Tag: Altitude

New Exhibit Opening Tonight!New Exhibit Opening Tonight!

January 25, 2022 Whistler Museum 0 Comments

The 29th annual Whistler Pride and Ski Festival is right around the corner! This week of January 23 – 30, 2022 will be chock-full of events dedicated to diversity, inclusion, and fun. Coinciding with this year’s festivities, the museum is pleased to announce the launch of a new temporary exhibit titled Pride & Progress: From the Grassroots Altitude to the Fearless Whistler Pride and Ski Festival.

Opening to the public this evening, Tuesday, January 25, 2022, the exhibit will take visitors through a visual and descriptive history of Whistler Pride.

*Whistler’s rainbow crosswalks are just one example of increased visibility mentioned by Dean Nelson during our online talk in February 2021. Photo courtesy of Dean Nelson.*

The challenges and triumphs leading up to the world-renown festival we know today weave a fascinating narrative. The story begins in 1992, when Altitude – as it was known then – covertly hosted around seventy participants for a gay ski week at Whistler Mountain. From these humble beginnings, the festival continued to grow, welcoming more guests and hosting increasingly renowned performers with each year, all the while working to create a safe space for the LGBTQ2s+ community in our mountain town.

The story of Whistler Pride wouldn’t be complete without an exploration of the relationship between the LGBTQ2S+ community and mountain sports. Centering on Pride House, the LGBTQ2S+ pavilion established during the 2010 Olympic Winter Games was a beacon of courage, visibility, and support for queer athletes to be their authentic selves. As the struggle for acceptance continues, this section of the exhibit invites visitors to reflect on the presence of homophobia in sport, and the importance of safe spaces to create awareness and encourage important conversations.

*Whistler’s Pride House was located at the Pan Pacific Village Centre and was very visible from outside. Photo courtesy of Clare Johnson.*

The exhibit will also feature artifacts, photographs, and films from the past 29 years of the festival in its various forms that will give insight to these historic Pride events. Thanks to Dean Nelson, former festival director (2008 – 2018), for donating many of the artifacts and archival materials being used for the exhibit.

We’re also happy to announce that our extensive collection of Whistler Pride records and materials have now been officially catalogued, rehoused, and published on our online database. Here you can find descriptions on various events, promotions, photographs, and audiovisuals to name a few. Please browse through at your leisure for more information on the history of the festival.

*Some of the materials donated as part of the Whistler Pride collection.*

We will be celebrating opening night of Pride & Progress: From the Grassroots Altitude to the Fearless Whistler Pride and Ski Festival on this evening, January 25, 2022 with evening hours from 6 to 9 pm. We will also be open from 11 am – 5 pm on Wednesday, January 26. As ever, entry is by donation and masks are required for all visitors to the museum – we hope to see you all here! Otherwise, the exhibit will be on display during our normal operating hours until April 19, 2022.

Not quite ready for an in-person visit? Our 2021 Speaker Series conversation with Dean Nelson is also available to watch on our YouTube channel here.

Chris Monaghan is the assistant archivist at the Whistler Museum and Archives. He has been here on a Young Canada Works contract through the fall and winter.

Whistler Speaker Series Launched for 2021Whistler Speaker Series Launched for 2021

March 9, 2021 Whistler Museum 0 Comments

Last month the Whistler Museum hosted its first Virtual Speaker Series of 2021. We are still getting used to hosting events online and miss the informal camaraderie of our audiences, but we are very excited to continue hosting some amazing speakers and sharing their stories.

For our first event of the season, we were joined by Dean Nelson. Nelson is an LGBTQ+ activist and a travel expert specializing in LGBTQ+ travel who first came to Whistler in 1993 to help open the Holiday Inn Sunspree Resort as part of the front desk team. He became involved in Whistler’s gay ski week, then known as Altitude, when its founder Brent Benaschak approached him about the Holiday Inn becoming a hotel sponsor for the event. From there Nelson volunteered to help with the fashion show and became increasingly more involved with the week. As part of the event on February 17, Nelson told us more about how the Whistler gay ski week came about and how it has grown over almost thirty years.

Whistler’s rainbow crosswalks are just one example of increased visibility mentioned by Dean Nelson during our online talk. Photo courtesy of Dean Nelson.

Even if you weren’t able to attend our first Speaker Series, you may have read about what Nelson had to say in the Pique of February 25th, and you can still learn more about the Whistler Pride and Ski Festival and its history by watching our talk with Nelson on the Whistler Museum’s YouTube Channel.

Prior to 2020, the Whistler Museum had relatively few records or materials documenting LGBTQ+ history in the Whistler area. Late last year, however, Nelson donated a large amount of archival material and artefacts to our collection, including photographs, promotional materials, jackets and much, much more. Along with oral history interviews (such as the one we conducted with Nelson for February’s event) and other materials, this donation helps to fill one of the gaps in our collection.

While the Whistler Pride collection is not currently available to search in our online database, we hope to begin cataloguing the collection this summer. Most summers, the Whistler Museum is able to hire summer students through the Young Canada Works program, a joint initiative of the National Trust for Canada and the Department of Canadian Heritage. This summer, we are intending to hire a collections student whose main focus would be the describing, cataloguing, and rehousing of this new collection. In the past, collections students have helped catalogue the Don MacLaurin Collection, the George Benjamin Collection, the Greg Griffith Collection, and many others that are now available to search online. The ability to find documents and information online is especially important at a time when researchers may not be able to come to the archives easily.

We really enjoyed learning more about the Whistler Pride and Ski Festival with Dean Nelson last month, and are looking forward to continuing to learn more. Our next Speaker Series event examining the history of journalism and publishing in Whistler will take place at 7pm March 25 and include an audience Q&A with the speakers (while the talk by our speakers will be posted online after the event, the Q&A will not). Find more information about our upcoming Speaker Series at whistlermuseum.org/events.