Lisa Richardson Bylines

Travellers’ Law number 2 : “Get the scoop from locals” comes close second in global-hobo advice lore after Rule #1 : trust the universe. Or as Robin Esrock leads off, in his rules for the Gonzo Traveller - Never turn down a free drink.

Everyone who has been either a traveller, a guest or a local knows that the official sanctioned tourist information has nothing on the low-down from an insider. It’s the reason that Maui Revealed is the only book ever banned at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park Visitor Center for being “too honest” and “revealing too much” – locals like to share their secrets at their discretion, randomly bestowing nuggest of beta like a ego-primed God. (Cue King Lear: Worthy. Not worthy. Oh, compliments for me? Worthy…)

Freeskier mag has introduced a new section, Local Beta on ski hills around North America. I mapped some Whistler hotspots for their December issue, and while I’m not likely to get banned for raciness in dishing out local dirt (Stephen Vogler has the stranglehold on that claim to fame) or scolded for revealing secret powder stashes (Brian Finestone and Kevin Hodder did that already), I am more than happy to landmark some of the indie businesses that are busting their asses to make Whistler a unique place. Honestly, people, Starbucks? Esquires and Second Cup have just pulled mysterious vanishing acts… but why not Beetroot Cafe, Quinny’s, The Lift Coffee Company, Gone Bakery, Moguls, Java at Nesters, Cracked Pepper at Function Junction, Hot Buns, La Bocca cafe, even Pasta Lupino…  You could even go further afield and check out Onatah Coffee in Squamish and Mt Currie Coffee Company in Pemberton… You could get your coffee in ice-cream format with Lucia’s Espresso gelato… but Starbucks?  Why even bother leaving home?

We come back to Robin Esrock, Gonzo Tip #7: Never, ever eat food in a MacDonalds, Burger King, KFC, Pizza Hut etc etc (Using their bathrooms however, are OK).

When my brother and I were kids, we weren’t ever given cold and flu medication.  Our dad was a pharmacist… a pharmacist who pimped litres of sugar syrup during cold and flu season believing it was the biggest rort on the planet. It drove him nuts to be asked by earnest customers, “Well, which of those 60 different cough syrups is better for my dry hacking insomnia-inducing cough?” when what he really wanted to say was, “They’re all equally useless.”  But they wanted a recommendation from an expert, so he’d smooth down his white pharmacist’s jacket and randomly select a bottle from the shelf. My dad, the modern day snake-oil salesman.

I’m not a high-risk category for H1N1, so haven’t rolled up my sleeve to be innoculated yet, although I’ve been mainlining Happy Planet Immunity shots (which were deployed to excellent effect during the TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival this April), thinking, “well, it can’t hurt…” (and it helps that the Happy Planet  immunity boost involves no needles and tastes like the blackcurrant cough syrup I never did get to sup on.)

But on a recent tour of the Pacific Sport Centre in Whistler, which I visited for an article for Mountain Life in which I attempted to become superhuman, I discovered that Canadian athletes have been on a government-sanctioned doping program.  Not wanting to blow any Own the Podium Top Secret special advantages, I sat on the information… but here’s what I discovered. Canadian Olympic athletes have been doping themselves with free caseloads of Cold FX.

The national team is sponsored by Cold FX and the athletes are provided two tablets a day, to take like a vitamin, for prophylactic measures.

Weird, that  a sporting showcase with an anti-doping commission would not just have an Official Supplier relationship with a pharmaceutical company, but would pronounce Cold FX the 2010 Olympic Games’ official cold and flu remedy, and would encourage athletes to pop the pills by the handful.

Maybe my dad was right. Snake oil salesman make millions. Every one wants to feel that they have a special booster in their wellness arsenal. And ultimately, believing it pretty much makes it so.

It’s February 1996 and a high-pressure system has locked over Whistler and Squamish.  My brother and I pile into my husband’s old Volvo and navigate the narrow winding highway for a day of down-clad rockclimbing. The highway’s canyon walls press so tightly against us that in places I suck in my breath.

I’m driving, which proves what a high capacity for adrenaline my brother has. A dented looking box suddenly appears in the middle of the road and I plough straight through it.

“Oooh, you don’t want to do that,” says my brother.

“Why not?”

“Well, you don’t know what’s in the box. It could be full of wood scraps and nails.”

“Uh-huh.” I’m non-plussed.

He changes tack. “Or, it could have been full of kittens.”

“Oh my god! I could have killed a boxful of kittens!”

This past weekend, the Globe and Mail announced “the end of the killer road”, calling the Sea to Sky highway’s facelift the “greatest legacy of the 2010 Olympic Games.”

Paul Mathews said the same thing when I interviewed him for this winter’s Kootenay Mountain Culture article on Olympic hangovers.   Mathews is a mountain resort planner with extensive experience designing venues for Olympic Games and has been masterplanning for Whistler Blackcomb since 1975. He recently admitted to Pique’s Michel Beaudry that his company’s tactics helped “shrink the mountains”.

