Piquenewsmagazine 2906

FEBRUARY 10, 2022 ISSUE 29.06

WWW.PIQUENEWSMAGAZINE.COM

FREE END TIMES

A MILLION AND COUNTING PART I

EXPERTS BELIEVE THE WORLD IS IN THE MIDST OF THE SIXTH GREAT EXTINCTION, AND BIODIVERSITY LOSSES AROUND THE GLOBE CONTINUE TO MOUNT. HOW DID WE GET HERE? AND WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT?

14

TRAGIC WEEKEND Search-and-rescue crews responded to multiple calls last week

16

PERMIT APPROVED Long-awaited Function Junction development set to move ahead

44

ANCIENT ORIGINS Whistler film crew traces skiing’s origins in Return to Roots

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THIS WEEK IN PIQUE

38

44

32 A million and counting Part 1 Experts believe the world is in the midst of the sixth great extinction. How did we get here? And what can be done about it? - By Leslie Anthony

14

TRAGIC WEEKEND

Search-and-rescue

28 STATE OF EMERGENCY

The Squamish-

crews didn’t get much rest last week, with several call-outs up and

Lillooet Regional District is preparing for last year’s unprecedented

down the corridor.

number of emergencies to be the new normal moving forward.

16

PERMIT APPROVED

Whistler’s mayor and

38

NATURAL TALENT

Snowboarding’s ultimate

council issued a development permit—with conditions attached—for a

competition, the Natural Selection Tour, is heading to its second leg near

long-awaited Lil’wat Nation development in Function on Feb. 8.

Nelson, B.C. in February.

18

44

PICKET PETITION

A Whistler resident has

launched a petition in support of striking transit workers, as the union

ANCIENT ORIGINS

skiing’s origins in the new short doc, Return to Roots.

prepares to escalate job action.

COVER At least in the future all the museums will be full. - By Jon Parris // @jon.parris.art 4 FEBRUARY 10, 2022

A Whistler film crew traces

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THIS WEEK IN PIQUE

Opinion & Columns 08 OPENING REMARKS The new Lil’wat Nation development in Function Junction is exciting—

#202 -1390 ALPHA LAKE RD., FUNCTION JUNCTION, WHISTLER, B.C. V8E 0H9.

PH: (604) 938-0202 FAX: (604) 938-0201 www.piquenewsmagazine.com

aside from the questions still lingering about its traffic impact.

Founding Publishers KATHY & BOB BARNETT

10 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Letter writers this week ask for empathy, voice frustration with

Publisher SARAH STROTHER - sstrother@wplpmedia.com Editor BRADEN DUPUIS - bdupuis@piquenewsmagazine.com Assistant Editor ALYSSA NOEL - arts@piquenewsmagazine.com Sales Manager SUSAN HUTCHINSON - shutchinson@wplpmedia.com Production Manager AMIR SHAHRESTANI - ashahrestani@wplpmedia.com Art Director JON PARRIS - jparris@wplpmedia.com Advertising Representatives TESSA SWEENEY - tsweeney@wplpmedia.com GEORGIA BUTLER - gbutler@wplpmedia.com Digital/Sales Coordinator AMELA DIZDARIC - traffic@wplpmedia.com Production production@piquenewsmagazine.com

Meadow Park Sports Centre policies, and provide a different view on the Freedom Convoy protests.

13 PIQUE’N YER INTEREST While Joe Rogan isn’t terrible at what he does, the podcaster is missing the entire point of vaccines, writes Andrew Mitchell.

62 MAXED OUT The schemers and dreamers have ramped up the fantasy machine to try and land the 2030 Games™—but could the price tag ever be worth it?

Environment & Adventure

Arts & Entertainment/Features Editor BRANDON BARRETT - bbarrett@piquenewsmagazine.com

31 RANGE ROVER Though the backyard-bred, gauntlet-throwing event known as barrel jumping never

Social Media Editor MEGAN LALONDE - mlalonde@piquenewsmagazine.com

made the Olympics, it wasn’t for lack of trying, writes Leslie Anthony.

Reporters BRANDON BARRETT - bbarrett@piquenewsmagazine.com MEGAN LALONDE - mlalonde@piquenewsmagazine.com ALYSSA NOEL arts@piquenewsmagazine.com HARRISON BROOKS - sports@piquenewsmagazine.com

Lifestyle & Arts

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42 FORK IN THE ROAD For athletes like Whistler’s Olympians, a hearty breakfast is key—and

Office and Accounts Manager HEIDI RODE - hrode@wplpmedia.com

columnist Glenda Bartosh has just the recipe.

Contributors G.D. MAXWELL, GLENDA BARTOSH, FEET BANKS, LESLIE ANTHONY, ANDREW MITCHELL, ALISON TAYLOR, VINCE SHULEY, LISA RICHARDSON

46 MUSEUM MUSINGS Prior to 1965, the road to Whistler was notoriously unreliable, and it took a

President, Whistler Publishing LP SARAH STROTHER - sstrother@wplpmedia.com

special type of ski enthusiast to make the trip on Friday evening before the roads were plowed on Saturday morning.

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In no event shall unsolicited material subject this publication to any claim or fees. Copyright in letters and other (unsolicited) materials submitted and accepted for publication remains with the author but the publisher and its licensees may freely reproduce them in print, electronic or other forms.

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OPENING REMARKS

Future of Function traffic remains a mystery HAVING

WORKED in Function Junction for nearly a decade, I’ve taken a special interest in following the progress of the new development at the entrance to Whistler’s industrial neighbourhood—or, more accurately, the lack of progress.

I first wrote about the Lil’wat Nation’s plans for a mixed-use development— including a new gas station, office and

BY BRADEN DUPUIS commercial space, and employee housing— in October 2017, when Whistler’s mayor and council issued the first development permit for the work.

Since then I’ve driven past the empty site every morning longingly, wondering when we might finally see work get underway, every few months making a mental note to check in with the municipality, and the Lil’wat, and the provincial Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure (MOTI) for an update.

And for years, the update was always some variation of the same: no comment.

But with a new DP issued by council on Feb. 8, it seems the lonely lot may finally see some activity.

At that first presentation way back in 2017, I had all the obvious questions about how the new development might impact traffic through the area. Some councillors had the same questions, and when they raised them, they were told a full trafficimpact study was completed for the project in the summer of 2017.

Nearly five years later, Pique still hasn’t seen the study (a 2018 Freedom of Information request was denied outright, while subsequent requests to see it were also

rebuffed), but according to Lil’wat Nation CAO Kerry Mehaffey, the new development is expected to generate about five per cent more traffic.

To handle the increased traffic, MOTI and the Lil’wat have settled on a realignment of Lynham Road to create a new four-way intersection, along with an extension of the right-hand turn lane accessing Highway 99 heading southbound.

The extended right-hand turn will also feature a 110-metre southbound acceleration lane onto Highway 99 rather than the yield sign currently in place.

The Lil’wat and MOTI will split the roadwork responsibilities, and the Nation will pick up the bill.

On paper, it looks manageable, but it remains to be seen how it all flows in practice.

While a shift in the timing of the light at Highway 99 some years back made a big difference, anyone who lives or works in Function knows how bad the 5 p.m. northbound traffic can sometimes get—

the Legacy Land Agreement of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, and sees many positives in its development, both in terms of increasing its presence in Whistler and delivering new revenue for programs and services to community members.

Along with the service station (which Mehaffey has previously said will include space for EV chargers), the split-zoned site allows for light industrial uses, commercial services, professional office space, restaurants and employee housing—48 employee-restricted rental units, in this case, all of them desperately needed.

Some have questioned the foresight of installing a new gas station as B.C. pushes for increased EV adoption (the hope is that 100 per cent of all new light-duty vehicles sold in the province will be electric by 2035).

But most of us aren’t there yet, and won’t be for some time. When the time comes, gas stations can be converted, and incrementally so if necessary. For now, having another gas station in Whistler is

A grocery store, pharmacy, daycare spaces—anything local residents might need or want should be up for discussion as the build out of Cheakamus continues.

According to the RMOW, preliminary neighbourhood planning has taken place, with more to come, including “looking at neighbourhood-serving commercial services and amenities,” a spokesperson said.

These things have always been necessary, but the ongoing Whistler Transit strike has accentuated how isolated the neighbourhood really is from the rest of the resort.

The RMOW often talks about reducing highway traffic and cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions. Having fewer Cheakamus residents travelling north for basic amenities is a great place to start.

As it relates to traffic management, the impact of new development isn’t limited to Function; some have already raised concerns about Cheakamus’ lone entry/ egress point, and what hundreds of new residents will do to traffic flows in and out

I do still have some (admittedly selfish) concerns about what the new development will mean for access/ingress from Function—and in particular the construction phase involved with modifying the road and highway—but the development itself is exciting. particularly on a snowy Friday.

I do still have some (admittedly selfish) concerns about what the new development will mean for access/ ingress from Function—and in particular the construction phase involved with modifying the road and highway—but the development itself is exciting, both for Whistler’s southern residents and the opportunities for the Lil’wat Nation.

The Nation acquired the lands through

welcomed, in my opinion.

The timing of the development, if years in the making, works well with the new housing going up across the highway in Cheakamus Crossing.

But the Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW) shouldn’t stop here. With hundreds of new homes being added to the Cheakamus neighbourhood, it’s time to start seriously considering adding new amenities for Whistler’s southern residents.

of the neighbourhood—particularly in the event of an emergency.

Pique asked the RMOW if there is talk of adding a second entrance to the neighbourhood, but did not get a response before deadline.

As for Function, we’ll just have to trust that the flows will be manageable and the road readjustments will work as planned— because nobody will let us see the hard numbers for ourselves. ■

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Empathy needed now more than ever I have grave concerns about the direction some people are choosing to go in when dealing with mandates, protocols and responding to posts and articles online. I recently posted to Facebook to relate an unpleasant experience that I had with a local business owner in Pemberton who closed his door in my face and told me to not come back after I requested my takeout order be brought to me outside, as neither employee was wearing a mask. This issue was resolved after I called WorkSafe BC to investigate the business’ protocols and I received a sincere apology from the co-owner and a guarantee to do better.

The experience was concerning as my husband and I are both over 65 and immuno-compromised.

It was also disheartening as we miss going out to lunch once a week, and this was our first time getting takeout at this establishment. I can tell you that we take appropriate precautions and are mostly isolated at home. What sticks in my craw is how some people on Facebook chose to defend this act of cruelty and attack me for calling the business out, and for having expectations that protocols would be observed.

There were the usual cries of “personal rights,” “just stay home” and “masks don’t work.” The lack of compassion made me quite sad, but I hung in there and tried to see beyond

you projecting it all onto others or are you looking for viable solutions? Are you willing to be focused on kindness and compassion and occasionally step into someone else’s shoes? We all have different medical, economical, social and family statuses, and so are bound to want agendas to meet those individual needs. How can we make this work inclusively? Perhaps this café owner could have seen my fear when I told him how risky his environment was for me and reacted in compassion. Why he didn’t is beyond me.

It is a slippery slope to be out of touch with ourselves—and therefore others. This is where anarchy, oppression and prejudice find their beginnings. Always speak up to oppression and cruelty and keep moving forward.

Diane Zaste // Pemberton

Freedom convoy more than a ‘fringe’ movement the cruelty and have a conversation. Eventually the admin of the group turned off commenting.

How unfortunate.

I think it’s very frightening to observe the shouts of personal rights from those who would have me confined to my home. Where are my rights? Are your personal agendas more valuable than my life? This screams entitlement. What if smokers defied the law and rallied to defiantly puff away in public places while screaming, “I have a right to!” while you unwillingly risk your health breathing in their toxins while dining at your favourite restaurant?

I feel compelled to speak out and call out

behaviours of this nature. I will not become apathetic and hide away in my home like a prisoner. I can’t afford to become discouraged or tired in the face of cruelty. I will cloister and act. I will make my best effort to remain compassionate and kind.

I will try to understand, listen, set boundaries and whatever other tools I can muster up out of my granny tool belt.

Perhaps, as a start, we can all stop shouting our opinions and start listening more to each other’s stories. I want to understand where you’re coming from. How is this impacting your life? How are you coping with your anger and frustration? Are

Here is an alternate opinion on the trucker convoy that may more accurately reflect one third of Canadians’ views on the subject.

As of Feb. 6, police said they had arrested several people on “mischief charges” related to bringing material goods like gas and propane cans to those demonstrating in Ottawa.

Earlier in the week, one man was charged with carrying a weapon to a public meeting, and another was charged with uttering threats online.

Otherwise, infractions were mainly for traffic violations.

A list of recent tickets issued in Ottawa, according to CTV News: Excessive noise; use of fireworks; failure to drive in marked lane;

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR N red light violations; driving through a no-truck route; seatbelt violation; driving a motor vehicle on a sidewalk; cellphone; disobey sign; improper muffler; tint (too dark); obstructed license plate; failure to produce documents; stunt driving (vehicle seized); suspended license; no insurance. Note the absence of violence.

Compare that to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, as Justin Trudeau did last week, making a point about how he supports BLM protests.

According to the non-profit Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project, at least 11 Americans were killed while participating in political demonstrations in 2020: nine were taking part in BLM protests, and two were involved in pro-Trump “patriot rallies.” In Seattle, pro-BLM protesters threw rocks at the police, and molotov cocktails at the police station.

In Minneapolis, the BLM protesters burned down the police station, and one protester was arrested and convicted for attempting to set fire to a school.

(Editor’s note: In its study, the ACLED concluded that the overwhelming majority of the more than 9,000 Black Lives Matter demonstrations that took place across the U.S. after the killing of George Floyd were peaceful.)

The trucker protest is about government orders being instituted without going through the proper process. This is about an identifiable, solvable problem with a known source (i.e. various levels of governments instituting restrictions without due process).

On the other hand, BLM is addressing a serious, systemic, societal problem, which unfortunately does not have a simple cause or solution. Easy for Trudeau to support a cause he is powerless to solve.

Current Provincial Health Officer orders have been instituted by fiat, under the guise of a public health emergency, rather than due parliamentary process. Bypassing parliamentary process is acceptable in times of grave danger to our nation state, for example war.

COVID has killed about 34,000 Canadians in a period of two years. That is about 0.09 per cent of the population. The average age of a deceased COVID patient in B.C. is still 82.

COVID does not represent a grave threat to the nation state of Canada.

There is absolutely no justification for orders being instituted without due process, given the current situation. Doing so is contrary to the democratic principles on which this country was founded.

Recent opinion polls say that support for the trucker convoy is between 28 per cent and 36 per cent. That is roughly the same level of support that the Liberal party had in the last election.

By no means is this a “fringe” movement.

Martin Fichtl // Squamish

January for Jesse event comes up big for WSAR The staff and management of the Beacon Pub & Eatery would like to extend their heartfelt thanks to the Whistler community for the first annual January for Jesse fundraiser.

Jesse Van Roon was much loved by the Beacon staff, its patrons and many Whistler locals. He was a passionate snowboarder and we felt that giving back to Whistler Search and Rescue (WSAR) was a great way to honour his legacy. We were overwhelmed with donations from local businesses and the turnout at the event on Jan. 31 was incredible. We raised more than $8,700 for WSAR, and throughout the month of January, the community bought a $2,900 bar tab for Whistler ski patrollers for all their hard work.

January for Jesse brought out the best of our community, something we’re all in need of right now. Thank you to everyone who supported the event, and we’ll see you again next year!

Frances de Montigny // Whistler

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Meadow Park Sports Centre policies lead to frustration I am writing in regards to my recent frustrating experience at the Resort Municipality of Whistler’s Meadow Park Sports Centre, and how it was handled. What I experienced firsthand is a facility that has sold so many memberships that most days you can’t even get a reservation.

When I was able to get one, it was for a partially opened gym with many machines or areas closed off—yet members are paying full price. Actually, I believe prices have gone up at some point over the past two years.

The centre has a cancellation fee in place if you can’t make it to your reservation. The cancellation must be 12 hours prior to your booking. Has the facility ever took into consideration many use the fitness centre for rehabilitation for injuries, or some might have medical conditions that don’t allow them to follow through with their desired plan that day because their body won’t allow them? Clearly not.

I recently had to cancel a reservation because of a medical condition I suffer from.

The fitness centre is a place I go to work on my condition to prevent my symptoms, yet some days I can’t make it because symptoms can come on at any moment. I shouldn’t have to explain my health to a business, nor did I. When I called to cancel my reservation, nobody answered the phone, yet the facility froze my pass for not showing up for my booking—which I already paid full price for.

Yet nothing has ever been offered to paying members for the many days that we can’t make a booking, as every time slot is full.

When I did get through to someone on the phone and was able to voice my frustrations, they ended up hanging up on me.

Clearly they have sold too many memberships, which only benefits them. As a local business owner and a retired professional athlete I am embarrassed that I ever supported this operation for 20-plus years, and I won’t be using this fitness centre after my experience, and the way you are treating members who are paying full price and top dollar.

Thanks to your hard-working staff that I have gotten to know over the years, but to the managers who put these policies in place, shame on you and maybe consider upgrading your education in customer service.

Justin Senecal // Whistler n

Write to us! Letters to the editor must contain the writer’s name, address and a daytime telephone number. Maximum length is 450 words. Pique Newsmagazine reserves the right to edit, condense or refrain from publishing any contribution. Letters reflect the opinion of the writer and not that of Pique Newsmagazine.

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A helping hand WHISTLER SKIER Susan Krieger sends a big thanks to Rob in Whistler Blackcomb’s electrical maintenance department, who she says went “above and beyond the call of duty” to help after she injured her hand on the mountain last week.

Susan was skiing fresh powder in West Bowl on Jan. 31 when she hit an ice chunk.

While she managed to download to Creekside, she knew from the throbbing in her hand that she’d need help getting to the clinic.

“Rob was at the lift. He helped me with my skis and tried to get me a cab, but with the bus strike, there were no cabs to be found,” Susan says. “So he took the initiative and drove me there himself.”

As it turned out, Susan had a broken thumb and ended up having surgery later that night.

“Rob, I can’t tell you how much I appreciated your help!” she says.

“Big thanks to all at Whistler Medical Clinic and to my partner Carl who has become my right hand.”

“The control operator also constantly communicates with our track team via radios, plus they announce athletes’ names and times to spectators, and comment on runs during race events, etc.”

When a session is on, everyone is listening to the voice from above to ensure safety and clear communication, she adds.

“A staple in both the figure skating community and Whistler Sliding Centre community, when she isn’t coaching up-andcoming figure-skating Olympians she’s walking to her other job as the God from above, the voice we all listen to, dispatch, our heiress at the bobsled, luge and skeleton track in town,” says Emily’s friend Brit.

With her birthday on Wednesday, Feb. 9, “she deserves a shout-out as she’s always shouting out for everyone else,” Brit adds.

“Twenty-seven is a hot year; watch out Whistler, she’s our bachelorette to cheer for.”

As a 34-year-old, I can confirm that 27 is indeed a very hot year. Happy birthday Emily!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE VOICE FROM ABOVE

Got good vibes to share? Send them to goodnews@piquenewsmagazine.com.

- Braden Dupuis

As a control and timing operator (CTO) at the Whistler Sliding Centre, Emily Nichols spends much of her time shouting out for others.

Emily’s job in the tower is a key role when sleds are on the track at the worldclass venue, as she and other operators oversee all aspects of sliding operations.

“The CTOs follow every movement of the sleds through our track camera system, which covers every corner of the track, and alert the team if there are any issues,” says Silke Jeltsch of Whistler Sport Legacies.

FOR THE RECORD An article in Pique’s Feb. 3 print edition implied the Village of Pemberton may not institute a tax increase this year.

To clarify, Pemberton’s typical budget process involves releasing a draft budget with no tax increases, with those increases/implications to be reflected at future sessions. ■

Backcountry Advisory

Mountain Psychology and Neurofeedback Centre

Stephen L. Milstein, Ph.D., R. Psych. BC #765 - 604.938.3511 Dawna Dixx Milstein, OT. COTBC # AA0201 - 604.938.3523 Whistler: #107 - 4368 Main St, Whistler, B.C. V0N 1B4 Squamish: 38077 2nd Ave, Squamish, B.C. // 604.848.9273

Serving sea to sky for 18 years

12 FEBRUARY 10, 2022

AS OF WEDNESDAY, FEB. 9 Early spring?

It’s amazing how fast conditions on the coast can change when February arrives. Days are rapidly getting longer and when the sun pokes out, which it most certainly will this weekend, it can feel downright tropical.

When the snowpack structure is strong, the main concern under this type of weather is for wet, loose avalanches in steep, sunexposed terrain. As surface crusts break down, this potential increases. When the crust is strong, conditions are generally safe from an avalanche perspective.

The dance between crust recovery and daytime warming will definitely apply this weekend. Unfortunately, the snowpack in the Sea to Sky has a bit more going on under the surface. A complex persistent weak layer that has recently been responsible for several serious avalanche accidents and even a fatality is very much still in the picture. This layer is buried about 70 centimetres deep and exists in a lot of areas, but it has proven

especially reactive to human triggering around the treeline elevation band.

Warming will have a complex effect on this problem. Initially, it will most certainly increase the chances of avalanches occurring at this layer.

As time goes on and warming continues, the trend gets more uncertain. Will a strong surface crust prevent people or machines on the surface from triggering it? The answer to this question could change from hour to hour this weekend.

Could a natural cornice fall or large, wet, loose avalanche provide the necessary trigger? The prudent answer would be “yes.”

Since this layer doesn’t exist in a uniform fashion over the region’s terrain, there is the added complexity that you may not receive negative feedback for being in the wrong piece of terrain. Extrapolate that observation carelessly and you could easily push your luck too far.

