This isn’t just any old boat. This beautifully restored Peterborough cedar-strip canoe was first purchased by none other than Alex and Myrtle Philip in 1916 for the use of guests at their recently opened Rainbow Lodge. After the Philips retired and sold the lodge in 1948, Myrtle kept it as her personal canoe for the next 25 years.
Getting out on the water was a major attraction for early guests to Rainbow Lodge, and the Philips owned a variety of boats and canoes for that purpose.
A few years ago the near-antique was starting to show signs of its age, and so the canoe ended up with Dave Lanthier, an expert vintage canoe restorer and member of the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association.
The canoe, pre-restoration.
David did an amazing job restoring the canoe to its former beauty, and the Whistler Museum purchased the wooden work of art and repatriated it to its former home. The canoe’s purchase was made entirely thanks to the generous support of the British Columbia Provincial Government.
Post-restoration, the red cedar has an amazing warm glow.
A detail of the bow deck and internal ribbing, post-restoration.
There is perhaps nothing more quintessentially Canadian than the canoe, as the eminent Canadian historian Pierre Berton so eloquently reminded us. This canoe is a pretty cool example of a classic, early-1900s design, fully restored to its original glory. Knowing that this specific canoe was taking avid fishermen out on Alta Lake nearly a century ago, and has been on countless River of Golden Dreams tours since, its only right that it has returned to its original home.
When Whistler Mountain entered the ski scene during the winter of 1965-66 it was a pretty big deal, but is was still “just” a ski hill. It wasn’t until the 1980s, once Blackcomb had opened and Whistler Village had been constructed that Whistler’s trajectory to international mega-resort was set.
Eldon Beck, an American landscape architect who had made a name for himself working at Vail, Colorado, was the village’s design mastermind, and the Museum has a bunch of photographs and a 2005 oral history with Beck which give some cool insights into this seminal period.
With local developers and the provincial government recognizing that the Whistler Valley had the potential to completely revolutionize the ski world, the Resort Municipality of Whistler was established in 1975, the first “Resort Municipality” in Canada. By this point, plans were already underway for the construction of ski lifts on Blackcomb and a centrally located, purpose-built village to service the twin ski hills.
Designs were solicited, but they left much to be desired, so in the summer of 1978 Al Raine visited Beck in Vail for some outside input:
Eldon Beck back in Whistler, 2005.
Al came to town and described what they were doing at Whistler, and I’d never heard of Whistler. So Al pulled the [existing Whistler Village] plan out and said, “You know, something’s not right with this. Could you take a look at it?” … It was basically a little grid plan. It was like a little city, and a lot of the images felt like a mini-Vancouver… there were major roadways crossing from one side of the Village to the other. There was a pedestrian [spine], but it had these really very heavy duty auto crossings over it. So you can kind of imagine both cars and people running together at critical locations… The land always tells you what to do. In this case, there was a plan imposed upon that. That was the major problem.
Beck’s initial comments were intriguing enough to earn an invite to Whistler to help amend the designs. During this initial visit Beck spent a lot of time walking around, getting to know the lay of the land and paying close attention to sight-lines. At one point Beck climbed to the top of a spruce tree and recognized the potential for a clear view of Fissile Mountain if the Village Gate was designed just right (thanks Eldon!). Later that day he reconvened with the resort development bigwigs in their corporate office:
I don’t know whose garage it was, but we went into a garage, and the Council was there and they were kind of all gathered around and we said hello and shook hands. This was a Saturday morning and they said, “We have a meeting tomorrow at two. Could you have something for us at two.” And I said, “Of course.”…
What I found in a lot of my design process, I kind of load my brain up and then I sleep on it. So at about four in the morning I woke up and I could really see it pretty clearly. So I got up and basically drew the plan and we worked on it then during the morning, but we had it ready for the two o’clock meeting, and presented it. And they all said, “Hey, that’s what we want to do.” It was supposed to have been a modification of the existing plan, [but] it really became pretty apparent that that was not the way to do it.
And so the Village design adopted a completely new course, following Beck’s lead.
From these initial sketches further details were hammered out.
This early sketch shows the attention to detail and 3-dimensional layout that went into Beck’s designs.
Beck (at centre) was hired on to oversee the project’s construction through 1979 & 1980. Village Square, behind the group pictured here, turned out to be Beck’s favourite part of the completed village.
Beck was initially frustrated by the lack of control he was given with the details of individual buildings, but over time, came to appreciate what he had initially considered to be “dozens of mistakes and imperfections.” The end result was sufficient to have him called back years later to oversee the design of Village North, Main Street and Blackcomb Village as well.
What are your thoughts? Is the Village a masterpiece or glorified mall? Does the consistency of design lead to a comforting or contrived feel?
Among the tens of thousands of historical photos that the Whistler Museum holds in our archives, I think Neal Carters’ are my favourites. Carter was one of the most prolific mountaineers on the BC Coast during the 1920s and 1930s, gaining several first ascents. He also managed to turn his climbing hobby into a career, working as a surveyor first on Hydro crews around Garibaldi Lake, and then playing a major role in creating the first official topographic map of Garibaldi Park in 1928.
