined that 50 years later, the audacious vision would be realized — on a scale that would blow the minds of those early boosters. Whistler has become one of the most celebrated ski resorts in the world. Ski slopes with an astounding full mile of vertical drop. The longest gondola on the planet. Year-round tourism that tops all but one or two European destinations.

For 17 days next February, the Olympics will finally come, turning an estimated 3 billion sets of eyes on Whistler, which will host the alpine and sliding events. Few of Whistler's original Olympic boosters are still alive to see the games arrive. And for those 9,500 or so people who live in the recreation mecca year-round, the games now pose a complex question:

What happens when you get what you wish for?

WHISTLER IS too new to boast many native sons and daughters. The year-rounders are intentional immigrants, mostly educated, uber-outdoor buffs willing to trade big-city amenities and live in overpriced housing so they can ski 120 days a year and bike to work. Many town graybeards came in Whistler's hippie days, famously commemorated in 1973 by the "Toad Hall" poster of 14 buck-naked, free-living ski bums.

Tom Thomson is among the elders here. He has a classic Whistler immigrant story, which begins with the day he first skied there. It was 1968; everyone and everything shrouded in fog thick as pea soup. "First day, I wondered, why would anyone want to stay in this?" Thomson recalls. The next day, the clouds cleared. He soon bought a season pass, then a cabin. After a career as a Canadian Football League player and broadcaster, he settled into retirement as a painter and, more recently, a town councilman.

Though he's nursing a broken shoulder from a mountain-bike accident, Thomson offers to host a driving tour of Whistler's fulfilled Olympic ambitions, starting in the village. Most of the 2 million people a year who visit Whistler — 1 million in the winter, more than 1 million in the summer — stay in and around the European-style, pedestrian-friendly village. In the main village square, you hear French, German, Mandarin and Korean as well as English spoken in Australian, Deep South and proper British accents — even in an indecipherable dialect that sounds like Klingon.

As Thomson drives past the hulking hotels, he begins a pro-Olympics pitch he's practiced on previous tours for out-of-towners. An estimated $1 billion (Canadian) has been spent preparing Whistler for the games — some of it on locals' wish lists, much of it not. The village alone is getting a high-speed broadband network, an outdoor plaza for nightly medal awards and face-lifts to older buildings.

The bigger-ticket items are farther out. On the way toward the venues for Nordic and sliding events, we pass a new hydroelectric dam added in time for the games, an expanded sewage-treatment plant and a landfill that was closed about 15 years early to make way for the Athletes Village, where competitors will be staying.

Those are sore points for locals, and Thomson acknowledges that.

"People ask me, 'Tom, do you wish for the old days of Whistler?' Hell no, I say. The best is yet to come. We said we'd accommodate it . . . It can't be a second-rate party. It has to be the best party of 2010."

Although they are officially the Vancouver 2010 Games, a majority of the medals will be handed out in Whistler. The Vancouver Organizing Committee estimates that 55,000 tourists will arrive each day during the 17 days of the games, swelling Whistler to its capacity. By some estimates, 130 buses — a bus per minute for more than two hours — will leave Vancouver most of those mornings, packing the two-lane highway so tight that anyone without a hotel reservation will be turned back in Squamish.

We stop at the Nordic venue, high above the Cheakamus River Valley. It is stunning, with more than 60 miles of trails snaking through the alpine forest.

Thomson revels in the place — the long-term benefit to locals, the image that will be broadcast over and over during the Olympics, the future draw for tourists. Then he looks down below us at the neatly parked row of 13 new snow cats brought in for the games. They were bought with games money for about $300,000 apiece, but symbolize the pre-Olympic spending that has made Thomson and his constituents nervous.

"When I ran for council, I said I'd be for the Olympics if it'd be at no cost to us as taxpayers." He shakes his head. "Famous last words."

WHISTLER'S OLYMPIC dream died hard. When the first bid — and the plan of leveraging the Olympics to build an instant resort — failed, the dreamers set about a more proletarian chore: carving out a ski resort the old-fashioned way.

Franz Wilhelmsen, a dashing former Royal Norwegian Air Force officer and Vancouver businessman, was elected the first president of Garibaldi Lift Co., which had an initial budget of $800,000. From the start, Whistler got lucky when a power company stepped up with $300,000 after tepid sales of shares.

Dawes' vision of runs down Whistler's mammoth north slope were scrapped when planners saw the maze of mining claims and adits on the slope. So on the south side — what is today Whistler Creekside — Whistler started with a modest offering of lifts and a pair of T-bars. When government inspectors came in January 1966 to give final approval for the lifts, it snowed so heavily the men couldn't find their cars and had to take a train back to Vancouver.

On the strength of a 50,000-seat stadium and monolithic hotel structure at what is now Whistler Village, the Olympic dreamers returned to put in a bid for the 1976 games. This time, the Canadian Olympic Committee backed the plan, but Whistler came in fourth in international voting.

Despite the second setback, developers smelled a coming gold rush and drafted plans for hotels, a theater and shopping mall scattered throughout the Cheakamus Valley. What was missing was a master plan that would put Whistler on par with the European resorts it hungered to match. In the early 1970s, a study commissioned by the socialist provincial administration called for creating a pedestrian-friendly village center and local government. It focused on a province-owned, open-pit garbage dump on Whistler's north side, a 58-acre parcel cradled between Whistler and Blackcomb mountains.