All in all, this will be a great weekend to soak up some rays and treat treeline terrain with extreme caution. Remember that sometimes there’s more going on below the surface than it might seem. ■

CONDITIONS MAY VARY AND CAN CHANGE RAPIDLY Check for the most current conditions before heading out into the backcountry. Daily updates for the areas adjacent to Whistler Blackcomb are available at 604-938-7676, or surf to www.whistlerblackcomb.com/mountaininfo/snow-report#backcountry or go to www.avalanche.ca.

PIQUE N’ YER INTEREST

Clearing the airwaves IT’S HARD BEING an ethical consumer.

I do my best to avoid products made by slaves or child labour. I’ve stopped shopping at some stores that support right-wing causes and politicians, or that underpay their employees and fight unionization efforts.

In a world where companies own companies that own other companies, it’s no picnic finding brands that are organic, fair

BY ANDREW MITCHELL trade, local, preferably Canadian, unionized, treat their people well, don’t enrich members of China’s Central Committee, don’t lobby against climate change efforts, and are generally good to the environment.

And now I have to decide what to do about my Spotify Premium Family account.

If asked to choose between Neil Young, the “Godfather of Grunge,” and Joe “Bro” Rogan, a man who I thought did his best work in the ‘90s sitcom NewsRadio, there’s no contest. I’m baffled why Spotify would sink $100 million into any podcast, much less one that gives a platform to controversial guests like alt-right Svengali Jordan Peterson, who recently touted Exxon’s anti-climate-change talking points like they were his own scientific research.

It kind of feels like when MuchMusic turned its back on actual music in favour of trashy reality TV. Spotify is choosing a dubious male-centric talk show over some of the most celebrated musicians of all time.

I honestly don’t have anything against Joe Rogan. I doubt we’d see eye to eye politically—in my experience a libertarian is usually just a conservative who smokes weed—but he’s not terrible at what he does, he’s not afraid to have people on his show that disagree, and he listens well enough to do a good interview.

But his statements on COVID, followed by his sorry-not-sorry apology for his statements on COVID, don’t really cut it.

Every time he opens his mouth on the subject, Rogan demonstrates that he has completely missed the whole point of vaccines.

Unfortunately he has a lot of influence and has used it to peddle the dangerously stupid idea that vaccines are a personal choice. I mean, they always have been in a way, but almost nobody said “no” before.

It isn’t that Rogan’s main point is factually wrong, it’s that it’s morally questionable. He’s right in saying that young, healthy people don’t have much to fear from COVID when compared to seniors, unhealthy people and people with medical conditions. Although there have been countless tragic exceptions, the vast majority of young people could get through this pandemic without a vaccine—or

masks, or physical distancing, or any of the measures that have been taken over the last two years to stop the pandemic.

Where Rogan goes wrong is by missing the whole point of how vaccines work.

It’s never been about you specifically or your own chances of survival, it’s about protecting others and doing your small part to eradicate dangerous illnesses. It’s about avoiding being a carrier and maybe killing someone unintentionally. It’s about preventing our public health-care system, and all the exhausted people in it, from being overwhelmed. It’s about nipping things in the bud before the virus has a chance to mutate into something more dangerous. It’s about achieving herd immunity for the benefit of all.

And it doesn’t work unless almost everybody is on board.

That’s why it’s never really been a choice if you care about others. Vaccines have also been mandated in schools, the military and all kinds of professions for countless years, and nobody thought much about it until social media and uninformed pundits like Rogan started asking stupid questions and treating mandates as a challenge to their personal liberties.

Vaccines are a “we” thing, one of the crucial links that bind us all in a civil society. It’s like giving your seat on the bus to someone on crutches or holding the door for someone with a stroller—you don’t

think about it, you just do it.

This is also not something where anyone can realistically do their own research. Putting your trust in Rogan and social media antivaxxers over the teams of educated experts at the WHO, CDC, BCCDC, Health Authority of Canada, Canadian Medical Association, as well as pretty much every medical professional rocking in the free world, doesn’t make you a free thinker because—if you’re honest—even those “free” thoughts aren’t really your own. They were planted there.

Researchers found that more than 60 per cent of vaccine misinformation on social media could be traced back to just 12 sources, many of which are selling unproven alternative medicines. The reality is that we’re all sheep at the end of the day; it’s just that too many of us have chosen to follow some dangerously unqualified shepherds threatening to drive every sheep in the world off a cliff.

And for everybody who thinks that Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and the other musicians taking their music off Spotify are attacking Rogan’s free speech, all they’re doing is exercising some free speech of their own.

People are free to join Young in leaving Spotify or they can choose to stay. And even if Spotify caved on this (they won’t) then that’s a business decision, not censorship.

Joe Rogan will always remain free to share his views with the world, such as they are.

I hear good things about Tidal. ■

FEBRUARY 10, 2022

13

NEWS WHISTLER

Hectic weekend in Sea to Sky backcountry ends tragically with one dead, more injured ‘VERY TWITCHY OUT THERE’: WEAK FACET-CRUST LAYER CONTRIBUTES TO ONSLAUGHT OF CALLS FOR WSAR

BY MEGAN LALONDE ONE PERSON IS DEAD and several more are injured after a series of avalanches in the Sea to Sky corridor during the first week of February.

The eventful week for Whistler Search and Rescue (WSAR) began on Tuesday morning, Feb. 1, when five local skiers were evacuated after three members of their group were injured in a size-2.5 avalanche on Rainbow Mountain.

WSAR said the ski-touring group had been heli-dropped at the top of a nearby run earlier that morning and were in the process of skiing a second lap on a northfacing slope when the incident occurred at about 1,900 metres of elevation.

All five skiers reportedly dropped in one at a time, at the same spot on a convex slope.

Four skiers had already entered the slope and were resting on two natural benches on the mountainside as the fifth member of the group prepared to make their first turn. That skier appears to have triggered the slide, but managed to self-arrest at the fracture line, said WSAR, and was not caught in or injured by the avalanche.

One skier in the avalanche path attempted to “straight-line it” towards the flats and successfully outran the slide, while a second skier was caught up mid-path and came to rest on a bench after suffering lowerleg injuries. Two more skiers were swept up and carried the full length of the approximately 500-metre slide, but managed

RESCUE RESPONSE Whistler Search and Rescue equips a helicopter for longline rescue after being called to the site of a fatal, Size 3 avalanche northeast of Pemberton on Saturday, Feb. 5.

PHOTO COURTESY OF WHISTLER SAR

14 FEBRUARY 10, 2022

to self-extricate from the toe of the avalanche after suffering “near complete burials,” with just their heads left above snow.

All five skiers were flown off the mountain by helicopter (one via longline), while three were brought to a waiting ambulance and driven to the Whistler Health Care Centre for treatment, said WSAR. According to Avalanche Canada, the slide on Rainbow Mountain broke 40 centimetres deep and ran on the facet-crust layer formed in late January. The Tuesday morning avalanche came following reports of “numerous large (size 2-2.5) human and explosive-triggered avalanches” the day prior. The danger rating on Tuesday was

northeast of Pemberton.

Four people were reportedly caught in an avalanche. Of those, two were uninjured and one, who suffered serious injuries, was evacuated via longline. The fourth, who witnesses identified as a woman, did not survive.

What initially appeared as reports of two separate slides turned out to be one massive, Size 3 avalanche with a fracture line spanning about 1.2 kilometres. It ran between 500 and 800 metres down the slope and impacted about 10 ski-tourers and splitboarders in two unrelated parties, said WSAR manager Brad Sills. The avalanche was triggered in an upper treeline feature on

“We just don’t have the depth of experience with the weather patterns that we’ve been getting, and people are just settled in their old ways [of thinking], ‘well, [the danger rating is] considerable, so it’s OK.’” - BRAD SILLS

listed as “considerable” for the alpine, and “moderate” for terrain at or below treeline.

SIZE 3 AVALANCHE NORTHEAST OF PEMBERTON KILLS ONE The Rainbow Mountain incident was a grim preview of what proved to be a busy weekend for WSAR. At about 1:20 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 5, Pemberton RCMP received “multiple emergency rescue calls in a 10-minute period” near Cassiope Peak, in the Duffey Lake area approximately 17 kilometres

a northeast aspect, according to Avalanche Canada.

Pemberton Search and Rescue (PSAR) responded with the assistance of WSAR, said PSAR manager David MacKenzie in a release, while Whistler Blackcomb Ski Patrol provided additional support.

“We deployed search teams, including two helicopters, avalanche dogs, and a longline rescue team” MacKenzie said in the release. “It is always difficult for our team when it is not always a positive outcome and our thoughts are with all the friends, families, and those involved today.”

Sills said the colossal slide occurred

on the same weak, late-January crust-layer that led to the Rainbow Mountain incident.

“Initial observations indicate this was a step-down avalanche, starting in a shallower layer then breaking into a deeper one,” read a Mountain Information Network (MIN) report on the Cassiope slide posted to Avalanche Canada’s website. “Two persistent weak layers are known to exist in the area, an upper surface hoar layer and a deeper facet/crust layer. Step-downs and wide propagations are characteristics often seen when persistent weak layers are the cause of failure.”

These kinds of sympathetic releases— when a nearby slide triggers another avalanche—are “quite different than what we see here, typically, on the coast,” said Sills. “I think that’s why people are finding themselves in these situations. We just don’t have the depth of experience with the weather patterns that we’ve been getting, and people are just settled in their old ways [of thinking], ‘well, [the danger rating is] considerable, so it’s OK.’” While on-scene in Pemberton, WSAR crews were also called to respond to reports of an injured snowmobiler initially thought to be in the Slim Creek/Leckie Peak area of the South Chilcotin range northwest of Lillooet. A team comprised of both Whistler and Pemberton SAR members flew to the reported site and spent “considerable time” searching, said Sills, but were unable to find any sign of the injured snowmobiler.

After being informed of the “nonexistent subjects at Slim Creek,” RCMP investigated and discovered new coordinates placing the snowmobiler at the base of Mount Cayley, in the Powder Mountain Range west of Whistler. With night approaching, WSAR volunteers visited the Brandywine snowmobile parking lot to interview witnesses, who confirmed the event and location.

NEWS WHISTLER Considering the two significant avalanche responses crews experienced in recent days, WSAR ruled out travelling over land through complex avalanche terrain at night. Instead—with the subject now exposed to cold weather for more than six hours—Whistler volunteers called on their North Shore Rescue counterparts to respond with their night-vision-equipped Talon helicopter. Rescuers were able to locate the subject, treat their leg injury and transport the snowmobiler to Lions Gate Hospital for treatment of hypothermia.

The incident at Mount Cayley was erroneously reported by Sea to Sky RCMP as another avalanche. According to Sills, the snowmobiler’s injury was caused by a manoeuvre gone wrong rather than a slide.

“He hit a wind lip, landed hard and broke his ankle,” Sills explained.

Sills said officials are working to determine what caused the confusion surrounding the subject’s location, but presumed the inaccuracy was due to either a failure of the GPS unit in reporting the subject’s position or a miscommunication in the transcription of the coordinates.

“It is interesting that the locations are longitudally one above each other, so there is a possibility that it was a transcription error,” he said. “But we are investigating it and trying to figure out why, because it led to a delay that could have been avoided. And a lot of effort, too—we had two machines searching for two hours.”

Also on Saturday afternoon, WSAR’s helicopter was again configured for a longline rescue when crews were tasked with responding to a ski tourer who sustained a head injury while descending from the Hanging Lake area. Whistler Olympic Park (WOP) staff reported the incident. With help from WOP ski patrol, search-and-rescue crews extracted the injured skier from densely forested terrain and transported the subject to an awaiting ambulance.

BC Emergency Health Services (BCEHS) confirmed in an email that four paramedic ground units and two air ambulance helicopters responded to Saturday’s incidents. BCEHS said two people were taken by air in critical condition, while two more people were transported by ground in serious condition and one was taken by ground in unknown condition.

‘IT ABSOLUTELY SHOCKS ME’ WSAR crews were called to yet another slide in the Whistler area on Sunday afternoon, Feb. 7. The incident had all the ingredients for a disaster, said Sills, but fortunately had a positive outcome.

Volunteers were tasked with responding to a group of five snowshoers who had made it to the summit of Spectrum Peak, past Hanging Lake and behind Rainbow Mountain. The group thought they spotted an avalanche—which turned out to be a glide crack, explained Sills—and were too uncomfortable to proceed with the descent.

No members of the group were carrying avalanche transceivers.

WSAR launched a helicopter response, but upon arrival on-scene found only three members of the group awaiting rescue. The other two members had decided to walk

down, said Sills, remotely triggering a Size 2 avalanche in the process. It appeared to run on the same problematic crust formed in late-January.

Crews found footprints leading into the slide, but “for a short while, we couldn’t find footprints leading out of it, so that necessitated three dog teams to be readied to go,” said Sills. “I just can’t believe, given the experiences of the past week, that anybody would go that far back into the backcountry without transceivers and without any knowledge—totally inexperienced. It absolutely shocks me.”

The pair had luckily managed to avoid the slide, and were found safe further down the trail before rescuers began probing.

Following the action-packed weekend, Sills praised the cooperative efforts of neighbouring search-and-rescue organizations. “It’s really good to see all the SAR teams in the Sea to Sky corridor coming together when they are needed and helping each other,” he said.

“It’s just a tremendous set of skills that we have incorporated in these teams.”

AVALANCHE DANGER RATINGS ELEVATE ALONGSIDE FREEZING LEVELS In the wake of these incidents, Avalanche Canada forecasters anticipate a “significant increase in the likelihood of avalanches” on the persistent weak layer during a warming pattern, expected to roll into the region from Wednesday, Feb. 9 onward. The layer is so far proving to be most reactive between 1,800- and 2,000-metre elevation. The Sea to Sky’s danger rating for Thursday, Feb. 10 is listed as “considerable” in the alpine and below treeline, and “high” for terrain located at the treeline.

“The snowpack isn’t a fan of rapid change. Freezing levels jumping 2,000 m in a couple of hours on Wednesday is about as rapid as it gets,” read Avalanche Canada’s public bulletin for the Sea to Sky zone on Feb. 8. “Hazard from wet, loose slides might be the obvious problem, but an increasing likelihood of triggering a persistent slab is the most worrying.”

While the weak layer responsible for the string of recent slides deserves attention, the snowpack is always changing, explained local avalanche expert Wayne Flann.

“It’s never the same,” he said. “It’s just one of those things [that] keeps evolving … It’s important that you totally keep up with what the snowpack is doing on a daily basis.”

The snowpack can go from being unstable to stable “in half a day,” Flann continued. “It’s just a matter of keeping on top of everything and reading the reports and making good, educated decisions on where you’re going to ski.”

And if people aren’t sure, “be conservative. That’s the one thing that you can always do,” Flann said.

Now is a good time to lower your objectives, agreed Sills.

“It’s very, very twitchy out there,” he said.

“If you don’t want to stay home and read a book right now, then take up cross-country skiing, because it’s fantastic right now.” n

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JAMES COLLINGRIDGE

CALL JAMES, THE LEGENDS & EVOLUTION SPECIALIST Direct: 604-902-0132 Toll Free: 1-888-689-0070 james@whistlerrealestate.net www.whistlerrealestate.net

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FEBRUARY 10, 2022

15

NEWS WHISTLER

Lil’wat project in Function gets long-awaited development permit FIRST PROPOSED IN 2017, PROJECT PLANS INCLUDE GAS STATION, BREWERY AND 48 UNITS OF EMPLOYEE HOUSING One particularly challenging element of the project was roadwork. The original proposal called for more significant improvements, but ultimately the Nation and B.C.’s Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure (MOTI) settled on a more incremental approach. Plans now include dedicated left-hand and right-hand turn lanes as well as a straight-through lane departing Function, along with the addition of a 110-metre southbound acceleration lane on Highway 99. Lynham Road will also be realigned to form an intersection with the access point into the development, while the Valley Trail will be connected from the intersection at Highway 99 to the nearby CN Rail crossing.

The Lil’wat and MOTI will split the roadwork responsibilities.

Exactly how the project—which allows for office, commercial, industrial and residential use—will affect traffic in Whistler’s southern neighbourhood isn’t clear. The Resort Municipality of Whistler denied Pique’s Freedom of Information request in 2018 to obtain a copy of a traffic study connected to the project at the Lil’wat’s request—but the Nation has concluded the project will generate about a five-per-cent increase in traffic.

In September 2021, MOTI provided

BY BRANDON BARRETT MORE THAN FOUR years after it was first proposed, a Lil’wat Nation-led project slated for Function Junction is finally set to move forward, closing the loop on a legacy left over from Whistler’s 2010 Olympics.

Owned by the Nation as part of the Legacy Land Agreement that was inked ahead of the 2010 Games, the 2.15-hectare site at 1000 Alpha Lake Road will see a service station and three mixed-use buildings with 48 units of employee housing constructed after local officials greenlit a development permit at Whistler’s Feb. 8 council meeting.

“It’s been long and we’ve been patiently waiting, trying to understand the whole process,” said Kúkwpi7 Skalúlmecw Lil’wat Chief Dean Nelson. “It’s a presence for the Nation and [provides] opportunities for us and for partners.”

The project has seen numerous delays since it was proposed in October 2017, and came back to the council table this week with a slew of changes since it was first seen, some of which, like the increase of planned employee housing units from 18 to 48, were previously approved.

WHISTLER

|

agreement. That comes with an additional 287 square metres of employee housing space, for a total of 6,711 sq. m., as well as added parking. The building heights in Lot 2 have also been raised to accommodate an additional floor of housing, while Buildings B and C have been moved closer together in the designs to improve connection within the development.

2030 MAPLE DRIVE, SQUAMISH SOLD

$3,999,000

$1,599,000

6

5

3.5

3,220 sqft

|

39076 KINGFISHER ROAD, SQUAMISH

NEW LISTING

$1,499,000 3

2

VANCOUVER #4-2239 SAPPORO DRIVE, WHISTLER

NEW LISTING

SOLD

6

3,634 sqft

- ARTHUR DE JONG

While it’s still too early to say what commercial tenants will end up occupying the site, the gas station allows for limited restaurant use, while plans for Building C on Lot 2 have been revised to allow for a purpose-built brewery space.

The service station will offer standard gas and diesel pumps, along with electric vehicle charging stations. Councillor Arthur De Jong asked about the economic viability of the station given the transportation industry’s push to electric and autonomous vehicles. Auto manufacturers such as GM and Volkswagen are investing big into transforming their fleet all-electric within the next two decades, and a 2019 report by Boston Consulting Group predicted 80 per cent of America’s 150,000 or so retail gas stations could be unprofitable by 2035.

“It’s just making sure we position for the future or at least ask those questions to set this project up for success,” De Jong said.

There is a lengthy list of 13 recommendations the proponent will have to complete as a condition of its development permit, including environmental protection and monitoring, wildfire mitigation, signage and a security of $440,920 provided prior to construction to ensure the planned landscaping work gets carried out. n

NORTH SHORE

2761 COYOTE PLACE, WHISTLER

FOR SALE

5

“It’s just making sure we position for the future or at least ask those questions to set this project up for success.”

SQUAMISH

5694 ALTA LAKE ROAD, WHISTLER

$7,400,000

the RMOW with a letter stating it had no objections to the proposed development.

The site plan divides the parcel into two lots: Lot 1 for the service station that will be operated by the Lil’wat Business Group, and Lot 2 for the three mixed-use buildings.

The 48 units of employee housing will provide 184 total bed units, far exceeding the 58 bed units required by a 2019 housing

$639,000

2.5

1.5

2,250 sqft

1,645 sqft

396 sqft

1

Direct access to Alta Lake with own

•

Bright and beautifully renovated

•

Corner lot with loads of potential

•

Central location with mountain views

•

private dock

•

Self-contained 2 bedroom suite

•

Incredible views of the Chief from

•

Soaks up all of the morning sun

•

A quick walk to Creekside Gondola

•

Gorgeous lake and mountain views

•

Quiet cul-de-sac in Bayshores

the front windows

•

Open concept living and dining area

•

Close to shops, trails and lakes

•

Private ensuite for each bedroom

•

Close to trails, shops and gondola

•

Fantastic revenue suite

•

Backs on to greenspace

•

Nightly rentals ok, GST paid

2 car garage and ample storage

•

Close to trails and river access

•

Fully fenced with 2 car garage

•

Offers Tuesday, February 15

•

•

•

Two wood fireplaces

DANA FRIESEN SMITH

SADIE BRUBAKER

JENNA FRANZE

604 907 1400

604 345 5415

1 bedroom + loft in Gondola Village

KRISTEN DILLON

DAVID WIEBE

*PREC

604 902 3878 dana@seatoskydreamteam.com

sadie@sadiebrubaker.com

jenna@jennafranze.com

778 266 0150 kristen@seatoskydreamteam.com

604 966 8874 david@davidwiebe.ca

Stilhavn Real Estate Services | 208-1420 Alpha Lake Road, Whistler | 1388 Main Street, Squamish | Stilhavn.com This communication is not intended to cause or induce the break of an existing agency relationship. *Personal Real Estate Corporation.

We would like to acknowledge that we work and live on the traditional, unceded territory of the xwməθkwəýəm, səlilwətaɬ, Lil’wat & Sḵwxwú7mesh People.

16 FEBRUARY 10, 2022

Each year, the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver recognizes the Top 10% of its agents, based on properties sold, with membership in the prestigious Medallion Club. We are beyond proud that over 65% of Stilhavn sales agents received this honour for 2021. Help us celebrate our local Sea to Sky qualifiers below...

Medallion Club Member

Medallion Club Member

Medallion Club Member

DANA FRIESEN SMITH

HANNAH GARCIA

IAN TANG

*PREC

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Medallion Club Member

Medallion Club Member

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JENNA FRANZE

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NEWS WHISTLER

Petition launched in support of striking Sea to Sky transit workers UNIFOR SAYS IT PLANS TO ‘ESCALATE’ EFFORTS TO BRING EMPLOYERS BACK TO THE BARGAINING TABLE

BY BRANDON BARRETT SINCE THE SEA TO SKY transit strike began on Jan. 29, Whistler resident Jimmy Cheng has settled into a regular routine. Every day, he sends a fresh email to both local and provincial officials calling on them to pressure the parties to get back to bargaining.