The mountains immediately surrounding Whistler were of special interest to him. Not only did he personally map much of the area (original copies of his massive topo map are in the Vancouver City and BC Provincial Archives), he was also instrumental in convincing the Provincial Government to expand Garibaldi Park in 1928 to approximately its current boundaries, including the Spearhead Range and the Wedge groups of peaks.
His first excursion into our local mountains occurred in September 1923 when he, along with fellow Vancouver climber Charles Townsend, spent two weeks bagging first ascents in the region. Beyond the sheer joy of two weeks climbing in such sublime terrain, the two were also on the lookout for potential sites for future BC Mountaineering Club summer camps, which had been held almost exclusively in Black Tusk Meadows for the last decade.
Their first night’s camp on the flanks of Wedge. Tent pole technology has come a long way in the last 88 years.
Using Rainbow Lodge as their base (they gave Myrtle Philip copies of their photos from this trip, which is how the museum ended up with them) they first scrambled up Wedge Creek with a week’s worth of provisions. Townsend’s very matter-of-fact account printed in the BC Mountaineer belies their huge, gruelling days of bushwacking, navigating crevasse mazes, and scrambling up terribly steep and loose talus slopes in uncharted terrain.
The view south from Wedge to our familiar W-B backcountry: (l to r) Overlord, Pattison, Fissile, Trorey, Davidson, Castle Towers and Decker.
They managed to bag the first ascents of the twin giants of Wedge Mountain and Mount James Turner (whose summit was almost too small to build a cairn), while surveying and naming many of the surrounding peaks and glaciers, over seven days. Along the way they were treated to remarkably clear conditions, which, combined with Carter’s substantial technical skills as a photographer (crucial for accurate topographic surveys), produced some striking images of the surrounding landscape.
Returning back to Rainbow Lodge, they revelled in a massive dinner and comfortable night’s sleep in a bed, but were back at it early the next morning heading for the “largely unexplored” Spearhead Range. They first headed for Singing Pass-then known as “Avalanche Pass” and spent a night in the prospector’s cabin.
Impressive solitude near Whistler’s peak.
Getting radical near Mt. James Turner.
The rest of that week was spent climbing surrounding peaks such as Fissile (then known as Red Mountain), Overlord, and a further excursion for the first ascents of Mount Diavolo, which they named for their difficult experience on its steep and exposed north ridge.
This is just a small sample from more than fifty photos in our collection that Carter produced over the two-week dream trip. Most of them are beautiful in their own right, but are just as interesting as a unique perspective on a landscape that has become so familiar to us. Scanning through the images, you get a sense of Carter’s excitement and wonder as he peered out over vast expanse of completely undeveloped, largely unknown terrain.
While our events and exhibitions garner most of the attention, there is a third, equally important component of the Museum’s activities: managing our archives. This might not sound that exciting, but an archive is essentially a community’s collective memory, at least on paper. If you considers the sharpness of some people’s memories around here you begin to realize how crucial our archives are.
Anyone interested in the history of our local mountains will be excited by one of Sarah and Brad‘s latest projects: accessioning the Cliff Fenner fonds. (“Fond” is archive-speak for a distinct collection of documents, usually an organization’s documents or someone’s personal files.)
Cliff Fenner was born in 1909 in England where he built a solid career in the timber industry. After helping manage and maintain the crucial flow of commodities for the Allied war effort, in 1947 he moved to Vancouver. Here he bounced around a few more logging camps, then helped run Mount Seymour Park for a few years, before accepting the position of Park Supervisor for Garibaldi Provincial Park in 1953.
A Vancouver Province article on Fenner.
For the next few decades Fenner’s job mainly consisted of hiking around Garibaldi’s vast mountainscapes observing wildlife, leading trail crews, and advising on the park’s development. Dream job, anyone?
A year into his warden career Fenner described this twist in his life’s path in a way that’s easy to relate to today:
“I have always loved the outdoors. I’ve had city jobs, of course. Even thought about building up my own business, but I’d been exposed to too much good, fresh air.”
Lucky for us, Fenner was more than capable behind the lens; after retiring from the park service he made his living as a travel photographer and writer. Today our archives hold an extensive collection of his photos taken over more than two decades amongst the Coast Mountains.
Other interesting documents in the Fenner Fonds also include:
Fenner’s March 1960 report to BC Parks about a helicopter survey of Garibaldi Park to locate potential Winter Olympics sites. His preferred location for the Olympics base area was the west end of Cheakamus Lake, with ski runs on Whistler’s south-western slopes (Khyber’s, Cakehole, etc).
Several old magazines (Reader’s Digest, B.C. Motorist, etc.) in which Fenner’s photos and articles were published.
Personal files like his official certificate of Canadian citizenship, correspondence related to his photography, writing and travel, even a tourist visa for Columbia from 1980.
Another Fenner photo from the same issue of BC Motorist, showing Creekside in its infancy.
We’ve just started to browse the documents and photos, so surely there’s still some goodies yet to be found in there.
An unidentified climbing partner on one of Cliff’s mountaineering trips near Bralorne.
