Tag: Cliff Jennings

Skating in the VillageSkating in the Village

December 12, 2023 Whistler MuseumWhistler Museum 0 Comments

Skating and hockey have been popular winter sports in the Whistler area for over a century, especially when weather conditions make for less than optimal skiing. The Woods and Jardine-Neiland children played hockey with shovels on Alta Lake ins the 1920s and 30s while in the 1960s the Alta Lake Community Club reported on Friday nights spent skating at the “Rainbow Rink” with hot dogs and hot chocolate from Rainbow Lodge. Until 1978, most of the skating rinks were built on frozen ponds and lakes by residents and community groups.

Pat Woods, Bob Jardine, Tom Neiland and Jack Woods skating at Alta Lake. Jardine/Betts/Smith Collection

While November 1978 started off looking promising for the upcoming ski season, the snow turned to rain by November 6 and the freezing level rose, melting much of the snow that had accumulated on the runs. The temperature then dropped to about -8°C overnight, leading to frozen pipes and 8cm of ice on some of the lakes and streams.

The weather stayed cold and clear through mid-November, which was great news for those interested in ice stock sliding or skating, but terrible for Whistler Mountain and their expected opening date of November 18. In a statement from November 22, 1978, a lift company spokesperson told the Whistler Question they still needed “about 50 cm of new snow to make the upper areas anywhere near skiable and probably closer to one metre to make the mountain operational.” The season was being compared to that of 1976-77, when Whistler Mountain had closed for three weeks in January due to lack of snow but the cold temperatures had made for amazing skating and a perpetual hockey game on the local lakes.

A hockey game on the Alpine Meadows pond. Whistler Question Collection, 1978
Ice stock sliding on the River of Golden Dreams. Whistler Question Collection, 1978

Whistler residents took advantage of the cold weather of November 1978 by skating on Alta Lake and Nita Lake, playing hockey on the Alpine Meadows pond, and ice stock sliding on the River of Golden Dreams. The municipality also began construction of an outdoor skating rink adjacent to Municipal Hall and next to Myrtle Philip School (MPS).

The ice rink next to Myrtle Philip School. Whistler Question Collection, 1978

Unfortunately for the municipal crew led by Cliff Jennings, as soon as they began to flood the rink, the temperature rose and it finally began to snow. The rink was still not finished by December 6, when a Question “School News” report written by MPS student Lance Bright stated, “We would like to thank the person responsible for the skating rink by the school. We hope it will be completed soon.”

While the change in the weather delayed the ice rink, it was good news for Whistler Mountain, which was finally able to open on December 15. The snow continued through much of December but by the end of the year the temperature had dropped again and 1979 started off cold and clear.

An enthusiastic game of broom hockey on the municipal rink. Whistler Question Collection, 1979

Skating at the municipal rink became a popular activity for residents and holiday visitors. The rink’s regulations allowed hockey to be played on the rink until 1pm; from then on, it was recreational skating only. Lights were added and bonfires lit to attract skaters in the evenings. The rink was always intended to be temporary, lasting only the 1978-79 season. Though the original plans for the Whistler Resort Centre (now the Whistler Conference Centre) included an Olympic-sized ice rink, the plans for the building were changed dramatically following a recession in the early 1980s and the rink was among the features that were cut. Whistler’s first indoor municipal ice rink, the rink at Meadow Park north of the Village, opened in in 1992, with the pools and recreation facilities added in the following years. Walking through the Village today, however, you are likely to see people skating in Olympic Plaza, not far from the first outdoor rink built by the municipality.

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Need a lift?Need a lift?

October 24, 2023 Whistler MuseumWhistler Museum 0 Comments

When Whistler Mountain opened for skiing during the winter of 1965/66, it had four lifts (one gondola, one chairlift, and two T-bars), all supplied by GMD Mueller of Switzerland. The company of Gerhard Mueller also won the contract to install the gondola and chairlift and two of his employees arrived in the area in the early summer of 1965. This past spring, Ed Schum, one of those two employees, came into the Whistler Museum and sat down with Cliff Jennings and our director Brad Nichols to share his memories of constructing Whistler Mountain’s first gondola and Red Chair.

Ed had already been planning to come to Canada with a friend when he saw an ad in a newspaper for technicians who would go to Canada to install ski lifts. He and fifteen other people were hired by Mueller, who hadn’t officially received the contract to install the lifts at Whistler yet. They worked for Mueller for about a year and a half before four were chosen to go to Canada. Ed and another man named Walter were sent to Whistler Mountain while two others were sent to install a gondola in Quebec.