“May I remind that this is another day without transit? It is unfair that people have to suffer from this, in which most would agree,” he wrote on Feb. 2.

“Yet another day without transit,” he said Feb. 5.

“Still no transit,” he wrote Feb. 7. “Day 9 and I hope it is not a number that we have to keep counting.”

Despite Cheng’s best efforts, it would appear his daily count will continue for the time being, with no active negotiations ongoing between privately-contracted employers Whistler Transit, Squamish’s Diversified Transit and the union representing local transit workers, Unifor.

“Talks have broken down because there’s a complete unwillingness on the part of the employer to recognize how far behind transit workers in Whistler, Pemberton and Squamish are to many of those other areas,

including Greater Vancouver,” said Chris MacDonald, assistant to national Unifor president Jerry Dias.

Local 114 represents more than 80 transit workers at Whistler Transit who voted 98 per cent in favour of striking in August 2021.

In that case, negotiations failed to produce a satisfactory offer from the employer, said Unifor. Wages, a lack of benefits coverage for nearly 40 per cent of the unit, pension, and job security remain sticking points for the union. The parties have been working on a contract for more than a year.

In a show of support for transit workers, Whistlerite Isla Robertson launched an online petition calling on the parties to get back to the bargaining table and urging locals to write to BC Transit and its private contractors. At press time, the petition had garnered more than 1,500 signatures. View it at change. org/p/support-s2s-bus-drivers-on-strike.

“I know an online petition is not going to fix a strike tomorrow but I still think it’s really important for community members to be able to show that they do have a voice, that it does matter and they can sign their name to something to show they do care about what happens in this community,” said Robertson, a regular bus rider.

Robertson was particularly motivated to launch the petition after learning that

transit workers’ contracts were in limbo for more than a year in the pandemic.

“I just think that is so irresponsible. It disrespects the work that transit workers and especially the drivers do and have been doing in the pandemic,” she said. “To me, it’s another example of this pandemic highlighting how we’re not valuing the workers in our communities that were doing such important work before the pandemic,

“We’re only going to sit in front of the depot in Whistler for so long.”

- CHRIS MACDONALD

and now especially during the pandemic.”

As previously reported in Pique, Unifor contends that a major barrier to the negotiations is the way BC Transit structures its third-party contracts, which MacDonald said incentivizes contractors to cut costs wherever they can.

“Of course when you contract things out to a third party, they’re not doing it for charity. They’re a company. They’re doing it because they want to make money, so in

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order for them to have a cost structure that makes money, then they’re going to have to have certain wage, benefit and pension demands on the workers,” he said.

Those demands have taken the form of capping the number of transit workers that qualify for benefits, as well as proposing a less-than-two-per-cent wage increase in the face of a national inflation rate of 4.8 per cent, MacDonald said. Unifor has previously indicated that Sea to Sky transit workers make anywhere from $3 to $5 an hour less than their counterparts in Vancouver and Victoria.

As the strike drags on, Unifor intends to ramp up its efforts to get the parties back to the table.

“We’re only going to sit in front of the depot in Whistler for so long. We’re only going to sit in front of the depot in Squamish for so long before we start to escalate things and do things that Unifor is famous for, frankly, which is disrupting things in the employer’s world so we can get people’s attention,” he said, noting that Whistlerites can expect to see union members sharing information in the village and strike signs going up at BC Transit property.

BC Transit has referred all comment to its private contractors. Whistler Transit has not returned multiple requests for comment. n

NEWS WHISTLER

‘I won’t believe it until I see it’: Kiwis grounded in B.C. approach New Zealand’s staged border reopening with cautious optimism NEW ZEALANDERS HAVE STRUGGLED TO RETURN HOME AMID THE COUNTRY’S CONTROVERSIAL ISOLATION REQUIREMENTS

BY MEGAN LALONDE BOBBI MCEWAN hasn’t been home to New Zealand in about three years.

The Whistler resident, originally from Cambridge, on the North Island, was just over halfway through her two-year working holiday visa when the COVID-19 pandemic exploded, slamming borders shut. In New Zealand, borders closed in March 2020 to anyone but citizens and residents.

“I was like, ‘Well, do I go home, do I live with my parents? Do I have to try and find a job?” McEwan recalled. “Do I have to start all over again while this pandemic is going on, and have to go through all these lockdowns, or do I live in Canada where I’ve already got a roof over my head, I’ve already got a job that’s paying me something, and I’ve already got a foundation and a support network?”

Confident the emergency measures would be long gone by the time her visa ended, McEwan decided to stick it out. But as the days left on her visa ticked down, her home country’s borders stayed airtight, with strict entry limits and quarantine requirements essentially stranding many

20 FEBRUARY 10, 2022

New Zealanders abroad without valid visas.

“I didn’t have a plan in place,” said McEwan. “I didn’t know if I was going to be able to get another visa, I didn’t know if I was going to be able to get home.”

Luckily, she found a new employer in Whistler who agreed to take her on under a Labour Market Impact Assessment, which allowed McEwan to apply for a work permit.

“I’m very, very grateful,” she said.

“There was a few months there where I couldn’t work, but I’m just happy to have a place to live, a job and a roof over my head.”

That hasn’t meant the past two years in Whistler, with little to no possibility of returning home to see her family, have been easy.

HARSH MEASURES New Zealand has implemented some of the harshest measures in the world amid its efforts to stamp out the virus, barring most foreigners from entering the country and subjecting returning Kiwis to a managed isolation and quarantine program (or MIQ, as it’s better known), first implemented in April of 2020.

The acronym has become associated

with heartache for many living abroad.

The MIQ program requires anyone entering the country to isolate at a government-run isolation hotel. In October 2020, it shifted into an allocation system, where travellers were required to have a “MIQ voucher”—or quarantine hotel reservation— before boarding a plane. With only so many spaces available, hopeful travellers at first would need to refresh the government’s MIQ website daily until a small amount of available rooms popped up.

After a Delta outbreak in August 2021, some cases within the country were also required to ride out their isolation period at a MIQ facility. With available spaces further compounded, the government adopted a lottery approach to the MIQ booking system in response to heightened demand. The government sets a time for a “room release” covering about a two-month period, with the “virtual lobby” opening an hour prior.

Those interested sign into a waiting room and watch the clock count down before being automatically sorted into an online queue.

“If there’s 2,000 rooms, and you’re within the first 2,000 people, you’ve pretty much got a room, but you just have to sit and wait for your number to go down

to one” before you can reserve, explained New Zealander Hayley Clark. “So if you’re 2,000th in line, you’re probably going to get a room, but you might not get the room on the date you need … Generally there’d be about 2,000 or 3,000 rooms and about 30,000 people trying in those lotteries.”

Clark, a former Whistlerite who called the resort home for four years before moving to Montreal just before the pandemic struck, was one of the lucky few who managed to get a spot in the lottery in early 2021—on her seventh try. While Clark said she’s supported the MIQ program in theory, she criticized its execution, calling her experience with the lottery “a nightmare” that amounted to “absolute torture.”

“I didn’t get under 10,000th [in line] until I eventually got my spot,” she said in a Zoom call from Christchurch, where she had just wrapped up her final day of quarantine and plans to stay for a couple of months. Clark has been eager to get home not just to serve as the maid of honour in her best friend’s upcoming wedding, but to see two family members who were diagnosed with terminal illnesses about a year ago.

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NEWS WHISTLER << FROM PAGE 22 With every unsuccessful lottery attempt, “It just got more and more stressful,” she said. “It was really difficult and really tough to sit there and watch and go, ‘OK, I’m not going home because of this lottery.’ It has been dubbed the lottery of human misery, and that’s pretty accurate.

“The mental strain of having absolutely no control over it, I think, is understated.”

Another prohibitive factor is MIQ’s cost: Kiwis who plan to stay in New Zealand for under six months obligated to cover the minimum $1,610 bill for a 10-day stay.

Emergency exemptions to the lottery system and managed isolation exist as well, but as Clark explained, the bar for these circumstances is exceptionally high.

‘I FEEL LIKE I JUST LUCKED OUT’ Being back in New Zealand “is surreal,” Clark said. “It’s so strange. I’m very happy to be home, but I feel like I just lucked out.”

The border restrictions have meant daily life has been largely normal for most Kiwis since the middle of 2020, but have caused major distress for New Zealanders looking to go home. An advocacy group called Grounded Kiwis filed a judicial review claim in the country’s High Court in Oct. 2021, alleging that the MIQ system breaches the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. That case will be heard in Wellington on Feb. 14.

But last Thursday, Kiwis abroad were given some hope. On Feb. 3, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a five-step border reopening plan that will soon see vaccinated New Zealanders and eligible travellers able to self-isolate and test on arrival, rather than entering MIQ. This option is slated to become available to New Zealanders in Australia on Feb. 27, and open up to Kiwis anywhere else in the world

by March 13. If everything goes according to plan, all vaccinated travellers will be able to enter New Zealand in October.

New Zealand had previously announced in November that MIQ restrictions would ease in early 2022, but those plans were put on hold in December due to the Omicron variant’s surge.

Jenny McAlpine, a New Zealander who has called B.C.’s Interior home for just over two decades, called Ardern’s announcement “welcome news.”

Following the government’s November announcement that MIQ requirements would be ending for New Zealand passport holders this February, McAlpine booked

“It’s so strange. I’m very happy to be home, but I feel like I just lucked out.”

- HAYLEY CLARK

“It is easy to hear the word MIQ and immediately associate it with heartache.

There is no question that for New Zealand, it has been one of the hardest parts of the pandemic. But the reason that it is right up there as one of the toughest things we have experienced, is in part because largescale loss of life is not,” said Ardern during last week’s announcement. “The anguish of MIQ has been real and heartbreaking, but the choice to use it undeniably saved lives.”

She added, “MIQ meant not everyone could go home when they wanted to, but it also meant that COVID could not come in when it wanted to, either.”

a ticket immediately. “I was so excited,” she said, until the Dec. 20 announcement “shattered” her. “I had about a week with a ticket in hand, making plans with my family—I had a self-isolation plan with my sister at her house, and I’m triple-vaxxed, and they took it away from me,” she said.

“I bawled my eyes out for, like, two days.”

McAlpine says Kiwis abroad want to protect their fellow citizens and aren’t looking for a “free-for-all” border reopening, but for reasonable health measures now that the virus is spreading within New Zealand communities. “Now that it’s there, there’s thousands upon thousands of people who

are trusted to self-isolate at home, just like we’re doing here in B.C.,” she said.

“I’m happy that the only country in the world barring its citizens to come and go freely is finally waking up,” she added in a follow-up email. “I’m just hoping and praying that the NZ government doesn’t move the goal posts, again.”

Whistler local McEwan shares McAlpine’s skepticism, and remains cautiously optimistic about the prospect of returning home for a visit towards the end of this calendar year.

“I won’t believe it until I see it,” she said.

“They’re going to be re-evaluating everything.

So I’m just like, cool, they’ve announced [a shift to self-isolation], but is it going to keep getting pushed back?”

Being far away from home and unable to hop on a plane on a whim “is not a nice feeling,” said McEwan. While she said she’s fortunate her family is currently well, there was a period earlier in the pandemic where her grandmother was sick and “all I wanted to do was get on a plane and go home and visit my family.”

She explained, “There’s good days; there’s bad days. There was kind of a point where I’m just like, ‘I’m never going home.’”

Armed with the knowledge that harsh border restrictions would continue into 2022, would McEwan have made the same decision to stay in Whistler over returning home to New Zealand nearly two years ago?

“That’s a really tough one,” she said. “I think if I had known then what I know now, I probably would have gone home.” n

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Recreation and Leisure Advisory Committee Membership

The Accessibility and Inclusion Committee is a volunteer committee appointed by Council to advise on matters concerning accessibility and inclusion in Whistler. The Committee’s Terms of Reference can be viewed at: whistler.ca/AIC Nominees may include: PersonsMunicipality with disabilities; The• Resort of Whistler is seeking qualified applicants to serve in a voluntary • Caregivers; and capacity on the Recreation and Leisure Advisory Committee for the to 2022 term. or tourism sectors • Professionals in 2020 the accommodation roles isinclude inclusion and accessibility.

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NEWS WHISTLER

WORCA joins chorus calling for more funding at Rec Sites and Trails BC WITH LIMITED STAFF AND BUDGET, PROVINCIAL AGENCY HAS ‘FALLEN UNDER THE RADAR’ OF GOVERNMENT PRIORITIES, SAYS OUTDOOR RECREATION COUNCIL OF BC

BY BRANDON BARRETT AND STEFAN LABBÉ THE WHISTLER Off Road Cycling Association (WORCA) has joined the chorus of trail-building organizations calling for more funding at Recreation Sites and Trails BC, the province’s main agency for approving trail infrastructure projects.

“We do agree that they are underfunded because at any given time, depending on the time of year and other priorities, they may have anywhere between zero and two technicians to review all of the applications coming in [throughout] the province,” said WORCA president Dale Mikkelsen.

It’s not unusual for trail applications to the province to take a year or more to process.

As first reported in The Squamish Chief, the Squamish Off-Road Cycling Association’s (SORCA) as-yet unapproved application to expand the parking lot at the bottom of Pseudo Tsuga, in the Diamond Head area, was first submitted more than 18 months ago.

Once factoring in the community feedback process and other site preparations, the entire process has taken nearly five years.

“It is just finally getting some traction now,” SORCA president Jeffrey Norman told The Chief.

“At this point, the official referrals to stakeholders have been sent out. The province will make their decision on approval based on the feedback they receive.”

maintain most of the outdoor recreation infrastructure in Squamish.

“This is a big ask,” wrote Norman in an email to The Chief. “For some projects, like trail building, there is a ton of enthusiasm for the community to help. However, without a clear path to an approval in a

“For some projects, like trail building, there is a ton of enthusiasm for the community to help. However, without a clear path to an approval in a reasonable timeframe, many individuals simply ignore the process.”

- JEFFREY NORMAN

The head of Squamish’s most prolific trail-building group also believes B.C. needs to improve its ability to process these applications because it’s “important to continue to inspire the volunteer community that is so important to our outdoor recreation culture in the Sea to Sky.” Norman said the province depends on SORCA and other volunteers to build and

reasonable timeframe, many individuals simply ignore the process.”

Other infrastructure, such as parking lots, require considerable funding, yet it still often takes more than a year for the province to even open an application, he added.

While some trail associations have called for more transparency in the approval process, Mikkelsen said Rec Sites and Trails

BC have always been forthcoming about the status of their applications.

“On a transparency perspective, the province has always made it clear to us that there is where you are in the queue but it’s not entirely first come, first served,” he said. “If a trail association all of a sudden throws in 30 new applications and they did it before anyone else, it doesn’t mean that they get 30 approvals before any other association does.”

The lack of staff and long processing times at Rec Sites BC has shifted how WORCA approaches its trail applications, Mikkelsen added. While some organizations might blanket the agency with numerous applications in the hopes of getting their projects into the queue, WORCA tries to narrow down its applications to just a handful a year.

“At WORCA, we think about what we can actually build, what we can actually get funding for and what’s the timeline we can deliver these trails on,” Mikkelsen noted. “Realistically, if we get two approvals this year, we can’t manage much more than that anyway.”

In 2021, the organization only submitted two new trail applications, anticipated for

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NEWS WHISTLER approval in time for this year’s building season: The still unnamed route linking Into the Mystic to Function Junction, and the D’Arcy Memorial Trail near Jane Lakes.

Helping WORCA’s cause further, in Mikkelsen’s mind, is that trail applications in Whistler typically only come from WORCA—even on projects they’ve partnered on, like the D’Arcy trail— while other communities might submit applications from trail associations as well as private and for-profit builders.

Mikkelsen said he also ensures WORCA’s applications have local government, First Nations and environmental sign-offs in place ahead of submitting to the province.

“We only do two applications [annually] and they are very easy for the province to approve. We try to make their job easier,” Mikkelsen said.

Meanwhile, province-wide, outdoor recreation advocates are calling out the B.C. government for failing to adequately fund an agency responsible for overseeing the upkeep of more than 1,000 recreation sites and 20,000 kilometres of trails across the province.

With 50 staff and an $8-million operating budget, Recreation Sites and Trails BC has “fallen under the radar” of government priorities, according to Louise Pedersen, executive director of the Outdoor Recreation Council of BC (ORCBC).

“It’s just not enough,” said Pedersen.

“We wish they could speak up for themselves, but for some reason, they seem

HAPPY TRAILS WORCA volunteers building a new trail in May 2021.

FILE PHOTO BY DAN RAYMOND

to have been forgotten for decades.”

Pedersen added that funding shortfalls have prevented the agency’s staff from participating in land use and recreational planning that would help ensure B.C. has a “world-class network of recreation sites and trails.”

Rec Sites and Trails BC has a mandate to provide quality recreation experiences on Crown land outside of provincial parks, First Nation reserves and local municipalities.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development, which

oversees the agency, said it would be “premature to speak to plans on increasing funding,” citing the ongoing provincial budget process.

Indirectly, ORCBC said it represents more than 100,000 British Columbians who use the huge network of trails and recreation areas to hike, ride horseback, mountain bike, nordic ski and snowmobile, among other activities.

Last year, the B.C. government allocated $83 million over three years to bolster infrastructure in BC Parks. But none of that money has filtered down to recreation areas

outside of parks, where 85 per cent of the province’s land base is found.

Pedersen said her group was among several outdoor recreation advocates that took part in the 2022 budget consultation process last September.

When the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services came back with its recommendations in November, it said the government should provide increased funding, not just for parks, but for “recreation and trails to address gaps in maintenance and staff, including dedicated funding to community-based organizations for trail maintenance and development.”

Pedersen said that longstanding capacity challenges mean many recreation groups are facing long delays in getting approval to rehabilitate trails.

Hearing their recommendations echoed by the budget committee was “hugely reassuring,” she added.

But as the 2022 budget negotiations continue, Pedersen said British Columbians that care about outdoor recreation need to remind their MLAs of their longstanding blind spots at a time when the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is driving more people outdoors than ever.

Pedersen said trail counters in the Sea to Sky region, for example, recorded a 150-percent increase in traffic in 2019 and 2020.

Other regions across the province report similar increases over the past two years.

- With files from Steven Chua of The Squamish Chief n

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Michael Bublé meets Elsa

Beer can breaks the ice

BY JENNIFER ROK

BY TRICIA BLOOMFIELD

Cast your mind back to Spring of 2020. While some people embraced the sourdough starter craze or obsessed over Tiger King, my own COVID cliché was to adopt a pandemic puppy – an attempt to combat the loneliness after my husband of ten years passed away from cancer in 2018. The loneliness was exacerbated by social isolation measures and my diminished household “bubble” of one.

Feeling myself on the brink of a deep depression I knew I had to take action. The answer was unconditional love in the form of a hound.

My adorable puppy was a beautiful black and white Siberian Husky rescue dog with piercing blue eyes. I named him Michael Bublé.

Michael Bublé matured from a tiny, fluffy, playful, 20lb puppy to a 60lb fully grown pooch who barely ever left my side, a loyal companion on long hikes in Pemberton and bike rides along the Valley Trail. I fell deeply in love with him and his delightfully curled wagging tail gave me every indication the feeling was mutual!

I met my husband in front of Garfinkel’s, in Whistler in 1999. He was on holiday from England, and it was my first visit to Whistler. I was partying with a friend and we couldn’t drink a whole 6-pack of beer, so my friend dared me to give the can of beer away and take a photo of the person we gave it to. As we walked through the village there were old people, people who were too young and just not the right group of people to give the beer to. I put the can down and was going to walk into Garf’s when I saw a nice group of guys and said, “Hey, does anyone want a can of beer?” My now-husband took the can and we took a photo together minutes after we met. He later met me in the bar and we chatted for the rest of the night. This was before internet and cell phones, so he asked me to meet him the next day in front of Starbucks. I said yes at the time, but I had to return that night to Vancouver with some friends. I didn’t really think I would make it back, but the next day I woke up in Vancouver and was like, “We have to go, or else I will never know what could have been.” When I arrived 30 minutes after our agreed meeting time, he was not there. I sat there sad, thinking, “Now what?” About 20 minutes later he showed up! (Apparently he did a few circles.) We ended up marrying in Whistler, as it is such a special place for us—22 years!

SLEEPLESS IN WHISTLER

Just over a year in, I discovered the existence of dog DNA tests and decided to learn more about Michael Bublé’s lineage. Unexpectedly, the results revealed that Michael Bublé had a sister, Elsa, in Cannon Beach, Oregon. I messaged her owner, Shane, and three months later when the US border re-opened, I drove down to meet them with Michael Bublé in tow. Over picturesque walks along the beach to the soundtrack of gentle ocean waves lapping against the shore and games of driftwood catch, Michael Bublé and Elsa bonded. To my amazement, my relationship with Elsa’s doggy daddy also blossomed. Two months later, he proposed. We are now a happy family of 12 legs and I couldn’t imagine life any other way!

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NEWS PEMBERTON & THE VALLEY

‘Unprecedented is becoming our new normal’ FROM HEAT WAVES AND WILDFIRES TO ATMOSPHERIC RIVERS AND FLOODING, WILL 2022 OFFER MORE OF THE SAME?

BY HARRISON BROOKS IN A YEAR THAT included heat waves, floods, wildfires and atmospheric rivers, all on top of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Squamish-Lillooet Regional District’s (SLRD) Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) had its hands full in 2021.

But what may seem like an unprecedented year in terms of the number of emergencies is actually “not atypical, and all climate-science data and forecasts tell us that this is our ‘new normal,’ not an isolated, unprecedented year,” said SLRD director of protective services Sarah Morgan, in a report presented to the board on Jan. 27.