"I used to take people to show them the bears; that was a tourist attraction in the summer," says Hugh Smythe, then a young ski bum who went on to become president of Whistler-Blackcomb's owner, Intrawest. "There was a cat pushing garbage up, burning it. There were cars, and old wrecks and stuff."

To give the plan some heft, the provincial government gave the dump to Whistler, put in seed money — and froze all development

"The beauty of the plan was that it was a blank page," says Garry Watson, an attorney who helped with the first Olympic bid and later became a Whistler councilman. "We had every opportunity to plan what was needed — from sewer and water and transportation to accommodation and mountain development."

The freeze was deeply controversial — "I was called a communist," Watson says, chuckling — but it prevented the type of sprawl that dilutes many American resorts. Instead, Whistler got the village, which opened in 1980 with peek-a-boo views of the mountains, underground parking and absence of roads crisscrossing the pedestrian Village Stroll. The aesthetics were — and remain — tightly controlled, with a 28-hue color palate for exterior buildings and mandates for size, structure and uses for ground-floor commercial space.

At the same time, Smythe — then working for a ski company owned by 20th Century Fox, flush with profits from Star Wars — unfurled plans for Blackcomb and the ensuing huge expansion of runs. "I always say Blackcomb was built with the money from Star Wars," Smythe jokes.

A solid base established, Whistler tried once more for the Olympics, putting in a bid for the 1988 games. But the Canadians submitted Calgary instead.

Failure turned out to be an unlikely gift, allowing the resort to build deliberately instead of sprouting like an overfertilized plant.

Paul Mathews knows how resorts can go wrong. His Whistler-based firm, EcoSign, designs ski resorts worldwide, including for Olympic venues. "I'm certainly glad we built it like we did, as a commercial resort instead of for the Olympics. I've seen those plans, and they are just artists' dreams."

Because the games now arrive at a fully developed resort, Whistler didn't have to build "a bunch of stuff we don't want" just to impress the International Olympic Committee, Mathews says. "We get it now, and Whistler is in its prime."

WHEN WHISTLER'S Olympic ambition was fulfilled in 2002, the local real-estate market responded with a party of its own. Prices — already on par with the mega-resort Whistler had become — spiked 30 percent in a year. It has since leveled off, but shoe-box studio condos start around $600,000. Undeveloped lots: $1 million. The average for a single-family home: $2.8 million. Top end: a 12-bed, 11-bath mansion, listed now at $15 million.

On the other end are the Australian, South African, British and American kids who arrive each year, looking for cheap crash pads while they waitress, bartend and teach ski lessons. Crawl spaces, garden sheds, abandoned trailers and closets get rented out at $500 a month or more.

The municipality tries to shrink the income gap by capping real-estate prices for properties that can be sold only to locals. One local construction manager — with a 2-year-old and a pregnant wife — described waiting eight years for such a home before buying a two-room condo for $450,000 in a new development called Cheakamus Crossing. The same condo, unsubsidized, would cause a sticker-shock heart attack.

Cheakamus Crossing is perhaps the biggest long-term benefit for Whistler. It will be used as the Athletes Village during the games, then converted to 220 condos and town homes — their price increases limited to inflation — as well as a hostel and rental units for locals and visiting athletes.

"People think everyone in Whistler is rich. But there's a lot of people who work in Whistler with very normal incomes and struggle to get by," says Cathy Jewett, a 52-year-old mother of two. She moved to Whistler in 1976 to be one of the first female ski patrollers and will lead the ski patrol for women's alpine events during the Olympics.

The games have not helped the financial insecurity. Tourism has flatlined since 2002, and the grand plan laid out in the mid-1970s is now complete, meaning Whistler is at "build-out." The Olympic-related spending spree — especially the needed utility upgrades — have polarized the community, Jewett says.

"We're growing faster than we really should be at this point, at the maturity of the village. I think we should have had a chance to sit at build-out, and see what it was like, how the municipality would do, rather than pushing all these projects."

Jewett, however, says she's willing to withhold judgment. "In a year from now, it will be so . . . I don't know. Hopefully, those will be all positive superlatives. I think by anticipating the worst, you might set yourself up for it."

Paul Shore is the man perhaps most responsible for creating the superlatives. He is head of marketing for Whistler 2010 Sport Legacies, an intergovernmental group that will have a $100 million trust to run the Olympic speedskating oval in Richmond, as well as Whistler's Sliding Centre, the Nordic ski network and the part of Cheakamus Crossing to be used by visiting athletes. It is up to people like Shore to ensure that the venues — particularly the Sliding Centre — won't become white elephants as many locals fear.

To do it, he plans to sell — at $150 to $200 per person — an 84-mile-an-hour thrill ride on the sliding track that will host the bobsled, luge and other events. "At the top, you can barely focus on what people are telling you to do. The first couple of turns go slowly, then at the third or fourth turn, it's like someone grabs the back of your shirt and yanks," Shore says. "The first thing I said at the bottom — 'I had no idea.' Then for the next week, you tell everyone you know about it."

Until those tickets hit the market, Whistler can settle for the wild ride of the games itself.

Jonathan Martin is a Seattle Times staff reporter. He can be reached at 206-464-2605 or jmartin@seattletimes.com. Ken Lambert is a Times staff photographer.