The original gondola on Whistler Mountain. Whistler Mountain Ski Corporation Collection.

According to Ed, he and Walter arrived in Vancouver in mid-June and were flown up to the Whistler area by Quadra Construction, who built the foundations for the lifts. Ed fell in love with the area during that flight and predicted that he wouldn’t be going back to Switzerland after the job was done. Upon arriving at Alta Lake, they found the Whistler Mountain site was pretty much as it had been described to them by Mueller: a nice parking lot where the gondola station would go and then, up the mountain a little bit, “it gets really rough.” The pair went back to Vancouver to buy a truck and some tools, met with Franz Wilhelmsen and a couple of other directors of Garibaldi Lifts Ltd., and then drove back up the “highway” to start work while staying at Cypress Lodge.

There were pieces of tower all over the parking lot that they started assembling. They quickly discovered that the Swiss way of raising the towers wouldn’t work with the rough terrain and limited vehicle access (Ed estimated that it would take about eighteen months to put in the towers that way) and so Quadra Construction put them in touch with a pilot named Buzz at Okanagan Helicopters who had helped with the construction of the tower foundations. Together, they worked out the rigging needed and Buzz flew in the towers of the gondola and Red Chair. It took a day or two, a dozen sets of rigging, and “crews all over the place” to install over thirty towers for the two lifts, and Ed remembered that all of the flying was completed by his 24th birthday in early October.

Once the towers were installed, the gondola still required a cable and cars. A splicer came from a cable company in Vancouver to oversee the splicing of the Swiss cable, a process that required at least six people and very careful oversight. Both Ed and Cliff remembered an unexpected mishap when the heavy cable, still on its spool, broke the floor of the midstation, but the cable itself was unharmed. Additional workers were also hired to assemble the gondola cars, which were cheaper to transport in pieces.

The gondola still in use in December 1978. Whistler Question Collection, 1978.

Ed recalled that Walter went home once the lifts were running while he stayed to ensure that they continued to run smoothly. After the first season, it was decided that the gondola was too low in some places and some of the towers needed to be raised, which Ed took part in. When Mueller opened an office in British Columbia, Ed went to work there but would occasionally return to Whistler Mountain for maintenance work, where he worked closely with Doug Mansell who was in charge of the lift operations. As he predicted on that first flight, Ed ended up staying in the province, although the place and occupation changed over the years. The lifts he built remained on Whistler Mountain until 1991/92, when both the gondola and the original Red Chair were replaced.

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The first decade of grooming on Whistler MountainThe first decade of grooming on Whistler Mountain

March 21, 2023 Whistler MuseumWhistler Museum 2 Comments

Today Whistler Blackcomb has a fleet of 30 snow cats grooming the resort each night. This is a far cry from the limited grooming that occurred when Whistler Mountain opened in 1966.

Those lucky enough to have skied on Whistler Mountain in the 1960s may remember moguls the size of Volkswagens and ski runs covered in felled trees. Whistler Mountain had a single Thiokol and a bulldozer to maintain the ski runs in the early years. The Thiokol was essentially a van on tracks, which was useful for knocking the air out of powder and breaking up ice crusts, but it could not do anything about icy moguls. These machines could turn ice crust into sugary snow at the rate of half a run per night, so it took two days to groom one run.

Watching cornice blasting from the Thiokol groomer in 1968. At this time the Thiokol was one half of the grooming fleet on Whistler Mountain. Photo courtesy of Cliff Jennings.

Cliff Jennings spent two winters working as a groomer on Whistler Mountain when there were only the two machines. He remembers track packing the steep section of the downhill course known as the Weasel. (Track packing involves grooming the run by packing the snow down using only the bulldozer tracks.) “You would go over the edge and the snow was coming over the cab. You put your feet almost on the dash and put it into fourth gear so that the tracks were traveling as fast as you were otherwise you could lose the track. When the snow stopped coming over the top you knew you were on the road below midstation and you’d go back up around again.” Skiers’ side-slipping would then smooth the finish for race days.

Fixing a broken track on the John Deere bulldozer in 1967. Photo courtesy of Cliff Jennings.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the method of flying blindly down the hill in a bulldozer did not continue as the permanent method for grooming the Weasel, and volunteer Weasel Workers began grooming the slope entirely by ski.

The fleet of groomers grew over time and in 1975 the Fall edition of Garibaldi’s Whistler News included an article on the grooming on Whistler Mountain. ‘At Whistler we use over-snow vehicles called Thiokols, towing various pieces of machinery to literally farm the snow, just as a farmer cultivates his field. At Whistler we have four Thiokol 2100’s. The equipment they tow consists of four rollers, two mogul cutters, a powder maker (with another also on order for this winter) and a harrow.’