“Last year, this Executive Summary opened with the words, ‘2020 was an unprecedented year for Protective Services in a regional district where emergencies are uncommon,’” Morgan said in the report. “In reviewing 2021, this statement is unchanged, and unprecedented is becoming our new normal.”

According to SLRD Chair Jen Ford, the report reflected how “incredibly hard” the EOC staff worked last year and gives the board as well as residents in the area a good sense of what to prepare for going forward

WASHED OUT A section of Reid Road north of Pemberton was completely washed out in November due to high water levels.

FILE PHOTO BY KELLY COSGROVE

28 FEBRUARY 10, 2022

if an increased number of emergencies is in fact the new normal for the region.

“I think it’s all around us, and what we’ve seen in other communities is that maybe we were lucky that we didn’t have a wildfire in our region in 2021 and that we can’t take that for granted,” said Ford. “I think for everybody looking at what happened in Abbotsford and Merritt and Lytton and just

EOC was active for 121 days in 2021, which equates to 24.2 five-day work weeks for each of the 21 staff members. Four states of local emergency were declared throughout the year as well as 19 evacuation alerts and 16 evacuation orders being issued.

“In 2021 we spent about half of our time on emergency response,” said Morgan. “We did get quite a bit done in the other half of

“I think it’s all around us, and what we’ve seen in other communities is that maybe we were lucky that we didn’t have a wildfire in our region in 2021...”

- JEN FORD

all over the province that these types of emergencies are no longer a ‘someday’ or a ‘what if,’ they are a ‘let’s get ready’ and be prepared for what could happen and what is happening to this province.”

FireSmarting properties, having a go-bag ready in case of evacuation and having emergency preparedness plans within individual homes as well as neighbourhoods are some examples Ford outlined of ways people can be ready for the next potential emergency situation.

According to the report, the SLRD’s

our time, including exponential increase in our FireSmart program from the typically sort of $25,000-to-$60,000-a-year grantfunded program to our half a million dollars currently. And we’re expecting the result of our 2022-23 grant funding application in the next week or two.”

On top of the big increase to the FireSmart program funding, the SLRD has also been able to secure funding for multiple other projects including $650,000 towards Lillooet River sediment removal, $70,000 toward Mount Cayley/Mud Creek

debris flow monitoring and $60,000 for SLRD and area evacuation planning.

“We are continuing our hazard and risk assessment work for current and future land use considerations in 2021 that included completing the upper Paradise Valley floodplain and risk assessment mapping, and also kicking off phase two of our Geohazard Risk Assessment study which focuses on more pre- and postwildfire slope stability,” said Morgan. “We also continue to see good results from our regional coordination and collaboration through our regional emergency program committee, which also includes First Nations and our member municipalities and some key partners.”

With more emergencies potentially being the new norm, the SLRD’s financial capacity is something the board will have to take very seriously in the coming year, with greater involvement needed from local governments to prepare for the region’s fiscal future, Ford said.

“What that essentially boils down to is that we can’t tax enough to deal with all of the things that we need to pay for, so we need better partnerships,” she said. “But at the local level and at the personal level I think most obviously each of us needs to be aware of and prepared for emergencies, because you don’t get a lot of notice.

“And so yes, the regional district EOC has been working hard to prepare for and understand what potential threats are out there, but each of us needs to do that work too.” n

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Can carbon capture help resolve the climate crisis?

GLOBAL HEATING is accelerating. Yet we continue to pump out fossil fuel emissions and destroy forests, wetlands, bogs, grasslands and marine kelp forests that remove, convert and store atmospheric carbon.

Human well-being and long-term survival depend on quickly shifting course, but our failure to act sooner means we must also remove greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. One solution is to do what plants do: capture carbon dioxide and store it or convert it to something else.

Most carbon capture facilities remove CO2 emissions from industrial operations. Less

BY DAVID SUZUKI

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common but garnering interest are “direct air capture” technologies, which extract CO2 from the atmosphere. CO2 from both is normally injected into deep geological formations for permanent storage, but it can also be combined with hydrogen to create synthetic fuels, or used for other products and purposes. CO2 from industrial operations is often injected into oil and gas wells to force more “product” out.

Letting plants do their work—by protecting and restoring green spaces, planting trees and preventing wildfires—is an efficient, cost-effective way to capture carbon on a large scale, but technology can play a role in site-specific carbon reductions and converting CO2 to other products.

storage as a way to continue business as usual, raking in profits—and government subsidies, including tax credits. Claims of significant reductions in operations emissions don’t account for the much greater emissions from burning the end products in cars and factories.

Organizations like the International Energy Agency (IEA) say it’s needed to address the climate crisis. But it’s expensive, and injecting massive amounts of CO2 into the ground, whether to force more oil or gas out or to store it, may not be problem-free.

Converting it to something useful, such as fuels, could be a partial solution, but the fuels must be clean.

Although carbon capture and storage hasn’t really taken off in Canada, or globally, proposals are mounting from corporations, pipeline companies, oilsands consortiums and chemical manufacturers.

Most would inject operations-generated CO2 deep underground, storing it in porous rock—requiring a lot of “pore space.”

As with most “out of sight, out of mind” approaches, there could be unintended consequences. For one, the CO2 could leak.

And, although people once thought no life existed below bedrock, bacteria have since been found kilometres underground— including methanogens, which convert CO2 to methane, a shorter-lived but much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

The IEA says “emissions reduction targets cannot be met without employing the technology, estimating 7.6 gigatonnes of carbon would have to be captured annually around the world to achieve net-zero emissions.” That’s

“7.6 gigatonnes of carbon would have to be captured annually around the world to achieve net-zero emissions.”

- INTERNATIONAL ENERGY AGENCY

Whether it’s viable on a large enough scale to make a dent is another question.

The few existing carbon capture and storage facilities have been costly and not overly effective. One in Saskatchewan has an unimpressive capture rate and uses CO2 from a coal-fired power plant to extract more oil, so any climate benefits are negligible. Alberta has two plants, which cost $1.24 billion. The provincial government has promised more funding—even using carbon tax money.

Despite industry claims that facilities can capture more than 90 per cent of emissions, Shell’s Quest project to capture carbon from a fossil or “blue” hydrogen facility (used to upgrade oilsands bitumen) removed about 48 per cent of CO2 a year and 39 per cent of total emissions between 2015 and 2019, according to a Global Witness report. It captured 4.81 million tonnes of greenhouse gases, including methane, but emitted 7.66 million tonnes—all to process oil that will eventually be burned!

Fossil fuel and other industries have latched onto carbon capture, utilization and

30 FEBRUARY 10, 2022

almost 200 times what’s being captured now, a Narwhal article explains.

Technological innovation is critical to resolving the crisis, but governments shouldn’t subsidize expensive, timeconsuming, often unproven technologies aimed more at keeping the fossil fuel industry alive than helping resolve climate disruption. And we can’t use current or future technologies to justify continuing to overload the atmosphere with CO2.

To meet our 2030 climate targets and beyond, we must stop burning fossil fuels and focus on readily available, affordable solutions, such as renewables, electrification and efficiency. Technologies that truly help with the necessary transition are important, but we must also ensure that natural systems are a major part of our carbon capture efforts.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Writer and Editor Ian Hanington. ■

RANGE ROVER

Bring back the barrel jump?

IN THIS OLYMPIC season I’d like to talk a bit about a pure, backyard-bred, gauntletthrowing event that many of my generation were convinced was once a part of the Winter Games. It wasn’t, but given some of the arcane, deadbeat events of today’s Olympiads it should have been. I’m talking, of course, about the barrel jump.

A clip of barrel jumping was longfeatured on the trailer to ABC television’s infamous Wide World of Sports. In the grainy black and white footage, a dude skates up to a row of barrels at Mach speed, leaps feet forward like a broad-jumping track star, hits the last barrel with his

BY LESLIE ANTHONY tailbone, and appears to shatter his pelvis.

In the pantheon of Agony of Defeat, it was right up there with the upside-down ski jumper wiping the hay bales off the side of a jump later in the same montage. Still, since it was the kind of thing you could imagine doing with your buddies—or at least your Norwegian buddies—it seemed, somehow, Olympic in scope.

Though it never made it to the Olympics, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Few will be surprised to hear that long jumping on skates was an informal sport in nineteenth-century Holland. It grew naturally out of obstacle races in which speed skaters jumped fences, walls, and man-made barriers. During the 1920s and 1930s, barrels were often placed to mark the course boundaries. Skaters amused themselves and spectators before and after races by laying the barrels on their sides and jumping them.

BARREL JUMP Despite the Canadian Barrel Jumping Federation’s best attempts, barrel jumping was never able to make its way into the Olympics.

PHOTO BY CARL & ANN PURCELL/GETTY IMAGES.

Eventually the tomfoolery was formalized into its own competition: the skater would circle the rink a few times to pick up speed, then, at about 50 km/h, try to leap a batch of wooden (later fibreglass) barrels laid side by side by side on the ice. American speedskater Edmund Lamy set the first known record with a jump of 27’8” (8.4 metres) at Saranac Lake, New York, in 1925, and the distance remained a record for more than a quarter of a century.

Olympic gold-medal speedskater Irving Jaffee made his mark by organizing the first barrel-jumping tournament, at Grossinger’s Country Club in the Catskills, in 1951. Jaffee also standardized barrel size at 16” (40 cm) wide and 30” (76 cm) long. Terrance Brown set a new record by jumping 15 barrels (28’3” or 8.6 metres), at the second World Championships at Grossinger’s in 1952. The present record of 18 barrels (29’5” or almost 9 metres) was set by Yvon Jolin of Canada on Jan. 25, 1981. The women’s record

have speed and guts,” said Gilles Leclerc, one-time president of the Canadian Barrel Jumping Federation (CBJF), which tried for 25 years to get the sport included in the Olympics. In 1992, the CBJF sent a jumper to a Lillehammer winter-sports festival. But the demo was canned because of injury fears.

A video of the “sport” was shown instead.

Olympic officials remained unconvinced.

“I’ll admit it’s a brutal sport,” said a spokesman. “Nobody really makes it.

Everybody falls on their backside.”

“Fewer countries are involved now, and people are discouraged. When you’re refused all the time, all the good jumpers stop training.”

- GILLES LECLERC

was set in LaSalle, Que., by Marie Josee Houle, who jumped 11 barrels (22’5” or 6.8 metres) on March 1, 1987. Yay team Canada!

Obviously, we—along with the barrels— would kick some serious international butt in this event.

One difficulty was the height required to avoid serious injury. The skater had to leap a couple metres into the air to make it over, launching much like an airplane. “We must

Leclerc, however, a former Canadian champ, says barrel jumping isn’t dangerous because experts wear padded bodysuits and know how to land. Even so, he says, the notion of barrel jumping in the Olympics is dead. “Fewer countries are involved now, and people are discouraged. When you’re refused all the time, all the good jumpers stop training.”

He could have been talking about

Women’s Ski Jumping, but they actually prevailed.

Recall that while men ski jumped at the Olympics since the first Winter Games nearly a century ago, the FIS didn’t allow women to compete until 2014, and even then, insisted they wear hip padding on their suits. Ostensibly this was for “safety” but the women soon figured out it was to accentuate their curves and served no useful performance purpose. In its 2020 specifications, FIS removed the hip panel requirement, but the fight for equality clearly extends beyond ski suits. “It’s not like the suit was changed and everyone was like, ‘Yeah equality in ski jumping!’” a spokesperson told NPR. On the professional circuit, women still take home 70 to 80 per cent less prize money than men and there are fewer chances to compete, both on the World Cup circuit and at the Olympics.

Although excited to attend her first Olympics in Beijing, Canadian ski jumper Abigail Strate notes that there are only two ski-jumping events for women compared to four for men. “That’s that many more opportunities at an Olympic medal, that’s that many more opportunities to put yourself out there and show yourself as an athlete,” she says.

Which begs the question: if the Olympics actually had gotten its mitts on barrel jumping would it have been a case of careful what you wish for?

Leslie Anthony is a Whistler-based author, editor, biologist and bon vivant who has never met a mountain he didn’t like. ■

FEBRUARY 10, 2022

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FEATURE STORY

A MILLION AND COUNTING PART I

EXPERTS BELIEVE THE WORLD IS IN THE MIDST OF THE SIXTH GREAT EXTINCTION, AND BIODIVERSITY LOSSES AROUND THE GLOBE CONTINUE TO MOUNT. HOW DID WE GET HERE? AND WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT?

32 FEBRUARY 10, 2022

FEATURE STORY

MARCH 4 & 5, 2022

By Leslie Anthony

“It seems to me that if you wait until the frogs and toads have croaked their last to take some action, you’ve missed the point.”

- Kermit the Frog

IN

November 2013, an eclectic dinner group gathered during an innovative symposium entitled “Thinking Extinction” at Laurentian University, in Sudbury, Ont. Philosophers had joined leading biologists to address approaches—from captive breeding to the ethics of reviving long-extinct species to practicing medical-style conservation triage—to the growing global biodiversity crisis.

“Bringing humanities into a typically scientific discussion recognizes that all of us face questions about our role in protecting species diversity,” co-organizer and Canada Research Chair in Applied Evolutionary Ecology, Albrecht Schulte-Hostedde, said. “We hope it adds new dimensions to the conversation.”

If table-talk were any evidence, it had. Renowned turtle researcher and Laurentian professor Jacqueline Litzgus was expressing frustration at a bugbear query inevitably posed by the public, industry and media: Why should we care? “I just don’t want to answer,” she lamented. “If that’s the question when we’re talking about saving a species from extinction, we’ve already failed.”

Litzgus and Stuart Pimm, esteemed professor of conservation ecology at North Carolina’s Duke University, were discussing the lack of public buy-in for saving animals other than charismatic critters such as lions, tigers and bears. In reply, Pimm floated the moral imperative to not allow any species to go extinct—further noting that because politicians, rather than qualified professionals, often decide which ones to protect, people should be universally concerned. But it was celebrated author Margaret Atwood who talked Litzgus off the ledge.

Leaning over the table, Atwood wrapped the scientist’s hands in the deft fingers that have delivered countless literary treasures.

“My dear, you’re going about it all wrong,” she said quietly, “You think you have to tell people why they should care from a human perspective, but you should really be telling them why to care from the turtle’s perspective.”

A moment of silence ensued.

All gathered grasped Atwood’s abstraction for the clever reverseengineering it represented: one needed to understand the impact of species loss on nature, in order to see how it impacts us all.

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THE 2018 WORLD WILDLIFE FUND LIVING PLANET INDEX SHOWS A STAGGERING 60-PER-CENT DECLINE IN WILDLIFE POPULATIONS IN JUST 40 YEARS (FRESHWATER FISH HAVE THE HIGHEST EXTINCTION RATE WORLDWIDE AMONG VERTEBRATES IN THE 20TH CENTURY)

BEFORE ZOOM In late February 2020, as the world was just beginning to grapple with COVID-19, delegates from more than 140 countries gathered at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome, Italy. They were there to discuss a key document in the lead-up to the 15th meeting of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity scheduled for October 2020 in Kunming, China.

Known as COP 15, the meeting in China will represent the largest global biodiversity gathering in a decade—a period of serial disappointments on the wildlife conservation front. So, expectations are high, with a desire to officially approve targets largely agreed to beforehand. The first step in this process was refining a framework produced by a Canadian and Ugandan co-chaired working group that featured five long-term goals for 2050, with intermediary milestones and targets to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, including proposals to protect a third of the world’s oceans and land and cut pollution from plastic waste and excess nutrients fully in half. Like most UN initiatives, it was a bureaucratic gambit to avoid more bureaucracy.

The Rome proceedings were both auspicious and steeped in irony. At the last minute, they had been moved from China over coronavirus fears (less than a month later, COP 15 itself would be postponed indefinitely for the same reason; it’s currently scheduled for

April 2022), and, as delegates spun their spaghetti in the capital, Italy’s north was struggling to contain an ultimately devastating outbreak of COVID-19. With a direct link between the environmental breakdown behind biodiversity loss and the emergence of zoonotic diseases (those that jump from animals to humans) laid bare by the suspected acceleration of the coronavirus’ spread from a wildlife market in Wuhan, China, dialogue on the draft document was suffused with added urgency.

China quickly shuttered the Wuhan market and issued a temporary ban on others. But this ultimately begged a much larger question: would people finally take the destruction of nature more seriously in the wake of such a dire global consequence? No less an environmental luminary than Jane Goodall opined that humanity “was finished” if we failed, post-COVID-19, to adapt our food systems away from over-exploitation and deforestation.

Given subsequent actions, however, those prospects look bleak. Amid pandemic isolation and racial civil unrest, and having already rolled back 100 environmental regulations for air, water, land, wildlife and health, then-American President Donald Trump’s administration removed longstanding protections for wild birds and eliminated nearly 85 per cent of marine protected areas along the continental U.S. In Canada, likeminded conservative governments in Alberta and Ontario suspended environmental compliance and reporting for industry. Elsewhere in the world, wildlife poaching skyrocketed and forests were illegally levelled.

This grim track record mirrors humanity’s collective response to other large-scale

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FEATURE STORY

A BIOLOGICAL MELTDOWN

existential threats. In the same way catastrophic climate events haven’t galvanized action on reducing atmospheric carbon, the accumulating hallmarks of soaring biodiversity losses have not inspired us to flatten that curve: not the repeated bleaching of the world’s coral reefs; not the visible-from-space slashing and burning of Amazon rainforest (responsible for a third of global forest loss in 2019—some 9.3 million acres [3.8 million hectares], the size of Switzerland); not the northern white rhino blinking out of existence; and not Singapore’s seizure of US$50 million in trafficked elephant ivory and pangolin scales. Worse, the much-ballyhooed Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), entered into gleeful force at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1993, has been similarly unable to move the needle—even a bit.

Despite some local successes, an international global biodiversity pact committed to in 2002 did not reduce the overall rate of decline. By COP 10 in 2010 in Nagoya, Japan, the 196 signatories of the CBD deemed it a de facto failure in need of a reboot. That effort, which yielded 20 so-called Aichi Biodiversity Targets (Aichi being the Japanese prefecture where Nagoya resides) aiming to achieve five broad goals under a “Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020”, is also on track to come up short. Hence that more ambitious prescription being readied for COP 15.

But having lost another decade—and thousands more species—while suffering a related and costly pandemic, where is global biodiversity governance headed? And what is Canada doing to halt its own biodiversity slide?

There is no better snapshot of biodiversity woes than the landmark 2019 “Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services” by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IEPBS). The work of hundreds of scientists who reviewed data from 15,000 sources, the report elucidates humanity’s crucial reliance on nature for food, water, medicines, energy, livelihoods and cultural and spiritual fulfilment. It also shows this same dependence eroding nature, with species rapidly declining in both range and number.

(An example: despite the loss of a quarter of North American bird fauna since 1970—an estimated 3 billion animals—industry continues to kill some 450 million to 1.1 billion birds annually). And essential services provided by ecosystems—e.g., water filtration, carbon storage, seed dispersal, pollination—are also breaking down. Having “severely altered” three-quarters of the planet’s land surface, humanity has put one million species at risk of extinction.

This eye-opening number corroborates that we’re in the midst of a planetary sixth mass extinction. The previous five, spread over a half-billion years of geological time, accrued from combined natural causes—cataclysmic meteor strikes, volcanism and atmospheric shifts. The present episode has only one root cause: Homo sapiens.

The study reported a normal extinction rate for vertebrates as two species lost per 10,000 per 100 years—or 0.1 per cent over 500 years. A conservative estimate of recent extinction rates during a similar time span, beginning in the year 1500, shows mammals at two per cent, and birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish at about 1.5 per cent.

Focusing on species extinctions, however, distracts from equally worrisome trends in population declines and extirpations (local disappearance). The 2018 World Wildlife Fund Living Planet Index shows a staggering 60-per-cent decline in wildlife populations in just 40 years (freshwater fish have the highest extinction rate worldwide among vertebrates in the 20th century). A 2017 study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found a third of 27,600 terrestrial vertebrate species are undergoing high degrees of population loss—even common species of supposed “low concern.” The authors suggested as many as half of the animal individuals we once shared the planet with have vanished, a “biological annihilation” in need of urgent redress. Three years later, in June 2020, these same authors’ cri de cœur rang louder after finding the extinction rate to be accelerating: some 543 terrestrial vertebrate species had disappeared during the past century and 500 more could follow in the next two decades—a combined loss equivalent to what would naturally occur in a 16,000-year period.

The ocean is also under siege. The IPBES report demonstrates how overfishing and bycatch severely affects biodiversity in two-thirds of marine environments. Since the early 1970s, five large shark species found along the eastern U.S. have declined by 97 to 99 per cent each, and a quarter of the world’s sharks and rays are currently threatened.

A 2020 University of British Columbia study found climate-driven ocean warming and acidification were affecting glass sponge reefs unique to the Pacific Northwest that had also seen damage by bottom trawlers and salmon farms. And the complex ecosystems of tropical coral reefs are suffering huge biodiversity losses.

Despite its large size, vast spaces, and relatively low population, Canada hasn’t been immune to such impacts. According to the 2017 WWF Living Planet Report Canada, 451 of 903 vertebrate species monitored in this country declined by an average 83 per cent between 1970 and 2014. Since Canada enacted its Species at Risk Act in 2002, 154 threatened populations have also continued to decline by an average 2.7 per cent annually (compared to declines of 1.7 per cent annually in the 30 years prior). Clearly there’s a need to re-evaluate what we’re doing in this country.

Of five key impacts on species, the most prominent remains habitat degradation, responsible for about half of losses in birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish. Only in mammals is habitat eclipsed by the second largest threat—invasive species and disease.

The remaining three impacts—pollution, climate change and exploitation—affect all groups to similar extents. Which circles back to the Aichi Targets.

