Whistler prides itself on being a pretty dog-friendly community. Our community-run animal shelter is more than three decades old, and dogs even have their own dedicated section of beach at Rainbow Park. Canines have always been prominent citizens in this valley; one could even argue that they were more important during the early days of Alta Lake, when they helped with the essential tasks of hunting and shooing away bears, as well as warming hearts like only dogs can.
Dogs appear in tons of the photos in our archives, so much so that you start to feel like you know some of them personally. You find dogs out on the hunt, hiking high up in the mountains, chasing horses, playing around the lake…
One prominent pooch, a spaniel named Binkie, led an especially unique life.
Growing up on the idyllic shores of Alta Lake, from a young age Binkie led a particularly leisurely lifestyle. In her abundant spare time she developed the habit of standing on her hind legs like a person.
Binkie was clearly quite proud of her bipedalism, and she was always keen to show off for the camera.
Binkie became a minor celebrity thanks to her unique skills, even landing a holiday-card contract with Hallmark…
What started out as an attention-gaining stunt morphed into something much greater as Binkie began to recognize the meditative qualities of prolonged balancing on her hind legs.
Binkie’s devotion increased with time, and she soon came to prefer Rainbow Lodge’s quiet winters, when she could practice in peace. It became a common early-morning ritual to find Binkie in her favourite spot behind the lodge, having stood all through the night.
Binkie’s focus became the stuff of legends. As remarkable as it was, however, sometimes her dedicated practice interfered with the busy work of running a popular tourist resort. Look how unfazed Binkie was by this fuming-mad horse that clearly had places to be and things to do.
The photographic record gets sparser in Binkie’s later days, but clearly she continued to experiment with balance, meditation, and focus. Many local yoga teachers consider Binkie to be a guru of sorts, a pioneer practitioner of what is today one of Whistler’s most popular and fastest-growing activities.
Whistler’s history is full of visionaries such as Binkie. Uncovering such stories broadens our perspective on this seemingly young community, and opens our eyes to new possibilities. Binkie was truly ahead of her time, and her story can offer inspiration to us all.
[Just in case it wasn’t clear, we might have fabricated certain elements of this story. All of the photographs are actual, unedited images of Binkie from our archives. We promise that all the other stories on our blog are truthful.]
It has been a gruelling three weeks of soliciting entries, debating their merits, paring down the field, and then finally, subjecting the strongest competitors to a gut-wrenching winner-takes-all on-line poll. Today, only the true champion is left standing, and that champion is “Whistorical.”
Congratulations to Andrea Phillp for submitting the winning entry (it just squeaked by on the last night we were accepting names). For your creative contribution you are now the proud member of the Whistler Museum Archives Society and owner of a signed copy of Leslie Anthony’s White Planet.
We received a lot of great entries and appreciate the strong response we received from the community, both locally and beyond (I would have been happy with any of the finalists, although, I must admit, I was rooting for Blog Tusk). We’ll try to keep things interactive here at Whistorical so stay put for more ways to get involved and contribute to the site!
The polls are officially open! Over the last few weeks we have been accepting name suggestions for the new blog. Thanks for all your submissions; we had an excellent response and had to narrow the field quite a bit to get to these final five.
The final tally will be taken on June 20th, at which point we’ll crown the winner as moniker monarchy. Beyond the immeasurable glory that comes with having your title grace this website in perpetuity, the winning entry will also receive a free Whistler Museum membership and a signed copy of local author Leslie Anthony’s latest book White Planet.
For the keeners, you can double your voting power by “liking” our Facebook page (if you haven’t already) and voting on our mirror poll there.
So which title best suits a historical blog about Whistler, and the crazy, unique community that it serves? Take your pick:
Whistler draws people from around the world for any number of reasons: skiing, biking, wildlife viewing, night clubs, fine dining, mining… wait, mining? Although a largely forgotten aspect of our region’s past, the (mostly unfulfilled) promise of underground riches was one of the Whistler Valley’s main draws in the days before “world-class shopping.”
Our local mining industry is actually 10,000 years old. Squamish archaeologist Rudy Reimer has found obsidian quarries in Garibaldi Park that were in use shortly after the retreat of continental ice sheets permitted the initial peopling of the region. Used for razor-sharp blades and fine jewellery, this volcanic glass can still be found among Garibaldi Park’s ancient lava flows.
Because each obsidian quarry has a distinct mineral composition, scientists are able to “fingerprint” fragments found at archaeological sites and trace them back to their source. Garibaldi obsidian, a valuable trade item, has been found throughout southern B.C. and Washington state.