Those mountains have not just shrunk, but have bungeed closer to the city, with the five-year, $600 million highway upgrade speeding up the drive. 

Mathews told me: “The highway is something we could never have gotten without the Olympics. People didn’t like Whistler because it was for the rich, but that road was getting slower and more dangerous. It took more than three hours to get to the airport. You can’t say enough to what it means to the tourism infrastructure of the future. We would never have gotten a new highway in Whistler. That’s the real legacy from these Games… and that we didn’t build anything stupid, like an open air sledge hockey arena in a town where it rains all winter.”

After talking to both Mathews and anti-Olympic activist Chris Shaw, it became obvious that the Olympics isn’t a sporting platform at all. It’s a catalyst for dramatic urban development, because the scale of the event and the pressure of the deadlines fast-track the approval and the financing for massive public infrastructure projects.

So we got a new highway. Which hopefully will be safer - for drivers and kittens.

The Gourmand World Cookbook Awards have been variously described as the cookbook Olympics or “a sort of Nobel prize for cookery writers.”

As if James Walt hasn’t enough accolades in his apron, he gears up for the Winter Olympic season with his newly released Araxi: Seasonal Recipes from the Celebrated Whistler Restaurant having just won the Gourmand World Cookbook Award for Best Chef Book in Canada. 

The objective of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards is to “honour those who cook with words.”  More tellingly, the awards aim to help book retailers find the 50 food and wine books out of the 26,000  published each year worth putting on the shelves. 

Araxi will now be entered in the Gourmand Best in the World competition. They may bring home the first gold medal of the season. The Gourmand Best in the World competition results will be announced at the Paris Cookbook Fair on February 11th, 2010, just 2 days before the launch of 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

I can’t read cookbooks.

I’m illiterate when it comes to technical directions.

But Araxi: Seasonal Recipes from the Celebrated Whistler Restaurant currently has pride of place on my bedside table. Call it high-class gastroporn.

I interviewed Araxi’s Executive Chef, James Walt, a few years ago for a series of Chef Profiles that ran in Whistler the Magazine. (I always thought the gig should come with free dinners – after all, the plate tells the chef’s story best, right? Alas, noone ever offered.)

Walt was just back from a stint in Italy, working as Guest Chef to the Canadian Ambassador at the consulate in Rome, and reacclimatising to his hometown.

Walt’s ethos has always been to cook seasonally, using only the freshest local ingredients. But the Italians take that to a whole different level. There, produce was so fresh it had to be purchased daily, the gamebirds were still feathered, eggs were individually stamped with the date they were laid, and olive oil was used within 6 months of pressing. Until that point, Walt hadn’t really followed Italian cuisine. “It seemed so simplistic.”

His new cookbook strives for simplicity – translating menus that normally cater to the restaurants peak season, so they work for the household cook. And the result is exquisite.

It’s also a love song to Pemberton, where all the restaurant’s senior staff reside. Which isn’t really a surprise to those who know the town is home to a back to the land rennaissance of kitchen gardeners, small plot organic farmers, Quebec treeplanters who dry their own food, passionate multi-generation growers, and innovative beef farmers who aren’t afraid to admit that they love their happy cows.

I got married at twenty. It was spur of the moment, and we really didn’t care about the details. Flowers, rings, fuss, whatever. At the time, I couldn’t think of anything worse than having a room full of people scrutinising me while I tried to fake them out that I was really a princess.

But now I live in a town with hitching posts. Where I lean my bike against the local cafe, others loop their horse’s reins over the hitching post, duck 10 gallon hats under the doorframe and stomp inside.

That, plus two summers of attending amazing local weddings, got me thinking about getting hitched in the Land of Hitching Posts, so I embarked on a 100 Mile Wedding research project for Tourism Pemberton.  This place offers so many options for vow-taking, be you anti-bride or full of Pride, catering with potluck contributions or willing to make literal your  Leap of Faith (see paragliders, Pemberton.)

Leap of faith. Tying the knot at Pemberton's paragliding launch. Photo by Corinne Stoltz Orava.

Whistler photographer, Anastasia Chomlack, has shot several Pemberton weddings, including one last summer that took place after the rockslide closed the highway. Family from England and Iceland took the long way around, detouring 5 hours via Lillooet, or flying in by float plane, to make it to “the church” on time. The groom handily whipped up the wedding arbor, and the family spent the morning at North Arm farm picking flowers to decorate it.

Pemberton Valley Vineyard hosts a P-town style wedding. Photo by Anastasia Chomlack.

Anastasia Chomlack captures Nate and Kim by One Mile Lake

The average cost of a wedding in Canada is apparently between $20,000 and $30,000 – higher if you’re hitching up in Toronto, or flying your flowers in to Whistler from Holland, as one “high-flyer” did… Nude weddings are apparently a lot cheaper.

Or you could keep it local. All the way to the bar.

