Olympic slopes and a village built for snow
Whistler exists because a few Vancouver skiers looked at the peaks above a fishing outpost on Alta Lake and decided they deserved an Olympic bid. The bid took decades — it finally landed in 2010, when Whistler and Blackcomb hosted the alpine events — but the village went up long before that, built from scratch in the 1970s as a pedestrian-only town designed around a sport rather than grown into one. The two mountains are joined by the Peak 2 Peak Gondola, a 4.4-kilometre span that held the record for longest unsupported stretch in the world when it opened. Long before the resort, the Squamish and Lil'wat Nations used this valley as shared hunting and trading ground, a history told at the cultural centre at the base of the mountains.