Though renewed international commitments called for more urgent and effective action,

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FEATURE STORY

OF FIVE KEY IMPACTS ON SPECIES, THE MOST PROMINENT REMAINS HABITAT DEGRADATION, RESPONSIBLE FOR ABOUT HALF OF LOSSES IN BIRDS, REPTILES, AMPHIBIANS AND FISH.

GETTY IMAGES

modest acceleration in policy and management efforts are unlikely to be reflected in improved trends anytime soon—Canada included. IPBES politely updated why targets for the sustainable use and conservation of nature cannot be met by current trajectories, and how goals for 2030 and beyond will only be possible through transformative changes across all sectors of society.

One of those transformations is money.

WHO’S PICKING UP THE BILL? Unsurprisingly, we’re already paying for biodiversity loss—a US$10 trillion hit to the world economy by 2050 under a “business-as-usual” scenario according to a January 2020 WWF report. It follows that spending far less to reverse this trend would be a sound investment; indeed, the study calculates a US$490 billion annual net gain in GDP under a “global conservation” scenario.

Money is the critical determinant in achieving biodiversity goals, yet governments remain reticent to fund things with uncertain outcomes—despite data suggestive of success. A model published in the journal Nature in October 2017 shows how conservation spending during 12 years reduced biodiversity loss in 100 CBD signatory

countries by almost a third. Indeed, back in 2013 at the Thinking Extinction symposium, Bridget Stutchbury, a biology professor at Toronto’s York University, noted that the average cost of improving the status of a single endangered bird species was about $1 million per year. “If open heart surgery costs $75 billion a year, the U.S. defence budget is $1.8 billion per day, and the world sees $470 billion in annual soft-drink sales, there’s plenty of money in the system,” she said. “If every taxpayer in North America gave $10 each year, we could probably save everything.”

Stutchbury wasn’t far off. Though the costs for meeting 2010 Aichi targets are largely unknown, reducing extinction risk for all globally threatened bird species was priced at USD $875 million to $1.23 billion annually over the next decade in a study published in the journal Science; when other threatened species groups were added, the cost tripled. Estimates for protecting and managing all terrestrial sites of global conservation significance ranged from USD $65.1 to $76.1 billion annually. So, meeting Aichi targets—or the more ambitious ones likely to replace them—will require worldwide conservation funding to increase by at least an order of magnitude.

Recognition of this need is reflected in a recent European Union pledge to raise €20 billion a year to boost biodiversity. Can the rest of the global community afford to do this?

Can it afford not to?

Next week in Part 2 of this feature: Oh, Canada—a deep dive into this country’s poor performance on biodiversity loss and what’s being done to improve it. ■

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SPORTS THE SCORE

Natural Selection Tour captures the ‘soul of why we snowboard’ THE TOP HALF OF THE NST FIELD FROM JACKSON HOLE HEADS TO BALDFACE LODGE IN LATE FEBRUARY FOR THE SECOND LEG OF THE THREE-STOP TOUR

BY HARRISON BROOKS MANY OF THE world’s top snowboarders were on hand in Jackson Hole, Wyo. on Jan. 25, for the second annual Natural Selection Tour (NST)—an event many in the industry consider to be one of the best snowboard competitions ever created.

“I think the NST captures the essence of the soul of why we snowboard,” said Whistler snowboarder Leanne Pelosi. “We all crave powder and community, and this has both of those in a contest vibe without feeling too competitive. The vibe is just unmatched.

“Seeing somebody ride a line that they’ve never truly ridden before in fresh powder has got to be one of the most difficult things you can do on a snowboard and that’s why I think [the NST] is the pinnacle of our sport.”

Building on the simple idea of bringing together the world’s best park and backcountry snowboarders to compete head-to-head for the crown of best allaround snowboarder on the planet, the NST, as it is today, has been years in the making.

It all started in 2008 with the first Natural Selection, a singular event in Jackson Hole that brought together

NATTY SELECT Whistler’s Leanne Pelosi shown here during her run in the Natural Selection Tour’s stop at Baldface Lodge last year.

PHOTO BY CHAD CHOMLACK

38 FEBRUARY 10, 2022

freestyle and freeriding on a mix of natural and semi-natural terrain.

“I think we kind of struck something unique, even way back then,” said contest founder and snowboard superstar Travis Rice.

“However, being very critical, I could see the areas and the improvements that needed to happen to really bring this thing into its full incarnation, so we stepped back and actually spent about the next five years looking for the right place and the right venue to do what was then called the Super Natural.”

After spending the summer of 2011 preparing terrain at Baldface Lodge, near Nelson, B.C. for the second and third incarnation of the event—the Super Natural and Ultra Natural, which ran in back to back years in 2012 and 2013—it still wasn’t perfect in Rice’s eyes. It needed to be a tour.

So once again, Rice and his team took a step back and spent the next few years scouting locations to find the best spots for a future Natural Selection tour. Finally, in 2021, the stage was set with stops in Jackson Hole and Baldface Lodge and finals taking place in the Alaska’s Tordrillo Mountains.

“Each location has its own unique set of characteristics and identity. Being here in the Rockies in Jackson, it brings its own style of riding. The type of snow we get, the type of terrain that we ride in, it’s got its own unique identity,” said Rice. “And then you go into Interior British Columbia and the terrain is different, the snow is much cakier, you get pillows, there is a higher water density in it, and then Alaska, which is more of a true coastal range, you are

riding at much lower elevations, there is even more water content in the snow, that’s why you get snow that sticks to such steep slopes up there. Each area offers its own unique set of challenges and I think that’s the beauty of this event.”

Returning in 2022 with the same three locations as the inaugural 2021 tour, the Sea to Sky was well represented at the first stop in Jackson Hole with Spencer O’Brien, Leanne Pelosi, Marie-France Roy and Chris Rasman all putting their skills to the test.

Unfortunately, no Whistler locals made it through the first round, with O’Brien, Roy and Rasman all losing their heats, and Pelosi pulling out last minute due to challenging snow conditions and the risk it posed to her in the early stages of her pregnancy.

Although disappointed she couldn’t compete, and hoping to be able to return to the competition next year, Pelosi was still stoked about the level of riding she was able to witness first-hand at the Jackson NST stop.

“The riders blew me away. Everybody had such a positive attitude, and they all brought their A-game regardless of the snow conditions. People were just truly psyched to be a part of this cream-of-thecrop crew of athletes that are the best in the world at what they do,” she said.

“It felt like it was a celebration of the sport to be there. It felt like a wedding of sorts, it was just so good. It feels good to be a part of a really strong community and to me it was just really what snowboarding is all about—just good community, good friends, good support, progression and powder.”

Just two of the five Canadians present in Jackson Hole made it through to compete in the second leg of the tour. Last year’s winner on the women’s side, Robin Van Gyn, and Revelstoke’s Dustin Craven won their respective first-round matchups.

While that was as far as Craven would go, losing to eventual stage one runner-up Jared Elston in round two (Elston lost in the final to Sage Kotsenburg), Van Gyn would go on to win her second matchup before coming up short in the final matchup against American Elena Hight.

However, when the second stop gets underway at Baldface at the end of February, some fresh blood will be added to the pack in the form of Mark McMorris, last year’s third-place finisher, as well as New Zealand’s 20-year-old phenom Zoi Sadowski-Synnott, each fresh off Olympicmedal-winning performances in Beijing.

With two of the world’s biggest snowboard stars joining the already talented field, Pelosi believes the title is anyone’s to win when the third stop in Alaska comes around in late March.

“I’m rooting for Dustin Craven at Baldface; he’s kind of the dark horse of this crew,” said Pelosi. “And then for girls, Zoi is probably going to destroy again. It will be awesome to see Zoi, but it will be awesome to see how the girls decide to compete with her because nobody knew how strong she was last year, so I think everybody is going to try to bring their A-Plus game against her.

Honestly, it could just be anybody’s game, that’s why it’s so exciting.” n

SPORTS THE SCORE

McNeill wins Freeride World Tour’s first leg WHISTLER FREERIDE CLUB ALUM LANDED A CLEAN RUN IN BAQUEIRA, SPAIN TO TAKE FIRST PLACE IN THE TOUR’S FIRST LEG IN JANUARY

BY HARRISON BROOKS

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CAPPING OFF a mistake-free run with a clean landing on the final drop, Olivia McNeill’s arms shot straight up in the air in celebration as she cruised down to the bottom of the course.

At the time, she didn’t know her run would be enough to capture the top spot on the podium in the first leg of the Freeride World Tour (FWT) in Baqueira Beret, Spain, but she knew it gave her a strong chance of reaching the top-four goal she set for herself before the competition.

“I was dropping fairly close to the end, so I was pretty excited because I thought I had a good chance at being on the podium.

I wanted to have a good, solid result to keep going with so I was just excited to land and at that moment hopeful that I would achieve a top-four result,” she said.

“I wouldn’t say I was completely in shock, but I was very excited. Lots of excitement for a lot of different reasons. I have a big, long trend of falling every time I go to Europe, so I was extra excited for that reason. It was just nice to put down a run that was nice and flowy and smooth.”

That first-place finish for McNeill, who got her start in freeriding with Whistler’s Mountain Adventure Program, represented a moment of redemption and relief for the 20-year-old Vancouverite.

In 2021, as a last-minute addition to the FWT after an injury to another rider, McNeill went through all the hassles of travelling overseas amid a pandemic only to break her ankle in the first leg of the tour, ending her inaugural FWT experience as abruptly as it started.

This year, once again making the tour as a wild card and wanting to prove that she belonged in a competition next to the same skiers she’s been watching for years, McNeill’s recent injury history was front of mind for the skier. It added even more pressure to put down a clean run.

“I’ve been dealing with a lot of injury stuff for the past few years, so the pressure that I feel most is to do a run that is actually up to my physical ability because I didn’t really feel like I necessarily earned [my spot],” said McNeill. “I was super excited to be there, but I was feeling a little out of place. And I think just landing a run like I did really helped solidify that, ‘I am here, and I do deserve to be here’ mindset. It’s nice to feel that confidence that I can do it and I can stand up against all these people who I have been watching for so long.”

Following Baqueira, the tour made its way to Ordino Arcalís, Andorra in early February, where McNeill found herself near the bottom of the pack in eighth place. But

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DROPPING IN Olivia McNeill drops off a rock face in Baqueira Beret, Spain in the first leg of the FWT. PHOTO COURTESY OF FREERIDE WORLD TOUR

despite the disappointing finish in the second leg, the Whistler Freeride Club alum still sits second overall in points with 12,095 heading into the third stop in Kicking Horse this week.

The chance to not only punch her ticket to the final legs of the tour in Fieberbrunn, Austria and Verbier, Switzerland in March, but also qualify for next year’s FWT, has McNeill excited about what’s to come.

The fact that her birthday falls inside the competition window makes the upcoming event all the more special.

“I’m really excited about Kicking Horse … it’s been a few years since I’ve been there now, so I’m very excited to go back,” she said. “I love the mountains in B.C. I love the landscape and they just kind of make me feel safe.”

The FWT finals consist of the top six riders based on their two best scores from the first three legs of the tour. With a first-place finish already under her belt, McNeill’s chances of qualifying are strong— but not guaranteed.

With that in mind, McNeill is on the fence about how to approach the competition in Kicking Horse.

“I kind of want to go full throttle there, too, but that will definitely be conditionsdependent because it is really important to me to remember that sometimes it is good to play the game a little bit, just in case,” she said. “But if I do qualify [for the final], I have that safety net that I get to come back to the tour no matter how I place in the final. And as sick as it would be to win the tour, I kind of just want to do some kind of crazy, wild run.

“I don’t think I’m reckless—I would never hit anything that I don’t think I can 100-per-cent land, but I kind of want to turn it up from 75 per cent of what I can do to 95. I am just hoping that I get that opportunity.” n

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FEBRUARY 10, 2022

39

SPORTS THE SCORE

2022 Winter Olympic Games: Results roundup WMSC ALUM JACK CRAWFORD NETS TWO TOP-10 RESULTS IN ALPINE EVENTS

BY MEGAN LALONDE THE 2022 Olympic Winter Games kicked off in Beijing, China last week, featuring a host of Sea to Sky locals putting their skills to the test in several different events. Here are some local(ish) results from the first few days of competition.

ALPINE SKIING Podium hopes were high for Whistler’s Broderick Thompson after the ski racer flew to third place in a downhill training session last week, but unfortunately that hot training run didn’t translate into competition. Thompson, competing in his second Olympics, lost an edge and took a spill about halfway down the downhill course on Feb. 6.

The downhill event was anything but a bust for Team Canada, with Whistler Mountain Ski Club (WMSC) alum Jack Crawford finishing just off the podium in fourth place. WMSC teammate Brodie Seger finished just out of the top 20, placing 22nd.

Crawford, Thompson and Seger all stepped into the start gate again for

the Super-G race on Feb. 9 in Beijing, where Crawford was once again the topperforming Canadian with his sixth-place finish. Neither Thompson nor Seger were able to finish the race.

MOGULS In her Olympic debut last week, Whistler local Sofiane Gagnon charged down the bumps with a few clean runs to qualify for finals.

After teammate and defending silver medallist Justine Dufour-Lapointe’s heartbreaking crash in her first finals run, Gagnon, unfortunately, suffered a similar fate in her second finals run.

The men’s moguls event proved to be more successful for Quebec freestyle skiing legend and 2018 gold medallist Mikael Kingsbury, who added another silver Olympic medal to his already-packed trophy case on Feb. 5.

LUGE It may not have been the result he was hoping for, but 23-year-old Whistler luge athlete Reid Watts still put down four solid runs on the sliding track to finish 17th overall in the men’s singles event.

Watts will be back on his sled this week

for relay action.

In the women’s singles event, Pemberton’s Trinity Ellis and Whistler’s Natalie Corless were sliding for Canada, while Whistler’s Veronica Ravenna competed for Argentina. In the final that took place extra-early Tuesday morning West Coast time, Ellis and Corless both managed to clock in a pair of runs that earned Ellis 14th overall, while Corless finished in 16th after four runs.

Ravenna did not advance to the fourth run, after ranking 23rd.

SLOPESTYLE SNOWBOARDING In women’s slopestyle snowboarding, defending silver medallist Laurie Blouin was the lone Canadian to compete in finals after Whistler residents Jasmine Baird and Brooke Voigt ranked 15th and 22nd, respectively, in the qualifying round.

Defending silver medallist Blouin finished just shy of the podium with a clean run, with a stomped run good enough to earn her fourth place.

Whistler-based Team USA rider Jamie Anderson, who won slopestyle gold in both the 2014 and 2018 Olympics, finished ninth.

Day 3 was a banner day for Canada’s

men’s snowboard team, with Bromont, Que.’s Max Parrot coming back from a cancer diagnosis in 2018 to win slopestyle gold with a couple triple 1620s. With Regina’s Mark McMorris rounding out the podium in third place, the only bummer for locals was Darcy Sharpe missing from the finals field, after finishing 23rd in qualifying.

It marked McMorris’ third bronze medal in as many Olympic slopestyle contests, making him the first Olympian to win backto-back-to-back bronze medals in the same individual event at the Winter Games.

Canada’s slopestyle team will all have a chance for redemption—or in Parrot’s case, a repeat—in the big air events this week.

OTHER HIGHLIGHTS Ski jumpers Mackenzie Boyd-Clowes, Alexandria Loutitt, Matthew Soukup and Abigail Strate made history with their bronze-medal win in the mixed team event: they earned Canada its first-ever Olympic ski jumping medal.

Canada also picked up three speed skating medals: bronze for both Isabelle Weidemann in the women’s 3,000-metre race and Kim Boutin in the 500-metre shorttrack event, and silver for Steven Dubois in the men’s 1500m race. n

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41

FORK IN THE ROAD

Breakfasts of champions WITH OLYMPIC ATHLETES INSPIRING US, TAKE A TIP FROM SOME TIMELESS CHAMPS WHEN WE WERE KIDS growing up in Edmonton and somebody wanted to bolster you up—say the morning of your elementary school’s track and field meet, and you were your team’s star broad jumper, or mom and dad had an “all-dayer” planned at Pigeon Lake—the call to arms was, “Eat your Wheaties!”

Everybody knew that Wheaties was the “Breakfast of Champions.” Somehow, the branding had burned itself into our collective consciousness. So when parents,

BY GLENDA BARTOSH aunties, uncles, you name it, urged us, or anyone who might be considered a “98pound weakling” to eat our Wheaties, we knew it was code for “get strong.”

The famous “98-pound weakling” trope, however, had nothing to do with cereal. That came from one of the longestrunning, most memorable ad campaigns ever in comic books, TV and more. And it was all thanks to the one and only Charles Atlas, the legendary American bodybuilder.

Born Angelo Siciliano, in 1892 in the small town of Acri, Italy, Charles Atlas was originally trained as a leather worker. Once he landed in America he was too poor to join the YMCA, but ultimately he parlayed his “muscleman” physique into a bodybuilding empire worth millions.

In an old comic book ad similar to the one accompanying this article, Atlas recounted the true story. According to him, he had sand kicked in his face at the beach by a bully, and he weighed 97 pounds when it happened. Just in case you’re interested, you can still buy his program today.

Now, when I think about it, “Eat your Wheaties!” was a weird exhortation in Alberta. Wheaties have never been sold in Canada! So how on Earth could we eat them if they never ended up in our grocery cart?

Never mind—we still loved the “Breakfast

CHUMP TO CHAMP An ad in The Daily Mirror from April 2, 1953.

IMAGE BY JBCURIO ON FLICKR / COURTESY OF THE DAILY MIRROR

42 FEBRUARY 10, 2022

of Champions” concept, which, like Charles, has stood the test of time.

Wheaties, now a General Mills product, started life as Washburn’s Gold Medal Whole Wheat Flakes in 1921. Since 1934 they’ve featured some 850-plus champion athletes on the front, including dozens of Olympic medallists and even two Canadians—Elvis Stojko and Mario Lemieux. To celebrate their 100th anniversary last year, the distinctive orange/red cereal box featured Muhammad Ali, who first made “the box” in 1999—now sold out on eBay. With all the amazing athletes bounding their way through the Winter Olympics right now, I especially think of the great Canadians, and the great locals taking part.

Too many to name them all, but you know I’m thinking of the Marielle and Broderick Thompsons; the Trinity Ellis’ and Natalie Corless’; the Mark McMorris’, Max Parrots and Jack Crawfords. I bet they all know how important a good breakfast—a breakfast of champions—is.

Search for what they eat, and you’ll get eggs, lots of eggs; oatmeal, and yogurt; and, yes, peanut butter, too. And lots of each.

Endurance athletes, like cross-country skiers, can burn through 3,500 calories a day, so a hearty breakfast is key.

In light of the above, here’s my all-time favourite recipe for granola—a homemade breakfast of champions that’s so good and easy to make it’s been around the world

GB’S CRUNCHY GRANOLA MIX TOGETHER IN A BIG BOWL: 4 cups rolled oats 1 1/2 c. unsweetened, untoasted coconut (shredded, ribbons, or otherwise) 1 c. wheat germ 1 c. [or more] chopped nuts—whatever you like: walnuts, almonds, pecans. Not salted or roasted.

1 c. raw sunflower seeds 1/2 c. flax seed [I partially grind mine in an old coffee grinder) 1/2 c. bran—wheat or oat, as you like 1 c. ground roasted soybeans (if you can find any. They do add protein, but I don’t usually bother.)

NOTE: Instead of the flax seed and bran you can substitute 1 c. of Sunny Boy or any similar dry porridge.

IN A SMALL SAUCEPAN OR GLASS CONTAINER, DEPENDING ON WHETHER YOU’RE GOING TO HEAT IT ON THE STOVETOP OR IN A MICROWAVE, MIX: 1/2 c. oil (I use just over 1/4 c.—a good organic sunflower oil) 1/2 c. honey or maple syrup (the latter is easier to mix in) 1/2-1 tsp. vanilla Once it’s gently heated, pour over your dry mixture and blend well. Stir in extras as you like—raisins, chopped dates, dried cranberries.

Lightly oil 2 cookie sheets. Spread evenly and bake at 325 F for 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally, until nicely browned. When it’s cool, store in an airtight container.

and back. (That’s only according to where some of my friends live who’ve asked for the recipe.) Full of fibre, nutrients and protein, I dare say, it’s even better than Wheaties.

Hey, I Iived in the States for years and, yes, I tried it.

My recipe card is so yellowed and faded, it looks like an original Charles Atlas ad.

Alas, I can’t tell you where it originally came from, but it has a very good, authentic provenance, namely straight from the heart of granola-munching, Birkenstock-wearing hippie-land—California, early 1970s.

With Valentine’s Day on the horizon, why not whip up some for your favourite loved ones? It’s easy to bag or box for a gift, and much cheaper than those tiny bags of decent commercial granola that go for nearly 20 bucks. Plus it’s as good over ice cream or fruit salad as it is for breakfast.

We all might not turn into another Charles Atlas but with a good, nutritious breakfast under our belts, we’ll be on our way to becoming champions.

BTW, if you’re ever in New York’s Washington Square, check out the monumental arch. Charles Atlas was the model for George Washington as president, also known as Washington at Peace— something we could all use more of today.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning journalist who applauds athletes everywhere who have overcome countless challenges to chase their gold. n

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ARTS SCENE

Whistler crew traces skiing’s origins in Return to Roots SHORT DOC CAME OUT OF WIDER SNOW HUNTERS PROJECT THAT WAS CUT SHORT IN RURAL CHINA BY COVID—AND AN AVALANCHE

BY BRANDON BARRETT ON THE FACE of it, the modern skier of today, what with the state-of-the-art gear and penchant for heli-fuelled descents, would seem to have little to learn from the traditional skier of yesteryear that relied on skis made from boiled wood planks and horsehair to get around.

But for Whistler filmmaker Chris Winters, co-director and producer of the new short doc, Return to Roots, there is much to learn from skiing’s original practitioners that goes beyond just sliding on snow.