After all, a town with hitching posts it is the perfect place to get hitched.

My husband bought me a tshirt that says, “Work is forever. Snow isn’t.”

Manifestees are a fashion staple in ski towns, and The Escape Route’s “Quit work, buy some stuff, go somewhere, have some fun” is an ethos the store has been promoting for 20 years.

When I talked to owner, Jayson Faulkner, about the store’s 20 year history, for this Mountain Life story, he remembered fielding angry phone calls from upstanding citizens, reaming him out for his lack of civic responsibility.

But Faulkner practiced what he preached, and he considered the message a public service announcement. He’d found himself at those crossroads before opening the store and is walking proof that if you follow your heart, the path will open up.

“I was working for a merchant bank in London,” he says, “turned thirty, and had a kind of life crisis.”

The future behind door number one: become a suit.

“I’d read a book that said, choose close to your dream, so I asked when am I happiest? It’s not commuting on the underground. It’s when I’m outside and in nature.”

It had been a couple of years since the BC boy had been to Whistler, so he called up an old schoolmate, who was manager of Canski on Seymour Street in Vancouver, Tom Duguid. “I said, ‘Hey. I have an idea. Are there any outdoor stores in Whistler?’”

“Only the Mountain Shop.”

“Can you get climbing equipment?”

“Not really.”

“So here’s my idea. Why don’t we open an outdoor shop?”

They pooled their savings, coming up with about $12,000 each. Borrowed some money from Tom’s mom. And secured the store space.

Then, they faced their next hurdle. They had no stock. And they had no idea where to get any.

“There was no outdoor retailer trade show. There were hardly any reps. You bought out of a catalogue. Then fortunately, a month before we opened, a shop in Squamish, the Alpine Shop, owned by Greg Foweraker, was going under. We got word about it. Greg was in Australia climbing. We called him and offered to buy everything in the store. Cash register, racks, stock, everything. Greg was in some trouble, so he said: Sold. We got everything for maybe less than 25c on the dollar.  We had one or two of everything, so if you sold one item, there was just a bare spot on the wall. And we didn’t know where to get new stock.”

They bullshitted their way into becoming Patagonia dealers – going through old catalogues and calling up to place orders. Says Patagonia HQ, “We don’t actually have you on file.” Answer: “Really? Well, we’re your dealer here in Whistler.”

Every year, the store serves people who are reinventing themselves. Like the 40-something senior VP of a major Toronto brokerage who had a heart attack at work.

“As they were pulling him out to load him into the ambulance, they pushed someone else into his chair so they wouldn’t lose any trades.” Cue ephipany.  ”He thought: well what the fuck am I doing here if I am that replaceable.”

He quit work. He and his wife moved to Whistler. He came into the store, utterly stoked because he’d just been hired on at the mountain as a liftie.

“There are a lot of stories like that,” Faulkner reminisces about 20 years in the business. “It’s one of the things I love about Whistler. It’s part of our mojo.”

It’s the place people come to find themselves. For the first time. Again. Reinhabiting their skin.

How you do write the story of Whistler, in 1500 words of less?

Given the chance to write the Whistler feature for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Souvenir Program, the only option was to offer readers a bullet-train journey across well-travelled ground, slowing occasionally to wave at contemporary Whistlerites, which gave rockstar-photojournalist Bonny Makarewicz a platform to shoot photos that are in themselves worth another 1000 words or so, like these of Whistler’s elder statesman Garry Watson, or brothers Michael and Peter (YP) Young.



YP and Michael’s old man, Sid, spearheaded the ’76 bid.  Classic examples of Whistler’s “came for a season” method of recruiting new residents, YP decided to spend a winter at the family cabin in ’72, when he was 17. He’s still here, running the Whistler Blackcomb Events department. Brother Michael followed the next year, and he’s still here too.

My husband is barely out the door five minutes when the phone rings.

“Are you calling to make sure I didn’t just go back to bed?” I ask. I am a writer. Such things do happen. It’s not as if I need to punch the clock at 8am to get my work done.

“No. I just passed One Mile Lake and saw a family of four swans.”

Fawns, I think he says. This fits my fantastical Disney-on-acid take on the world as well as anything.

I clarify, “A family of fawns is swimming across the lake?”

“Swans! Swans, baby. There are swans swimming in One Mile.”  There’s snow on the highway, huge puddles in the ditches, swans on the lake.

This is the place I live.

I knew it was my happy place the day a cowboy rode past me and asked “Which way to the beach?”

This fall, I worked with a crew of wickedly talented local writers, including Katherine Fawcett, Natalie Langmann and Todd Lawson,  to string a few story jewels on Tourism Pemberton’s baubly new website. “Some people mistakenly think it’s just a bedroom community,” wrote Susan Reifer, urging folk to discover the unexpected. “Others mistakenly think it’s one big potato farm. In fact, Pemberton is a hidden gem.”

It’s a place where deer could take a dip by the highway and I wouldn’t bat an eye. It’s good to call it home.