The article goes on to say, ‘The eight Thiokol operators work in two shifts to provide maximum coverage of the runs. The day shift starts up the Gondola run at 5:00 a.m. in the morning and begins grooming at midstation. Here they evaluate the snow conditions and decide what equipment to tow. Mogul cutters and powder makers and the harrow, if the snow is hard and heavily moguled, or if it is a typical deep powder day, rollers to make that fine packed powder skiing we all enjoy so much.’

A Thiokol grooming Whistler Mountain in 1974. Benjamin Collection.

Even with the improved technology most of the runs remained ungroomed and the machine tracks themselves would leave chunks of snow and ice along the runs. The corduroy that we know and love today would not come along until later.

Above: A groomer on Whistler Blackcomb in 2022. The machines grooming the mountain have changed slightly since 1966. Photo by Christie Fitzpatrick, courtesy of Vail Resorts.

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Poop or Chaos? A Whistler Sewer StoryPoop or Chaos? A Whistler Sewer Story

January 10, 2023 Whistler MuseumWhistler Museum 0 Comments

As we have recently learnt at the Whistler Museum, maintenance problems can pop up at the most inconvenient times and create quite the disruption. The same was true when a truck came down on power lines in Whistler one New Year’s Eve.

Disposing of human waste was an ongoing challenge for residents of Alta Lake and Whistler until the wastewater treatment plant opened in 1977. Prior to the sewer system, residents had private septic systems or outhouses, which posed environmental and practical problems for the growing community. On the weekends Brian Leighton, who lived in Creekside, regularly had to knock on the door of the upstairs units asking if they would hold off from flushing the toilets, as the septic system would back up through his toilet when all the units were full.

According to Garibaldi’s Whistler News, in 1977 Whistler had a permanent population of 800, but this swelled to nearly 7000 during the peak season and a reliable sewer system was required before the town could grow further. The importance of the sewer was not understated by Mayor Pat Carleton during the grand opening of the wastewater treatment plant, which included lunch, tours and much fanfare, when he said, “The foundation of Whistler’s future is this plant and sewer system.”

The sewer system was an important step before construction of Whistler Village could begin. Garibaldi’s Whistler News.

Despite initially being built to accommodate a growing community, the wastewater treatment plant could not keep up with the rapid and relentless increase in the population. Cliff Jennings was originally in charge of water distribution and sewer collection for the Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW) before becoming the superintendent of the wastewater plant. According to Cliff, every two years the wastewater treatment plant was having an expansion. However, with the economy slowing in 1981 there was no money to improve the plant coming from the Provincial or Federal Governments despite the population increasing. “We were pretty much always three years behind until just very, very recently. It was always just [cross your fingers].”

Continual construction of the plant during this time had its own challenges. Timing had to be perfect because it could only be powered down for short periods, around 90 minutes, before the waste had to be diverted, which meant raw sewage would be pumped directly into the river. “We never had to purposely divert but we got awfully close,” said Cliff.

Mayor Pat Carleton hands Cliff Jennings the keys to the municipal truck, August 13, 1978. Whistler Question Collection.

On the fateful New Year’s Eve, the power company had been working on the lines at the intersection of Highway 99 and Nesters when the hydraulic lift broke, landing the lift on the power lines. To get the lift off and the lines restored the power would have to be turned off to the entire Valley while it was fixed. This included the Village, which relied on floodlights as the main security measure on New Year’s Eve. Bringing down the lights would have meant total chaos in the busy Village, and would be questionable for safety. However, without turning the entire power grid off the line could not be fixed, and power to Whistler Cay and Nesters would be off all night until BC Hydro could fix the truck on the line. That would mean that the wastewater plant for these areas would also have no power for far longer than the 90 minutes, and without power, diversion of wastewater into the environment.

Due to safety concerns in the Village, the decision was made to keep the power off to Whistler Cay and Nesters for the night, rather than turn all the power off to the entire Valley to fix the line. Thankfully Cliff Jennings and the wastewater team were instead able to keep the treatment plant going with a diesel generator. The lucky team got to ring in the New Year’s with the sewage in the dark, but kept it going long enough that the lines could be fixed without any diversion, while revellers could continue as normal in the Village.

Revellers setting off fireworks on New Year’s Eve in Whistler Village, 1985. The Village was still busy but there were fewer security measures in place. Whistler Question Collection.

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