“I’m trying to remind people that skiing is not just a frivolous rich person’s activity that has no real meaning on our overall history. It actually is a fundamental thing that was used for survival in winter climates,” he says. “The conversation is about civilization and the strength of civilization as much as it is about the actual sport.”

Return to Roots emerged out of a larger project called Snow Hunters tracing the origins of skiing that brought Winters and fellow Sea to Sky filmmaker Brian Hockenstein, Olympic gold-medal snowboarder Kaitlyn Farrington and pro skier Brennan Lagasse to the remote village of Kohm, also known as Hemu, in northwestern China in January 2020. After the long and arduous journey to get to the

SNOWED IN The remote village of Kohm, also known as Hemu, in rural nothwestern China, where a Whistler crew filmed portions of Return to Roots.

PHOTO SUBMITTED

44 FEBRUARY 10, 2022

border village of a few hundred locals who still use skis as a form of transportation, their shoot was cut short by the coronavirus that was, at that time, only beginning to spread out of the eastern part of the country. Luckily, a local official had arranged for the team to board the last flight out of Altay City, some five hours away—but their relief was short-lived. About an hour in to their drive

more self-sufficient and more localized.

They lived a simpler life, and in a way, it was following what we were hoping to achieve in terms of learning from a culture that is still like that by nature. So as we return to the roots of skiing, we’re also returning to the roots of how we live.”

But is skiing—an industry increasingly geared more towards convenience and the

“In the future, we’re going to have to return to this kind of ancient style of hunting for snow if we’re going to continue to get out and enjoy this pastime, because climate change has made snow a little bit more endangered.”

- CHRIS WINTERS

from Kohm, they learned that several large avalanches had blocked the only road out.

The group waited for hours, unsure of their next move, when suddenly the lights of an industrial-sized snow removal truck appeared, clearing just enough space for their cars to pass through.

“Essentially we had to leave after just a few days there. While it seemed to have ruined our whole project in a sense … we realized there was some good footage that we captured and we wanted to connect it to what everyone has been going through over the last couple years,” Winters says.

“In lockdown, for a short time, people were

novice skier—ready to promote a more selfsufficient, back-to-basics approach?

“The reality is the ski industry is a business and going simpler is bad for business. I don’t really see the industry itself taking hold of this, although particularly during COVID a trend that has been building for a decade or so is backcountry touring,” says Winters. “It has become not just something fringe hardcore skiers do, but it’s becoming something you see other folks learn as they learn to ski at the same time.”

Given good snow is harder than ever to find these days, Winters believes it would behoove the modern skier to take a page out

of the traditional skier’s playbook.

“In the future, we’re going to have to return to this kind of ancient style of hunting for snow if we’re going to continue to get out and enjoy this pastime, because climate change has made snow a little bit more endangered,” he says.

Winters’ vision for the original Snow Hunters series was to link the old ways of skiing with the new by meeting with China’s Olympic and emerging skiers in Beijing ahead of the 2022 Winter Games that kicked off last week. What’s obvious to anyone who has paid even the faintest attention to the emergence of skiing in China is that the country has invested big into its future— President Xi Jinping has personally called to get 300 million Chinese on skis. A big part of that push has come in Xinjiang, the troubled province that is home to the village of Kohm, which looks to become the battleground between traditional forms of skiing and China’s expansive ambitions.

Home to the persecuted Muslim minority group, the Uyghurs, Xinjiang is also heavily marketed as China’s next winter mecca, even as human rights groups say more than a million Uyghurs have been detained against their will in recent years in China’s so-called “re-education camps.” But despite the country’s poor human rights records, Western snow-sport companies haven’t been able to resist the allure of a growing Chinese industry, which is predicted to become the world’s largest snow-sport market by 2025 on the back of this year’s Olympics.

To watch Return to Roots, visit snowhuntersfilm.com/returntoroots. n

ARTS SCENE

Acclaimed B.C. poet Gary Geddes plucks from ‘the ventriloquism of history’ in new book COMMONWEALTH POETRY PRIZE WINNER READS FROM ANTIWAR TOME THE VENTRILOQUIST AT WHISTLER LIBRARY EVENT

BY BRANDON BARRETT WHEN GARY GEDDES was still in grad school in the mid-’60s, long before he had penned or edited the more than 50 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and anthologies that would bear his name, long before the litany of awards he had earned as one of Canada’s most celebrated poets, he got a piece of advice from a mentor that sticks with him to this day.

“He said, ‘Gary, William Blake may have found the universe in a grain of sand, but you’re not going to find one in your belly button, so stop contemplating it,’” Geddes recalls.

That one comment wound up shaping Geddes’ entire career, and as he put it, formed “the beginning of my understanding of the power of persona.” Instead of writing from his own purview, Geddes began to inhabit other characters, writing from their first-person perspective. “It got me out of my own little claustrophobic ego out into the bigger world.

I could write about things by using the firstperson persona rather than speaking out of my own voice,” he says.

It’s an approach that has served Geddes well throughout his prolific career as Canada’s preeminent political poet, and is on full display in his latest book, The Ventriloquist, which he will be reading from at a virtual event this week hosted by the Whistler Public Library. Bringing back into print four poetic narratives that, like much of Geddes’ work, confront the physical and psychological ravages of war, The Ventriloquist saw the author taking his usual hands-on research approach.

One narrative centres on Canada’s role in the Fall of Hong Kong, one of the first battles of the Pacific War in the Second World War. Geddes pored through hours of audio interviews with Canadian veterans who took part in the battle, read issue upon issue of the South China Morning Post after Japan had occupied Hong Kong and wrested the publication from the hands of locals, and even crawled on his belly through the same Hong Kong battlefields thousands of soldiers had braved decades before.

“At one point, I was so overwhelmed by it, I started to feel as if I was getting secondary PTSD. I said to my wife, ‘I can’t go on. I have to drop this subject. It’s too powerful.’ She said, ‘Well, I’m so glad to hear that. You’ve been impossible to live with,’” Geddes recalls with a laugh.

But once he had given himself permission to drop the poem, the words began flowing out of him. After nine years, his manuscript was finished. “It had taken some weight off of me,” he says.

Geddes has described his literary

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VENTRILOQUISM OF HISTORY Canadian literary icon and anti-war poet Gary Geddes has described his deeply researched poetic narratives as pulling from “the ventriloquism of history,” which also gave the title to his latest book, The Ventriloquist.

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and historical work as pulling from “the ventriloquism of history” to lend a voice to “all those disembodied spirits silenced by turmoil and time who are wandering the ether looking for a sucker like me to tell their stories.”

Through his decades-long career, which has earned him everything from a B.C. Lieutenant Governor’s Award to the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas and even the Gabriela Mistral Prize handed out by the Chilean government, Geddes went on to be considered one of Canada’s foremost anti-war literary figures.

Given humanity’s long penchant for conflict, I ask him if a world without war is remotely conceivable.

“Kane slew his brother Abel, as we hear in the Bible story. There have been records of genocide and slaughter right up to the moment as it were, including the Canadian genocide against Indigenous people,” he says. “We can never change human nature to the point where none of this will happen, but we need to be constantly on the alert and speaking out against those destructive ways of living together.”

Geddes mentions a quote by Dylan Thomas to illustrate his point, in which the late Welsh poet describes how, from “the womb of war,” he tries to “make that momentary peace that is a poem.”

“In other words, peace is not a permanent condition,” Geddes says. “It’s something that has to be dealt with daily, like poetry. It’s a sort of meditation that has to be with us at all times.”

Geddes will be reading from his latest book in a Zoom talk on Feb. 10 at 7 p.m., which will be followed by a Q&A. Register for the free event by emailing publicservices@ whistlerlibrary.ca. n

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MUSEUM MUSINGS

WIN CANUCKS TICKETS! Canucks vs Detroit March 17th Come in for brunch on Saturdays and Sundays from 11am to 2pm to enter to win Children are welcome until 10 pm

Catch all the NHL and NFL action everyday! All games available!

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PERILOUS PATH Prior to 1965, the road to Whistler was notoriously unreliable. Regular creek crossings were required and the single-lane gravel road suffered extreme washouts, as seen in this photo of Cheakamus Canyon in the ’50s.

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Highway to (powder) heaven

BY JILLIAN ROBERTS THE TOWERING mountains and lush valleys that inspire people to fall in love with the Sea to Sky also create challenges for access. When Myrtle and Alex Philip arrived at John Millar’s cabin in 1911, they had taken a steamer to Squamish, and then walked the rest of the way to Millar’s cabin at present-day Function Junction. With the introduction of the railway to Alta Lake in 1914, the region was opened to more tourism and industry.

It was not until 1956, however, that a road connected Vancouver to Squamish, and there was not a reliable road to Whistler until the 1960s. To ensure the highway was completed in time for the opening of the lifts in 1965, rumour has it that the Garibaldi Lift Company gave a single ski to the then-Minister of

single-lane plowed gravel road, there was no room to pass. Both cars were required to stop and snow was dug out of the snow bank to let the smaller car squeeze by.

Revelers would spend Friday night at the Cheakamus Inn, watching to see whose cars had survived the rough trip. As Paul Burrows remembers, “Eventually most people ended up at the Inn because after driving that road you needed a drink.”

In 1966, one year after construction, Highway 99 was paved from Squamish to Mons and kept clear of snow as much as possible. As we know, that did not eliminate all transport problems. The Squamish Citizen reported in 1987, “Poor visibility, the near eradication of lines along the edge of the highway and the dinginess of the centre line coupled with the spottiness of the cat’s eyes (road reflectors) in many places makes it almost impossible to distinguish the centre line or edge of the road.” Does

“Eventually most people ended up at the Inn because after driving that road you needed a drink.”

- PAUL BURROWS

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46 FEBRUARY 10, 2022

Highways Phil Gaglardi. He kept this ski in his office as an incentive to complete the road, and was presented with the matching ski upon the completion of the highway.

Even once the highway went in, it was still a hair-raising journey. While driving the Sea to Sky in certain conditions today requires confident and experienced winter drivers, imagine if the roads were only plowed once a week. This is what visitors and residents had to contend with for the inaugural season of Whistler Mountain. Only ski fanatics would brave the journey, and you had to be a special type of enthusiast to make the trip on Friday evening before the roads were plowed on Saturday morning.

When you met another car along the

that sound familiar? The article goes on to recommend imbedding the cat’s eyes in the centre of the road, and suggesting that someone invent fluorescent paint for the road lines.

These solutions (including the invention of fluorescent paint), along with the widening of the road for the 2010 Olympics, have no doubt helped with access and we have seen incredible growth in visitors and residents alike, resulting in far more people using the Sea to Sky Highway. However, where you have mountainous geography and weather that brings amazing snowfalls, road and access continue to be topics of great debate.

At least it does not take five hours to get to Costco every visit, unless you make the mistake of leaving on Sunday afternoon! n

PARTIAL RECALL

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MASK UP This group of skiers visiting from the U.S. was easy to spot on Blackcomb Mountain on Jan. 27. PHOTO BY JUNE KLEBAN.

and 2nd in juveniles, respectively) at a Biathlon BC Cup race held in Quesnel over the weekend, from Feb. 4 to 6. PHOTO SUBMITTED. 3

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FUTURE OLYMPIANS Holden Wilson and Reid Murray of Whistler celebrate their podium finishes (3rd CHEERING FOR TRINITY The Pemberton community gathered on Saturday, Feb. 5 to show some support

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TRAINING DAY After responding to an avalanche on Rainbow Mountain on Tuesday, Feb. 1, Whistler Search and Rescue volunteers wrapped up their day with a large avalanche training scenario in the Callaghan Valley later that afternoon. PHOTO COURTESY OF JOEL SWEET. 5 RISE UP The Whistler Mountain gondola rises up out of the clouds early on a blue, foggy morning last month. PHOTO BY VIKTORIJA ZAKSAIT. 6 LUNCH BREAK We might be biased, but an on-mountain ski break is always made better with a Moscow mule and some quality reading material. PHOTO BY JESSLYN GATES.

for hometown luge athlete Trinity Ellis ahead of her Olympic performance. PHOTO COURTESY OF KELLY COSGROVE. 4

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ASTROLOGY 5 YEAR FINANCIAL PLAN INVITATION FOR PUBLIC CONSULTATION Work is underway as the Regional District prepares its annual budget and five-year Financial Plan. The 2022-2026 Financial Plan will be discussed (for services applicable to each meeting) at the following meetings of the Squamish-Lillooet Regional District (SLRD) being held virtually via Zoom and also available for public viewing from the SLRD office at 1350 Aster Street, Pemberton: SLRD Pemberton Valley Utilities & Services Committee (PVUS): February 3, 2022; meeting starts at 1:00 pm SLRD Electoral Area Directors Committee (EAD): February 9, 2022; meeting starts at 10:30 am SLRD Committee of the Whole meeting: February 24, 2022; meeting starts at 9:00 am SLRD Pemberton Valley Utilities & Services Committee (PVUS): March 10, 2022; meeting starts at 1:00 pm SLRD Electoral Area Directors Committee (EAD): March 9, 2022; meeting starts at 10:30 am SLRD Regular Board meeting (adoption): Thursday, March 30 2022, starts at 10:30 am All meetings may be viewed once they begin with a link to the livestream at https://www.slrd.bc.ca/inside-slrd/meetings-agendas/watch-meetings.

And if you’re unable to view the meeting as it happens, recordings of the meetings are available at the same link.

The full Draft 2022-2026 Financial Plan will be available to review online at a later date (will be advertised).

Questions on the SLRD’s 2022-2026 Financial Plan can be sent to: Mail: Box 219, Pemberton, BC V0N 2L0 Email: info@slrd.bc.ca

Cannabis Retail in Whistler The Resort Municipality of Whistler is developing an approach to regulating the sale of retail cannabis in Whistler.

Engagement with industry, key stakeholders, and the community will identify community goals and priorities for cannabis retail implementation, and the proposed regulatory framework.

Cannabis retailers and individuals involved in the cannabis industry are invited to a virtual workshop on February 17 at 10 am to learn more about the proposed framework and to provide input on the regulation of cannabis retail in Whistler.

To learn more about the workshop, policy development and to provide input, visit whistler.ca/CannabisRetail

Free Will Astrology WEEK OF FEBRUARY 10 BY ROB BREZSNY

ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Real love is a pilgrimage,” declared author Anita Brookner. “It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.” That’s the bad news, Aries.

The good news is that you have more potential than ever before to free your love of strategic manoeuvreing and manipulation. For the foreseeable future, I invite you to drop all romantic agendas and simply make yourself extra receptive to love’s teachings. Are you ready to learn what you don’t even realize you need to know?

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In the near future, I’ll be pleased if you dole out lavish praise to allies who enchant you. I will celebrate if you deliver loving inspirations and lush invitations to those who help you fulfil your reasons for being here on the planet. To get you in the mood, here are some suggested provocations. 1. “Your body makes mine into a shrine; holy, divine, godtouched.” —Ramona Meisel. 2. “Your luster opens glories on my glowing face.”

—Federico García Lorca. 3. “All night long if you want.

We’ll tell our secrets to the dark.” —Gayle Forman. 4.

“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.” —Bob Dylan. 5. “We are each other’s harvest. We are each other’s business. We are each other’s magnitude and bond.” —Gwendolyn Brooks.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): In Gemini author Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow, the main character Ka asks a woman named Ipek, “What is the thing you want most from me?

What can I do to make you love me?” Ipek’s answer: “Be yourself.” In the coming days, Gemini, I would love you to engage in similar exchanges with those you care for.

According to my understanding of the astrological omens, now is a favourable time for you and your best allies to shed all fakery and pretense so that you may be soulfully authentic with each other—and encourage each other to express what’s most raw and genuine.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Are you in the mood to make extravagant gestures on behalf of love? Are you feeling an urge to move beyond your habitual approaches to intimate togetherness as you dare to engage in fun experiments? Now is a good time for such behaviour with allies you trust. To spur your imagination, immerse yourself in the spirit of this poem by Nizar Qabbani: “I abandon my dictionaries to the flames, / And ordain you my language. / I fling my passport beneath the waves, / And christen you my country.” Your homework: Dream up and carry out a playful and audacious venture that will energize one of your close relationships.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): I’ve created a list of splashy titles for stories or poems or songs or artworks or dances that you could compose for beloved allies or people you want to be beloved allies. I hope my list inspires you to get gushy and lyrical. I hope you’ll be creative and marvellous as you express your passionate appreciation.

Here are the titles: 1. Glistening Passion. 2. Incandescent Rapture. 3. Succulent Dazzle. 4. Molten Luminosity. 5.

Splashy Fire Bliss. 6. Shimmering Joy Beams. 7. Opulent Delirium. 8. Wild Soul Synergy. 9. Sublime Friction. 10.

Fluidic Gleam Blessings. 11. Throbbing Reverence. 12.

Sacred Heart Salvation.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Author Eve Ensler tells us, “You have to give to the world the thing that you want the most, in order to fix the broken parts inside you.”

This is perfect counsel for you to carry out in the coming weeks, Virgo. Life will conspire to help you heal yourself, in dramatic and even semi-miraculous ways, as you offer the people and animals you care for the same blessings that you crave to receive. I foresee an influx of restorative karma flowing in your direction. I predict the fixing of at least some of your broken parts.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In Michael Chabon’s novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, the character named Arthur says to the character named Cleveland, “Love is like falconry.

Don’t you think that’s true?” Cleveland replies, “Never say love is like anything. It isn’t.” I propose we make that

your meditation during this Valentine season, Libra. In accordance with astrological omens, you will be wise to purge all your preconceptions about love. Use your ingenuity to revive your innocence about the subject. Cultivate a sense of wonder as you let your imagination run wild and free in its fantasies about love and sex and intimacy.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): I’ll love it if sometime soon you create a situation in which you tell an ally words similar to what author Jamaica Kincaid spoke to her lover: “To behold the startling truths of your naked body frees me to remember the song I was born from.”

Do you think you can make that happen, Scorpio? The astrological indicators at play in your life suggest that it would be right and sacred for you to do so. And if there is no such ally, then I hope you will deliver the same message to your naked self. And by the way, what is the song you were born from? (PS: There has never been a better time than now to learn treasured truths about yourself through your connections with others.)

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): I’m afraid I must be downright practical and mundane in my oracle for you.

Don’t hate me! I’m only reporting what the planetary omens are telling me. They say that now is a favourable time for you to practise, practise, and practise some more the fine arts hinted at by author Ivan Goncharov: “A close, daily intimacy between two people has to be paid for: It requires a great deal of experience of life, logic, and warmth of heart on both sides to enjoy each other’s good qualities without being irritated by each other’s shortcomings and blaming each other for them.”

Be diligently positive, Sagittarius, as you work through the demanding daily trials of togetherness.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): I’ll offer you a radical idea about love from author Hélène Cixous. Although it’s not always true for everyone, it will have special meaning for you in the coming months. She wrote, “It is easy to love and sing one’s love. That is something I am extremely good at doing. But to be loved, that is true greatness. Being loved, letting oneself be loved, entering the magic and dreadful circle of generosity, receiving gifts, finding the right thank-you’s, that is love’s real work.” How about it, Capricorn? Are you up for the challenge? Are you willing to expand your capacity to welcome the care and benevolence and inspiration coming your way from others?

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Actor Leelee Sobieski was mourning her romantic adventures—or rather the lack of romantic adventures. She said, “If only I could find a guy who wasn’t in his 70s to talk to me about white cranes, I’d be madly in love.” The good news is that Sobieski knows precisely what she wants, and it’s not all that complicated. The bad news is that there are few men near her own age (38) who enjoy discussing the fine points of the endangered bird species known as the white crane. I bring her predicament to your attention, Aquarius, in the hope that you’ll be inspired to be as exact and lucid as she is in identifying what you want— even as you cheat just a bit in the direction of wanting what is actually available.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): I’ve never offered you the wisdom of actor Natalie Portman, but her idealistic attitude about relationships is exactly what I think you should aspire to in the coming months. She said, “I always ask myself, would I want someone to do something that wasn’t comfortable for them to do just to please me? And the answer is no.” What do you think, Pisces? Do you suspect it might be interesting to apply that principle to your closest alliances? I hope so. If you do, the planetary energies will conspire to deepen your intimate bonds.

What love goal would you like to accomplish between now and February 2023? Write it down, stating it as an intention and vow. Share? Frewillstrology.com.

In addition to this column, Rob Brezsny creates

EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES Whistler.ca/CannabisRetail

48 FEBRUARY 10, 2022

In-depth weekly forecasts designed to inspire and uplift you. To buy access, phone 1-888-499-4425. Once you’ve chosen the Block of Time you like, call 1-888-682-8777 to hear Rob’s forecasts. www.freewillastrology.com

WAG’s Holiday Matching Campaign 2021 In Partnership with Zog’s Whistler and Moguls Coffee House

THANK YOU Our 2nd Holiday Matching Campaign was an even bigger success!

TOTAL RAISED: $41,200

Special Thank You to Zog’s Whistler and Moguls Coffee House for all your contributions to WAG this past year…

2021 presented WAG and our communities with even more challenges this past year, but thanks to your support, we ended on a high note! Thanks to the support of Zog’s Whistler and Moguls Coffee House, and their pledge to match all donations up to $15,000, we were able to raise our annual Holiday Matching Campaign goal to $30,000!

