Working at the Whistler Museum we sometimes forget that not everyone has heard of the story of Rainbow Lodge and its owners Alex and Myrtle Philip. Every so often we’ll be reminded, sometimes by a student on a field trip fascinated to learn that their school was named after a real person or a visitor […][...]
The names of people, places and things sometimes change. At the beginning of the 20th century, Whistler Mountain was labelled on maps as London Mountain and, until the creation of the Resort Municipality of Whistler in 1975, this area was officially known as Alta Lake. Even Alta Lake was once called Summit Lake. Some name […][...]
Winters at Alta Lake were a quiet season for the small community without the crowds of summer visitors. Whistler Mountain did not open for skiing until 1966 and until then downhill skiing in the valley was uncommon. Instead winter sports centred on and around Alta Lake. In addition to cross-country skiing, snowshoeing and sleigh rides, […][...]
Usually, we don’t think about ice very often, unless there’s none in the freezer. The cold, slippery truth is that our local ice deserves more consideration than that. Wrap up warm, and we’ll take you back to the times when the ice harvest was a hard, but fun, event in our valley. Since amenities were […][...]