The first non-indigenous visitors to Whistler–William Downie, a Scottish veteran of the California gold rush (a “49er”), and Joseph Mackay, a former Hudson’s Bay Company employee (a fur trader, not a retail clerk)–were commissioned by the colonial government to explore the territory between Lillooet Lake (Pemberton) and Howe Sound (Squamish) in September 1858, hoping to find a better coastal access route to the booming gold mines of the B.C. interior. Dwindling rations forced Downie and Mackay to press on to to the coast before exploring the surrounding mountains.
Scouring our archival holdings is a little like exploratory mining. Our archivists recently uncovered a gem, this massive 1916 map of recorded mining claims in southwestern BC. It is currently in a very fragile state and unavailable for public viewing, but we are looking into getting it properly restored.
Following on their heels, tens of thousands of goldseekers rushed into B.C. during the 1860s. While the majority of them travelled along the Douglas Route up Lillooet Lake then northwards beyond Pemberton, many other prospectors came up from Howe Sound and rooted around the surrounding creeks and mountains en route. Since mining men are notoriously secretive, however, very few records survive of prospecting activity prior to the twentieth century.
Among Whistler’s earliest known commercial mining operations was the Green Lake Mining and Milling Company, beginning operations at least as early as 1910. Run by Mr. A McEvoy of Vancouver, the Green Lake Co. worked 10 small claims at the 1000 – 1300 metre level on Whistler Mountain above Fitzsimmons creek. The workers lived on the mountain’s lower slopes in cramped, drafty housing with a regrettable male-to-female ratio. Sound familiar? They found gold, silver, and copper, but never in commercially viable quantities.
Harry Horstman, a lanky prospector from Kansas, was to have greater staying power but similarly meagre returns. Despite his prairie roots, Horstman was at ease up high, living for decades in a log cabin near the 1600-metre level on Mount Sproatt. Digging several tunnels, Horstman found enough copper to eke out a modest living (supplemented by trapping), but he never struck a major load.
Harry Horstman at his Mt. Sproatt cabin.
The Horstman Glacier on Blackcomb is named after this pioneering local. Horstman was a fixture in the Alta Lake community for decades, but still appreciated the seclusion of his mountain-top retreat. I wonder what he would think of the neon circus that goes on every summer on his namesake glacier!
Beginning in 1916, a group of twenty-odd men began operations as Alta Lake Mining near today’s Alpine Meadows neighbourhood. They excavated bog-iron ore, which occurs when iron dissolved in run-off water forms deposits in bogs or swamps. At their height of operations they sent 150 tons of bog iron a day down the PGE railway to Squamish, where it was then shipped to the Irondale smelter at Port Townsend, Washington.
Other locals also pursued small-scale prospecting and mining. Fitzsimmons Creek, which runs between Whistler and Blackcomb Mountains, is named after Jimmy Fitzsimmons, who prospected throughout his namesake valley. Mining shafts that resulted from his exploration can still be found along the Singing Pass trail.
In the 1930s, locals Billie Bailiff (who also kept a trapline in the Singing Pass/Cheakamus Lake area) and Bill “Mac” MacDermott also dug mine shafts on the north side of Whistler Mountain, hoping to find the north end of the Britannia Mine’s massive copper vein. They didn’t succeed, but interest in Whistler Mountain’s underground remained.
Most of us know that the first ski lifts on Whistler Mountain started from Creekside. Fewer realize that the original plans included lifts and runs on Whistler’s north side, rising from near the present-day village. These plans had to be abandoned, however, because the provincial government chose to protect mineral claims on that side of the mountain now held by two companies, including the Canadian giant Noranda.
Unsurprisingly, mining claims didn’t interfere when plans to develop the north side of Whistler Mountain resurfaced in the late-1970s, as the provincial government was now a key investor in the planned resort expansion.
While never developing on a comparable scale to the Coast Mountain mega-mines at Brittania Beach or the Pioneer Mine, the quest for underground riches still played a formative role in Whistler’s early days. If one knows where to look, traces of this past mining activity can still be found throughout the local landscape. Local whitewater folk are familiar with the abandoned Ashlu gold mine because it is the drop-in point for a popular kayaking run.
Kayaker at the entrance to the abandoned Ashlu gold mine.
Though interesting to history buffs, this hidden legacy also poses significant physical and environmental hazards. For more on this context, track down the Summer 2011 issue of Kootenay Mountain Culture Magazine for a short article on this titled “Rider Dun Gone.” (The article isn’t available on-line, but the magazine is free and can be found here.) For more info on industry and government efforts to track down and regulate Canada’s thousands of abandoned mines, check out the National Orphaned Abandoned Mines Initiative.
If you’re really keen you can even take your new knowledge into the woods and find some old mining ruins that haven’t yet been completely overtaken by the relentless coastal rainforest. But be careful! And remember, although relatively young these are archaeological sites; try to leave them undisturbed for others to enjoy.