Not only did we meet our $15,000 fundraising goal, we surpassed it, raising a massive $26,200 for the animals of WAG. We could not have done it without the support of our incredible communities, near and far.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts…

Brooke and Tracey Wade Foundation The Cleaver Family and Pepsi Co. The Beach, Whistler

Dylan Jones - Michael Spicer - Whistler Welding Services Ltd. - Franca Bebb - Denise Wood & Bandanas by Denise - Richard Moore - Merrilynn Morrison - Sarah Stead - ZiptrekEcotours - Dayna Holland Lynn Westwood - Sarah Passey - Anne Watson - Jane Finlayson - Sean Parrinder - Scott Keuling - Sandra Suckling - Mary-Anne Crevier - Glenn Allison - Sherry Klassen - Michele Ma - Bradley Sinclair - Janice Morning-Smith - Lorie Olynyk - Pauline Mullins Smith - Fred Cummings - Brian Wastle - Mark Tanner - Vicki Sanders - Mark Napier - Jennifer McLaren - Shannon Marler - Becky Biscuit’s Petcare - Johnathan Lunn - Cathy Beehan - Shannon Marler - Joan Hansen - Ellen Bartlett - Joanne MacLean - Stacey Taylor - Elizabeth McGregor - Zuzana Stevikova - Christie Scrase - Barbara Fulton - Alex Butz - Tammy Wreggit - Ida Garrett - Link-It Accounting Financial Services - Wendi and The Whistler Real Estate Co Ltd. - Laura Puckett - Jennifer Cole - Doug Forseth - Brent Morning-Smith - Stephanie Karpman - Douglas McCandless - AlevtinaGorbunova - Rolfe Benson Llp - Susan Frew - Laura McAlduff - Jess Prince - Jo Craft - Ron and Pam Mazza Joey Jeremiah - Claire Larkins - Terra Samson - Christie Paterson - Hudson Pond-Jones - Janet Pashleigh - Susan Holden - Karen Pashleigh - Mac Lowry - Janet Gosney - David Ricci - Cathy Dickison - Lewis Chinery - Bev Oakley - Nancy Bayly - Alison Jenkins - Seoyun Lee - Adrianna Di Segni James Mulligan - Laura Friedrich - Randy Winchell - Laura Funa - Danielle Goddard - Eric Scott Courtney Cline - Tindra Patterson - Marie Sheehan - Rachael Whittaker - Robyn Bosada - Miriam Wadge - Marie Sheehan - Kelsey Harder - Alison Obrecht - Brenda Chinn - Keith Murdoch - Irene Horvath - Andrea Symons - Alex Butz - Sarah Mazza - Vicki Romanin - Shannon Howes - Andrea Faught - Christopher Trothen - Elissa B - Katherine Smart - Elizabeth Clarke

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ROTARY CLUBS OF WHISTLER The Rotary Clubs of Whistler are now meeting virtually.

The Whistler Club Tuesdays at 3.

The Millennium Club Thursdays at 12:15.

Contact us at info@Whistler-rotary.org for log in info. All welcome.

The Pemberton Lions Club and Pemberton Rotary Club are looking for an event coordinator for this year’s Barn Dance on September 17, 2022. Applicant must show proven track record organizing live events, plus working with and coordinating volunteers. Preference shown for local individuals.

Competitive contract rate (depending on experience) plus new sponsorship incentives. If you are the right person for this role, let us know! pembertonlionstreasurer@gmail.com

CDA WANTED at

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Warehouse Lien Act

Notice is hereby given that on February 17th, 2021 at noon or thereafter the goods will be seized and sold.

MOVING AND STORAGE

Fantastic opportunity!

Contact: nancy@atwelldental.com

These vehicles are currently being stored at Cooper’s Towing Ltd 1212 Alpha Lake Rd, Whistler, BC, V0N 1B1

Services

For more information, please call Cooper’s Towing Ltd. @ 604-902-1930

We sell Norco, Giant, Kona and Devinci bikes and a wide range of parts and accessories.

Retail applicants should have relevant experience in bicycle or outdoor adventure retail.

Repair shop applicants should have at least one year of experience as a Bike Mechanic in a retail or rental setting.

Email us a resume whistlerbikeco@gmail.com www.bikeco.ca

Whereas the following registered owners are indebted to Cooper’s Towing Ltd. for unpaid towing and storage fees plus any related charges that may accrue.

1. Registered Owner: Dauphin Caroline Coulombe, 1998 Ford Escort VIN: 1FAFP10P0WW13898221 $2,713.20 2. Registered Owner: Ziya Emre Gurpinar, 2002 Toyota Corolla VIN: 2T1BR12E92C881951 $3091.20 3. Registered Owner: Colin Everett, 2007 Nissan Quest VIN: 5N1BV28U47N101046 $2272.20

Whistler's year round bike shop requires retail sales and repair shop staff for our busy spring and summer seasons.

www.whistlerwag.com

***Local Automotive*** Automotive technician for year round position in Whistler. 604-905-9109 steve@localautomotive.com

Squamish Personnel Solutions Full-time, part-time & temp jobs.

No cost, no strings. 604-905-4194 www.squamish-jobs.com

HEALTH & WELLBEING PHYSICAL THERAPY

big or small we do it all!

Call 604-902-MOVE www.alltimemoving.ca

Sally John Physiotherapy

EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES PIQUENEWSMAGAZINE.COM/JOBS

FOR LOCAL JOB OPENINGS

COVID-19 PRECAUTIONS TAKEN PRIOR TO APPOINTMENT DOUBLE VACCINATION REQUIRED

REGISTERED PHYSIOTHERAPIST

IN HOME PHYSIOTHERAPY AVAILABLE CUSTOM-MADE ORTHOTICS at competitive prices for ski boots & shoes, including training shoes.

17 years of making orthotics

‘Sally John Physiotherapy’ 2997 Alpine Cresent (Alta Vista)

(604) 698-6661

www.sallyjohnphysiotherapy.com

SPORTS & ACTIVITIES

Group Fitness Classes Thursday – Full Body HIIT @ 7:45-8:45 am w Anna Saturday – Zumba @ 10:30-11:30 am w Susie Monday – No Classes Family Day Tuesday – SPIN @ 5:45-6:45 pm w Alex

• Banquet Captains • Room Attendants • Barista • Casual Banquet Servers • Shipper/Receiver • Travel Perks and Benefits • Recognition and Rewards • Growth Opportunities

• Complimentary meal at work • Subsidized Staff Accommodation • Flexible Schedules

Wednesday – TRX MIXER @ 6:15-7:15 pm w Courtney

AVAILABLE ON STANDS IN THE SEA TO SKY

See our full page schedule ad in this issue of Pique for details

FEBRUARY 10, 2022

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EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES PIQUENEWSMAGAZINE.COM/JOBS

THE FIRST PLACE TO LOOK FOR LOCAL JOB OPENINGS

We are looking to hire some rad, adventurous humans to fill positions as:

BRIDGE CREW

NOW HIRING

and

RESTAURANT DIRECTOR Currently seeking a Restaurant Director to inspire and oversee the front-of-house team and deliver a unique, elevated guest experience.

PHOTOGRAPHERS Please send a copy of your resume and cover letter to: jobs@whistlerbungee.com

• Lead the delivery of an unforgettable culinary experience for guests • Provide leadership, development and motivation to the team to ensure guest experience is always paramount through consistent delivery of high-quality food and beverages • Oversee all day to day and event activity to ensure proper planning and execution • Minimum 8 years of experience in food and beverage industry • Minimum of 5 years of experience in a management role in food and beverage industry preferably within a similar venue

PLEASE SUBMIT YOUR RESUME TO: CAREERS@TOPTABLE.CA

is now hiring for

Assistant Maintenance Manager

This dynamic role includes the following Perks and Benefits:

• Full-Time, Year Round position • Competitive Wage and Benefits • Extended Medical Benefits • Supportive Executive Team Please reply with a cover letter and resume to hr@listelhotel.com

Thank you for your interest. Only those applicants being considered for an interview will be contacted.

RISE TO THE CHALLENGE YEAR ROUND OPPORTUNITIES We are a collaborative team with a passion for where we live and what we do. If you love Whistler’s unique mountain culture and want to join an innovative and supportive team, we are now hiring for the following opportunities:

GOLF MAINTENANCE OPPORTUNITIES Join the Whistler Golf Club Maintenance crew for the 2022 summer season!

The Golf Maintenance department is hiring for the following specialized positions:

• Facilities Engineer • Travel Consultant

• Irrigation Technician (Full Time, Seasonal)

• Visitor Centre Agent What we offer: a great schedule offering work-life balance, excellent benefits, and a positive team environment.

• Grounds Maintenance (Full Time & Part Time Seasonal)

What we’re looking for: individuals with a high level of enthusiasm and initiative, excellent communication skills, job knowledge and expertise, and a passion for Whistler.

TO VIEW OUR CAREER OPPORTUNITIES, AND TO APPLY, VISIT US ONLINE AT WHISTLER.COM/CAREERS.

52 FEBRUARY 10, 2022

• Volunteers (Seasonal) All positions require individuals who enjoy working outdoors, have golf experience, and the ability to deliver “Whistler’s Attitude”.

piquenewsmagazine.com/ local-events/

TO APPLY, PLEASE EMAIL YOUR COVER LETTER AND RESUME TO ANDREW ARSENEAULT: ANDREW@WHISTLERGOLF.COM.

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The Pinnacle Hotel Whistler has the following positions available:

ROOM ATTENDANTS Starting rate of $23 p/h

Please reply by email: parmstrong@pinnaclehotels.ca

THE FIRST PLACE TO LOOK FOR LOCAL JOB OPENINGS

UNLIMITED SEASON SKI PASS INCLUDED IN YOUR HIRING PACKAGE! we also provide our staff with: Competitive Wages, Health Benefits, Gratuities, Employee Discounts and Staff Housing

JOIN OUR TEAM

HIRING PROJECT MANAGER Please send resume to info@murphyconstruction.ca

Cooks, Dishwashers, Expeditors, Hosts

PLEASE SUBMIT YOUR RESUME TO: CAREERS@ILCAMINETTO.CA

We've Got You Covered VISITORS’ GUIDE 2017-2018 FREE

DOUG BUSH

EXCITING CAREER OPPORTUNITIES, APPLY TODAY!

SURVEY SERVICES LTD.

is looking for a

OFFICE ASSISTANT ADMINISTRATOR Part time Flexible hours. The applicant should have data entry experience and be detail oriented. Knowledge of Sage/Simply accounting, proficiency in Excel and Payroll experience an asset.

SURVEY FIELD TECHNICIAN:

with a two or three year college or technical school program in geomatics. Three years’ experience and Proficient in the use of robotic survey instruments and GPS equipment for engineering and building construction layout, topographic site surveys, site improvement surveys and precise monitoring.

Experience with AutoCAD Civil 3D also an asset to assist in office with computations and drawing preparation.

Please call Ian @ 604-932-3314 or email @ ian@dbss.ca #18-1370 Alpha Lake Rd. Whistler BC V0N 1B1 Serving Squamish, Whistler and Pemberton

Diamond Resorts Canada Ltd., Whistler, BC

Full Time Maintenance Manager Full Time Front Desk Agent Eligible successful candidates may receive* • Extensive benefits package which may include; ski pass or wellness allowance, disability coverage, travel insurance and extended health and dental.

• Travel Allowance and discounted employee rates at any Diamond Resort International resort.

• Full-time work year round and a FUN work environment. *eligibility and conditions based on DRCL policies and practices set out in general terms and conditions of employment.

Please note that Hilton Grand Vacations (HGV) acquired Diamond Resorts International (DRI) as of August 02, 2021. If you apply to work at a Diamond Resorts company you will be an applicant of a subsidiary of HGV. A transition to HGV will occur as we integrate technology, systems and branding but it will take time until our separate operating systems, employment policies and benefits are fully integrated. As a result, for a period of time, employees will receive correspondence and messaging from Diamond Resorts as well as from HGV and related entities.

For more information on this position or to submit your resume, please email: embarc_hr@hgv.com

FEBRUARY 10, 2022

53

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EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES PIQUENEWSMAGAZINE.COM/JOBS

THE FIRST PLACE TO LOOK FOR LOCAL JOB OPENINGS

UNLIMITED SEASON SKI PASS Included in your HIRING PACKAGE! we also provide our staff with: Competitive Wages, Health Benefits, Gratuities, Employee Discounts and Sta�f Housing

JOIN OUR TEAM Hosts, Server Assistants, Cooks, Dishwashers, Food Expeditors

Submit your resume to: elle.boutilier@araxi.com

Whistler Premier Resorts, Whistler’s leading property management firm is currently recruiting!

What We Offer You:

• Full Time Positions • Competitive Wages • • Discounted Ski Pass • Discounted Employee Rates • • Supportive Team Environment • Staff Housing • • Opportunities for growth & more • • Signing Bonus •

The current career opportunities are:

ROOM ATTENDANT GUEST SERVICE AGENT ROOM •ATTENDANT NIGHT AUDIT HOUSEMAN/INSPECTOR GUEST• SERVICE AGENT GUEST SERVICE NIGHT AUDIT • SUPERVISOR HOUSEMAN APPLY TODAY AT PEOPLE@WHISTLERPREMIER.COM

Resort ofofWhistler Resort Municipality Municipality Whistler Resort Municipality of Whistler

Employment EmploymentOpportunities Opportunities Employment Opportunities ·•·· Fire Legislative and Privacy Coordinator Lifeguard/Swim Instructor Legislative Coordinator Chief and Privacy

Lifeguard/Swim Instructor ·· ····Legislative and Privacy Coordinator Program Leader Instructor Skate Program •·Lifeguard/Swim Labourer I Leader - Facility Construction Management Capital Projects SkateHost Host ··•···Program Leader Lifeguard/Swim Instructor Wastewater Treatment Plant Supervisor Host Lifeguard/Swim Instructor Lifeguard/Swim Instructor ·Skate Wastewater Treatment PlantProcess Process Supervisor Solid Waste Technician ··•····Lifeguard/Swim Instructor Labourer I – Village Maintenance Solid Waste Technician Wastewater Treatment Plant Process Supervisor Program Leader - Myrtle Philip Community Centre Labourer I – Village Maintenance Accountant Youth and Services Specialist ··•····Solid Accountant Labourer IPublic – Technician Village Maintenance Custodial Guard YouthWaste and Public Services Specialist ·· Accountant Youth and Public Services Specialist Resort Municipality of Whistler Resort Municipality of Whistler whistler.ca/careers whistler.ca/careers Resort Municipality of Whistler

whistler.ca/careers

We’re Hiring!

Carpenters, Foreman, Project Managers

$1000 SIGNING BONUS BENEFITS, FULL TIME WORK ARE YOU LOOKING FOR A NEW CAREER IN CONSTRUCTION? WANT TO COME AND WORK FOR A GREAT TEAM WITH LOTS OF ROOM FOR CAREER GROWTH? APPLY TO CONNECT@TMBUILDERS.CA

Employment Opportunities:

Guest Services Agents Apply to: jobs@pembertonvalleylodge.com

Competitive wages, health benefits, casual environment 54 FEBRUARY 10, 2022

Be Your Own Boss • Pick your days as well as start/ finish times • 7 days/week available • Delivery is based on per package • Paid 4 hrs training provided • Average gross daily income based on 8 hrs is $200 (108 packages) or 14 packages/hr

Please reply to: joanjmr91@gmail.com

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THE FIRST PLACE TO LOOK FOR LOCAL JOB OPENINGS

We offer competitive wages, a unique environment, seasonal bonuses, staff discounts and benefits.

Ask about accommodation.

Come Grow Sport with us at our Whistler Olympic Legacy Venues

Whistler Athletes’ Centre (High-Performance Training & Accommodation) Guest Service Agent/Lodge Attendant

Whistler Olympic Park (Nordic Skiing, Snowshoeing & Outdoor Activities) Nordic Sport Instructor Maintenance & Operations Worker

Visit our website to view current postings and to apply: www.whistlersportlegacies.com/careers

WILD WOOD IS HIRING FOR ALL POSITIONS

We are a boutique events and lodging venue, located 15 minutes south of Whistler.

Our exclusive property has 35 guest rooms, unparalleled meeting spaces and vast produce and flower gardens, spanning over 20 acres.

Our unique west coast venue includes a farm to table restaurant, and we are committed to sustainable practices that include growing organic food & flowers. We are looking for passionate, hardworking and experienced growers to join us this season.

Landscape & Flower Farm Gardener Farmhand & Food Grower Apply to careers@thebrewcreekcentre.com

CONTACT bob@wildwoodrestaurants.ca TO APPLY

EVR Fine Homes is looking for exceptional people to join our team.

We are a proven leader in residential home and estate building in Whistler. We partner with the best architects, designers and trades in the industry. World class, custom projects require commitment and dedication from our partners and our team of craftspeople.

We have several significant projects currently in progress across Whistler and we are looking for individuals who are keen to build a rewarding career with a company that values quality workmanship.

We are currently hiring for Finish Carpenters, Carpenters, Apprentices, and Labourers.

EVR is committed to the long-term retention and skills development of our employees - we are only as good as our team. We are passionate about investing in the future of our workforce, and offer: • • • • •

Competitive Wages Apprenticeship Training & Tuition Reimbursement On-site Mentoring and Skills Development Extended Health and Dental Benefits Positive Work Environment

If you love what you do and have a desire to work on architecturally-beautiful and sophisticated custom homes while growing your career with a renowned Whistler builder, please get in touch.

You can send your resume to info@evrfinehomes.com and can view our work at www.evrfinehomes.com.

We look forward to hearing from you!

FEBRUARY 10, 2022

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THE FIRST PLACE TO LOOK FOR LOCAL JOB OPENINGS

DIRECTOR OF PEOPLE & CULTURE

As Westin Leaders, we rise to make each day better for our Associates, guests, and our communities. Every action we take or small gesture we perform helps to enhance the well-being of those around us, reinforcing our commitment to wellness inside our walls and beyond.

DISCOVER WHAT IT MEANS TO RISE Email resume to work@westinwhistler.com

Join our dynamic team at Whistler Dental!

Receptionist Wanted Certified Dental Assistant Wanted Registered Dental Hygienist Wanted Sterilization Assistant Wanted (No experience required)

Talent Wanted WHISTLER DENTAL 56 FEBRUARY 10, 2022

Send your resume and cover letter today: liz@whistlerdental.com Excellent compensation packages State of the art practice Learn, Lead, and, Grow With Us!

Vacasa's forward-thinking approach and industry-leading technology help set us apart as the largest full-service vacation rental company in North America.

We are seeking individuals with a passion for providing exceptional vacation experiences for our Owners and Guests.

We offer competitive remuneration and benefits: Travel allowance for Squamish and Pemberton-based employees OR Ski Pass/activity allowance, Extended Medical, RRSP match, Retention bonus, Recognition Program, Fun & Safe Work Environment-Great Team, opportunities to grow and more.

Vacasa Whistler is currently hiring:

Assistant Housekeeping Manager $55,000 per Year Apply online today! https://www.vacasa.com/careers/positions or email: paul.globisch@vacasa.com

We thank all applicants for their interest but only those selected for an interview will be contacted.

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Lil’wat Nation

THE FIRST PLACE TO LOOK FOR LOCAL JOB OPENINGS

ARE YOU A SELF-MOTIVATED INDIVIDUAL LOOKING TO GROW YOUR CAREER IN SQUAMISH?

Employment Opportunities • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Accounting Assistant Worker - Finance Administrative Assistant to Health Director Cultural Coordinator - Social Services Early Childhood Educator and/or Assistant - Daycare Early Childhood Educator Infant Toddler - Daycare Education Jurisdiction Coordinator - Xet’olacw Community School Elementary On-Call Teacher - Xet’olacw Community School Family Enhancement Worker Home Care Nurse RN or LPN Indigenous Support Worker Casual - Ts’zil Learning Centre IT Co-ordinator Kindergarten Teacher - Xet’olacw Community School Maintenance/Janitor- On Call Ts’zil Learning Centre Store Operations Manager – Tsi’pun Supermarket Part Time Janitor - Ts’zil Learning Centre Project Coordinator - Social Services Project Coordinator - Xet’olacw Community School

Benefits Pension Plan Employee Assistance Program Extended Health Benefits Professional Development Gym facility

DISTRICT OF SQUAMISH

Please visit our career page for more information: lilwat.ca/careers/career-opportunities-2/

Come be a part of our awesome team as The Squamish Chief’s new Media Account Manager.

If you don’t already live in Squamish, you should know it’s one of the most innovative and attractive communities on the West Coast just a short commute from the North Shore of Vancouver. It has a growing worldwide reputation for outdoor recreation with world-class mountain biking, rock climbing, water sports and skiing, boarding and the backcountry in the winter. We’re youthful, engaged and passionate about where we live!

And if you’re a local – well, you know you’re in the right place to forge a career and lucky to call Squamish home.

We’ve got an opportunity to work and truly be a part of this inspired community at its media hub, The Squamish Chief. We’re part of Glacier Media Group and Local News Network, the largest local digital network in Canada. We work with our clients to offer cutting edge solutions like programmatic, Social, SEO, sponsored content and community display advertising on our website – and yes, we reach customers through our trusted newspaper as well. We’ve got media opportunities covered.

WE ARE

HIRING General Manager of Community Services Regular Full-Time

Director of Public Safety Regular Full-Time Human Resources Advisor Regular Full-Time Municipal Engineer 1, Development Regular Full-Time Manager, IT Security and Infrastructure Regular Full-Time

Here’s what we’re looking for: • • • • •

You have sales experience and are comfortable making cold calls and setting up/ leading meetings with new and existing clients.

A self-starter with a consultative selling approach working with clients planning both digital and print advertising campaigns.

Building and maintaining client relationships with your exceptional communication skills comes easy to you.

You are a goal orientated individual with a positive attitude and a willingness to learn.

You possess strong organizational skills and have the ability to multitask in a fast paced environment.

Here’s the essentials of what we offer: • • •

Competitive salary + uncapped commission package.

Comprehensive health and dental coverage and extended benefits.

Extensive onboarding training and ongoing support.

Coordinator - Projects and Research Temporary Full-Time

Come join us!

Chief Operator Waste Water Treatment Plant Regular Full-Time

Please submit your cover letter and resume in confidence to Cathie Greenlees at: cgreenlees@squamishchief.com Closing date is February 18, 2022

squamish.ca/careers FEBRUARY 10, 2022

57

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EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES THE FIRST PLACE TO LOOK FOR LOCAL JOB OPENINGS

L

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AC

EL

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M B

B

PIQUENEWSMAGAZINE.COM/JOBS

ICOPTER

S

BLACKCOMB HELICOPTERS STORES ASSISTANT Job Location:

BHLP Pemberton Base - 1850 Airport Road, Pemberton B.C.

Status:

Full-Time Permanent Position

ABOUT US Blackcomb Helicopters is a well-established full service, multifleet helicopter company with rotary flight and maintenance services. We have bases in Squamish, Whistler, Pemberton, Sechelt, Lillooet and Vancouver.

Be a part of an amazing team as our newest Digital Account Representative!

We have a rare opportunity to work at one of Canada’s best-read online newsmedia companies, Glacier Media.

You will be part of the Pique Newsmagazine team, a division of Glacier Media. In your role you will consult with local businesses to offer cutting edge marketing solutions: programmatic, social media, SEO, sponsored content and community display advertising on our website and yes, we still reach customers through our trusted newspaper as well.

What we are looking for • • • • •

You are comfortable making cold calls and setting up/leading meetings with new and existing clients.

A self-starter with a consultative selling approach working with clients planning both digital and print advertising campaigns.

Building and maintaining client relationships with your exceptional communication skills comes easy to you.

You are a goal orientated individual with a positive attitude and a willingness to learn.

You possess strong organizational skills and have the ability to multitask in a fast-paced environment.

POSITION This position is part of the Aircraft Maintenance Department assisting in all areas that arise out of the day to day running of our helicopter operation. Duties include but are not limited to: assisting with inventory and counts, expediting parts for overhaul and repair, tracking incoming and outgoing freight, preparing reports on aircraft parts, organization and maintenance of stores rooms, input and transcription of technical records, maintenance of aviation software systems, and other duties as required.

QUALIFICATIONS • • • • • • •

Excellent accuracy with data input and extremely detail-oriented; Previous experience in the aviation industry a definite asset; Firm knowledge of Microsoft Excel and Word programs, as well as ability to learn new computer systems quickly; Excellent interpersonal skills and superior customer service skills; Strong organizational and time management skills; Ability to work collaboratively in a team environment with a great sense of humour; Legally able to work within Canada.

This is a position of approximately 40 hours per week, however, we will require flexibility in terms of days worked as weekend work may be required due to the nature of our business. We offer an excellent benefits package, RRSP matching, and a great work environment. Renumeration will commensurate with experience.

Note: Blackcomb Helicopters is federally regulated, therefore, proof of double vaccination is a condition of employment.

If you are interested in this position, please send your resume to attention to: Human Resources at stores@blackcombhelicopters.com noting Stores Assistant Application in your subject header.

What we offer • • •

Competitive salary + uncapped commission package.

Comprehensive / competitive group health and welfare benefits Extensive onboarding training and ongoing support.

Whistler has a worldwide reputation for outdoor recreation and boasts a vibrant village featuring restaurants, bars, retail and more. While this legendary resort is an international mountain sports mecca, it is also a down-to-earth mountain town, where community and culture have forged a unique environment. This opportunity offers you the chance to call a world-class ski hill you own—and if you are a local, well you know you’re in the right place to forge a career and lucky to call Whistler your home.

To apply, please submit your cover letter and resume in confidence to Susan Hutchinson, shutchinson@wplpmedia.com Closing date: Open until filled.

58 FEBRUARY 10, 2022

WE’RE HIRING FOR CONSTRUCTION HEAVY DUTY EQUIPMENT MECHANIC CIVIL CONSTRUCTION LABOURER/PIPE LAYER GRAVEL TRUCK DRIVER To apply: https://secure.collage.co/jobs/coastalmountain

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YOU’RE A KEGGER, YOU JUST DON’T KNOW IT YET!

NOW HIRING:

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To apply, email your resume to whistler@kegrestaurants.com or 2 come 3 in-person 7 Sunday – Thursday from 4:00pm-5:30pm 1 8 for an on-the-spot interview.

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7 8 4 9 6 4 3 WE ARE 2 LOOKING FOR: V. EASY

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WE ARE LOOKING FOR: MASSAGE COORDINATOR RESERVATION SUPERVISOR RESERVATION AGENT GUEST EXPERIENCE AGENT SPA EXPERIENCE AGENT NIGHT CLEANER

MASSAGE TECHNICIANS

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#7

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Answers 4 2 3 9 7 8 6 5 1

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2 6 5 8 9 7 3 1 4

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WHAT WE OFFER:

BATH MEMBERSHIP FOR YOU AND A FRIEND

BATHS MEMBERSHIP FOR YOU AND A FRIEND

STAFF HOUSING UPON AVAILABILITY

8 5 2 6 3 1 9 7 UPON 9 7 5 4STAFF 1 6 8HOUSING 3 6 1 7 9 8 2AVAILABILITY 4 5 1 2 9 8 7 4 3 6 4 6 1 3 5 7 2 9 3 9 4 2 6 8 5 1 send your resume to 2 4 3 7 9 5 1 8 hr.whistler@scandinave.com to apply 7 3 8 5 2 9 6 4 5 8 6 1 4 3 7 2

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send a cover letter and resume to hr.whistler@scandinave.com to apply FEBRUARY 10, 2022

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CALL THE EXPERTS

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BLINDS ETC.

BLINDS ETC.

SUNCREST WINDOW COVERINGS

WINDOW COVERINGS

BLINDS ETC.

Whistler’s Source for Blinds since 1989

Custom Blinds • Shades • Draperies

• BLINDS • SHADES

• SHUTTERS • DRAPERY

Connie Griffiths Tel: 604-935-2101 Email: windowcov@shaw.ca www.whistlerwindowcoverings.ca

Custom Window Treatments Contact us today for a free quote or consultation info@suncrestwindowcoverings.com

604.698.8406

CARPET CLEANING

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• Carpets • Upholstery • Tiles • Car Interiors

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www.blackbearcarpetcleaning.ca • 604 698 6610

Specialized in cleaning

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Western Technical System Inc

Book your in-home leen Consultation with Col today!

Coast Mountain Cleaning

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Our paint team has over 25 years combined paint sales experience, and we can help you get things right the first time. Now offering In Home Paint Consultations! Pemberton Valley Rona.

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Snow Finishings Limited

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Available for private viewings. Tel: 604-868-0117 7322 Old Mill rd, Pemberton,bc

Residential/Commercial Heat Pumps Boilers-Furnaces-Chillers Design Build Call us today! 778-994-3159 www.westerntechnical.net

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DOUG BUSH SURVEY SERVICES LTD DOUGLAS J BUSH AScT, RSIS p: 604-932-3314 c: 604-935-9515 Engineering & construction layout Topographic & site improvement surveys Municipal, volumetric & hydrographic surveys GPS - global positioning systems www.dbss.ca // dougb@dbss.ca

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Love, in Venice Horizontal support Mediterranean landmark Lawrence Welk tune Taj -Spreadsheet array Swig down heartily Laptop pictures Word processor command Kind of sprawl Conservative prefix 1980 fadmaker Designer Chanel Publicity Some choir members Oodles (2 wds.)

Without a doubt Garden path So long, in Soho (hyph.)

Sheathed with metal Pipe bend Winding curve Rashness Boat implement Dice throw Vanities Lemon peel Opposite of “paleo” Zoo building Caked-on dirt Not play fair Fresh Tenant’s contract Put the finger on Jerk Exactly like this (2 wds.)

3 1 9 2 5 7 9

65 67 68 69 72 73 76 79 80 81 82 84 85 87 91 92 93 94 95 98 100 101 102 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 118 120 121 122 123 125

6 7

127 129 131 133 136 137 138 139 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148

Spanish coins Wind-driven spray Cato’s bear Hair goos “Star Wars” rogue Defeat soundly Apartment, often Primate “Dr. Zhivago” role Compass dir.

Russian epic hero Sooner than Money manager Painter Pablo -Deckhand Italian wine city Become a donor Distribute Leisurely study Made a note Directed “Faust” character Geese relatives Wedding party member Behind bars Clapton or Sevareid Coddle Yeasty brew Raise to the third power Repast Hasty departure Pantry pest Lacking milk Cotton gin inventor Tyke Is, to Pedro Elevator developer Shirt size Greeted warmly

Display model Four duos Realtor Existence Cooking spice River in Europe Assuage Piano composition Have one’s say Units of length Firmed up, as muscles Plane parts Round numbers?

Furtive sound Root veggie Skybox locale

DOWN 1 2 3 4 5

8 2 5 3

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 20 22

1 9 2 8 9 9 5 6 1 4 8 3 7 2 8 4 5 6 7 2 8 4 1 V. EASY

#5

Band need Painter Chagall Akron’s home Foul-tasting “Crocodile Rock” composer -- John Bunghole’s place Waned Woeful cry High IQ group Social peers Gauzy fabrics Dapper Big hairdo Sea rover Of the eyes Gray wolf Grow together Question Elvis’ hometown Quickest

9

33 35 37 38 39 40 43 44 45 46 48 49 50 51 52 55 56 57 58 59 60 62 64 66 67 69 70 71 74 75 77 78 80 83 86 88 89 90 92

Fresh “-- Miserables” Oz. or tsp.

A fuel Rinse off Soprano’s rendition Wood for furniture Establishes in office Harper in “Far North” Vacillate (hyph.)

Part of a grove Humorist -- Bombeck Conjecture Spooky, maybe “The Prisoner of --” Small European vipers Doze Dishwasher phases Drive a semi More certain Part of NBA Within sight Verdict givers Wasn’t greedy Have a premonition Schmooze Ecol. police Stretch out Made warm Acid in lemons Technique Fragrant necklace Crowbar Ancient France Lightweight toy Corporate concern Grant territory Puccini work Styptic

6

7 5 6 3 9 4 1 8 4 9 4 8 5 3

96 97 98 99 100 101 103 104 105 107 109 111 112 113 116 117 118

Like Lex Luthor Not know from -A Peron Fjord port Overindulge Billy -- Williams Audit pros Superman alias Baja Ms. Brief Cushions Twice LI Wire gauge Compiled an index Game tile Rights a wrong Corrects a text

119 120 121 123 124 125 126 127 128 130 132 134 135 136 140

Most current Twisted up Tabloid staffer Moves a little Keeps on going Actor -- Reeves “Maria --” Fall guy Arab VIP Guy Mashed potato serving Dynamite detonator Perfect place Uncle’s offspring, slangily That, in Acapulco

LAST WEEKS’ ANSWERS

2 3 9 1 4 7 8 1 3 5 7 6 6

V. EASY

2 3 5 2 7

6

4 #6

Enter a digit from 1 through 9 in each cell, in such a way that: • Each horizontal row contains each digit exactly once • Each vertical column contains each digit exactly once • Each 3x3 box contains each digit exactly once Solving a sudoku puzzle does not require any mathematics; simple logic suffices.

LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: VERY EASY

7

1 2 3 5 6 9 5 3 9 8 7 6 4 2 1 3 4

8 6 3 2 4 1 9 5 7

7 1

8

4 2 5 8 3 9

V. EASY Solution, tips and computer program at www.sudoku.com # 7

4 2

5 2

3 1

7

8 6 1 7 4 1 8 4 3 8 6 7 9 3 9 2 5 2 9 5 1 7 8 4 9 6 4 3 2 V. EASY

#8

ANSWERS ON PAGE 59

FEBRUARY 10, 2022

61

MAXED OUT

The misguided fantasy of the ™ 2030 Olympics bid THE QUADRENNIAL extravaganza of wretched excess—sporting division—is in full swing in the country where everything we buy comes from. I mostly know that because, well, it’s pretty hard to avoid. Every newspaper, including this one, follows it hour-by-hour. There is nothing on our national broadcaster other than it, making it even easier to pretend CBC doesn’t exist.

And for two weeks, there seem to be sports other than hockey Canadians have a passing interest in.

But as uninterested as I am in the Olympics™, I’m pretty interested. Oh, not

BY G.D. MAXWELL the stuff happening in China. The stuff happening here; the misguided effort to bring the spectacle back to Vancouver and Tiny Town eight years from now.

Yes, the schemers and dreamers have ramped up the fantasy machine to try and land the 2030 Games™ back in Canada. But this time with a twist no sitting politician is likely to have a negative word about: The trial balloon floating over B.C. and the rest of the country is for an “Indigenous-led Games.”

The Canadian Olympic™ Committee (COC) inked a deal last week with four First Nations—Squamish, Lil’wat, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh—as well as Vancouver and Whistler mayors, to undertake a feasibility assessment and concept development necessary to put together a bid to host 2030.

As reported in Pique earlier this month, Musqueam Chief Wayne Sparrow explained, “We are only at the beginning of determining what an Indigenousled Games could look like, but through collaboration and mutual respect, we have the opportunity to create a unique Olympic legacy for all of our communities.”

Let’s set aside, for the moment, the notion of creating a unique legacy for all the communities involved. Let’s also set aside the obscene amount of money it would take to hold another circus here. Instead, let’s talk about fairness and smarts.

Canada held the summer Olympics™ in 1976 in Montreal. In November 2006, the residents of Montreal celebrated finally paying off the cost of those Games™, largely due to the Olympic™ Stadium—“the Big Owe”—that cost $1.4 billion dollars... against a “budget” of $250 million. But hey, that’s Montreal.

And, of course, Calgary hosted in 1988 and Vancouver/Whistler in 2010. Calgary’s turn was reported to be, at the time, one of the most costly Games™ ever held.

Vancouver’s bill was more but let’s not quibble. The fact is, the total cost of the

62 FEBRUARY 10, 2022

GETTYIMAGES.CA

Olympics™ is somewhere between the creative accounting reported by the host organization and the real cost.

And that doesn’t take into account the ongoing legacy costs of the white elephants left behind, like the Saddledome in Calgary.

Earlier this year, the city and owners of the NHL’s Calgary Flames pulled the plug on a cost-sharing plan to rebuild the arena with a budget of $600 million and rising. The costs to kill the project already totalled $20 million to $25 million.

So how smart would it be for Vancouver/ Whistler to throw their/our hats in the ring and hit replay? As outlined this week in the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Organizing Committee’s (VANOC) report that the games broke even is, to be generous, creative accounting that wouldn’t pass muster with generally accepted accounting principles.

VANOC conveniently omitted the $600

hopefully, we’re just ignoring millions.

Either way, real money.

And while it may be uncomfortable to think about, isn’t Canada being uncharacteristically hoggish about this potential bid? I mean, four Olympics™ in just over 50 years? Why not let some of the other countries that excel at the Games™ have a shot at it?

Looking at the medal standings early this week, Canada’s six medals are exceeded

by Norway’s eight, Austria’s and the Netherlands’ seven, and tied with Sweden’s six. It goes without saying those countries revel in their athletes’ Olympic™ success every bit as much as those of us who pay attention to such things do. After all, that’s one of the leading reasons people tout the Games™: National Pride!

But those countries have been smart about it. Norway has just hosted the Games™ twice, in 1952 and 1994. Austria

[H]ow smart would it be for Vancouver/Whistler to throw their/our hats in the ring and hit replay? million taxpayer dollars spent to build venues, the $900 million for security, and some other odds and sods. Nor did it include the $100-million haircut Vancouver took on its Olympic™ Village condo fiasco.

As Everett Dirksen once said about the much larger U.S. budget, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Except with the Olympics™,

has also hosted twice, in 1964 and 1976. The Netherlands once, in 1928! They tried to generate interest for the centennial in 2028, but neither Amsterdam nor Rotterdam gave a damn. Level-headed Sweden hosted in 1912 and withdrew its bid for the 2022 games.

What do those countries know that Canada doesn’t know? Yes, that is a

rhetorical question. Accept the invite, enjoy the dinner, save the cost of hosting yourself.

Let’s also ponder the question of what the four First Nations might do for themselves and the other First Nations with the dough it would require to mount 2030.

Even as out of the loop as I am, I can think of many more substantial and necessary community benefits the funds squandered on the Olympics™ might provide.

But if this notion gains any traction— and like I said, I don’t think there’s a politician of any stripe wanting to get re-elected who is likely to vote against it— here are the legacies I’d like to see Whistler get out of it.

First off, a four-lane highway from the Callaghan to Lorimer Road, the kind our Green Mafia declined to consider when goodies were being doled out for 2010. The only way we’re going to get more people out of cars is to have a bigger highway. What?

Yes. By four-laning the highway, we can have dedicated, exclusive bus lanes running both directions, maybe even bike lanes. The only way we’re going to get people out of cars is to make transit faster and easier.

Sitting in a bus in gridlock is not better than sitting in your own car in gridlock. Coupled with punitive day lot parking rates—think $50 with affordable, monthly locals rates— and a satellite parking lot at the Callaghan with a free, frequent, fast shuttle to the village, we might make progress with the every-morning-every-evening conga line.

Second, a new athletes village also to be repurposed as employee/seniors housing.

I’d like to see fair consideration of a fair proposal to site this on the Zen lands, across the highway from Spring Creek. Failing that, on half of the Palmer golf course.

Of course, I’d like to see the whole idea die a rapid death. But that seems unlikely. ■

Congratulations & Good Luck to our Local Olympians in Beijing!

You’re an inspiration to us all!

GO TEAM CANADA!!

SOLD

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604-932-7609

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Whistler Village Shop

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36-4314 Main Street · Whistler BC V8E 1A8 · Phone +1 604-932-1875

325-2063 Lake Placid Road · Whistler BC V8E 0B6 · Phone +1 604-932-1875

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whistler.evrealestate.com

whistler.evrealestate.com

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Engel & Völkers Whistler *PERSONAL REAL ESTATE CORPORATION ©2019 Engel & Völkers. All rights reserved. Each brokerage independently owned and operated. Engel & Völkers and its independent License Partners are Equal Opportunity Employers and fully support the principles of the Fair Housing Act.

604-966-7640

3D Tour - rem.ax/43glacier

#30 - 4375 Northlands Blvd.

$1,985,000

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Michael Nauss

2.5

604.932.9586

7580 Taylor Road

$999,000

This beautiful 1/3 acre property on the Pemberton Fringe allows for low taxes and access to municipal services. The current home has 3.5 bedrooms and 1 bathroom and the two story shop on the property allows for additional living space. This ideal location is close to the village of Pemberton and is prime for a new build.

Alexi Hamilton

3.5

604.935.0757

#43/43A - 4388 Northlands Blvd.

$1,650,000

Renovated 2 bedroom in Glacier’s Reach – located on the edge of Whistler, within walking distance to all the amenities of the Village and a short bus ride to the slopes. This ground level 2 bedroom offers the unique ‘lock-off’ option so that you can use/rent one side or both.

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2

604.905.6326

#602 - 4050 Whistler Way

Anastasia Skryabina

$314,000

604.902.3292

#57 - 4510 Blackcomb Way

.5

#353 - 4340 Lorimer Road

604.932.8629

9361 Wedgemount Plateau Dr.

1.5

$1,350,000

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Ann Chiasson

3D Tour - rem.ax/353marketplace

$3,850,000

$1,499,999

Nestled between Whistler Village and Upper Village, #57 Gables is steps to Whistler and Blackcomb Gondolas and the Whistler Bike Park. Split over 2 levels, this lofted 1.5 bedroom has high vaulted ceilings with lots of windows inviting in an abundance of natural light, and is ready for your creative touch!

Ursula Morel*

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3D Tour - rem.ax/1565khyber

1565 Khyber Lane

3D Tour - rem.ax/57gables

604.932.7651

3D Tour - rem.ax/208snowbird

$885,000

#208 - 4865 Painted Cliff Rd

$149,000

This One-Of-A-Kind Mountain Home is located in the exclusive Spring Creek residential neighborhood and shows off its quality with soaring vaulted ceilings accented with large heatsaving low e windows. The open floor plan and large deck invite you to enjoy a cozy feeling while entertaining or just relaxing at home.

This beautiful and updated 1 bedroom unit is conveniently located in Whistler’s Marketplace Lodge. It’s own private sundeck enjoys views of Whistler Mountain and is within walking distance of Whistler’s shops, restaurants and ski lifts. After a great day on the slopes, relax in the jetted hot tub or cozy up next to your gas fireplace.

Owning a 1/10th share in the 1350 square ft condominium on the Benchlands near Blackcomb is great way to insure that you family has year round access to Whistler and an Ownership position that will last in perpetuity. Each year you have access to 2-3 ski weeks and/ or 2 or more summer weeks.

Bruce Watt

Dave Beattie*

Dave Sharpe

4

604.905.0737

3D Tour - rem.ax/325springs

#325 - 4899 Painted Cliff Rd.

$475,000

604.902.2033

1

604.902.2779

2

3D Tour - rem.ax/305fourseasons

A popular winter and summer location slopeside to Blackcomb Mountain. #325 Blackcomb Springs Suites is an extra large 485 sf studio suite that also has an oversized balcony. Fully equipped for your personal use or nightly rental through a fairly recent takeover with Clique Hotels.

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604.905.8855

.5

#305/306 - 4591 Blackcomb Way

$1,625,000

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If you are a home owner, buyer, tenant, landlord, or small business in need of help during this time, please see our updated list of resources at: remax-whistler.com/resources

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2

#233 - 4350 Lorimer Road

$1,479,000

A bold design and functional floor plan is sure to amaze, as you walk through the home you’ll notice all the modern fixtures and Whistler style flares which will leave you with a bit of wow. And then…. A glimpse of those unparalleled FOREVER VIEWS of the ski mountains over Olympic Plaza will leave you realizing that you never want to leave.

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604.905.8777

1.5

PEMBERTON OFFICE 1411 Portage Road, Pemberton, BC V0N 2L1 604.894.6616 or Toll Free 1.888.689.0070