Tag Archives: Sea to Sky Highway

Best in Snow – The Volkswagen Beetle

Posted on November 8, 2022 | 1 comment

Snow tire season is upon us! Even through snowy and icy conditions you will see all types of vehicle tackling the Sea to Sky Highway today. Fifty years ago, however, one car dominated the snow, and that was the Volkswagen Beetle.

In the 1960s, Volkswagen touted the VW Beetle as the best car for driving in the snow, and North America listened. In one famous commercial a Beetle is seen driving through snowy conditions. The narrator asks “Have you ever wondered how the man who drives the snowplow, drives to the snowplow? This one drives a Volkswagen, so you can stop wondering.”

George Benjamin’s Volkswagen Beetle on Alta Lake. George Benjamin Collection.

At this time, most American-made cars were rear-wheel drive and had their heavy engines at the front, resulting in little weight over the drive wheels and thus less traction. Despite also being rear-wheel drive, the Beetle did better in the snow because the engine was also in the rear, giving the drive wheels more traction for slippery conditions. Somewhat surprisingly, the narrow wheels also seemed to help because the Beetle cut through the snow rather than riding on top.

In 1965, Cliff Jennings bought his 1957 Beetle before heading out west to Alta Lake. It was not a straight forward journey. “When I arrived in Vancouver, nobody had heard about this new area, so I just headed blindly north. Two hours later, in Squamish I got directions and headed up a steep gravel road, arriving eventually at a dead end with a trailhead signposted to Diamond Head. Back in Brackendale, I hung a right and headed blindly north again on what would now be called a 4×4 road. The first sign of civilisation was Garibaldi and Daisy Lake Dam, which the road proceeded over onto a detour around Shadow Lake through huge puddles that nearly drowned my Beetle. Finally, five hours after leaving Vancouver, I arrived at a big slash clearing and a swampy parking lot in pouring rain.” Cliff had made it to the ski resort!

The Volkswagen Beetle is a little harder to recognise in this photo. George Benjamin Collection.

Jim Moodie arrived in Whistler a few months later once the lifts had opened, also driving up in his Volkswagen Beetle. “People remark about the road being bad nowadays but the road then, a lot of it was gravel, and so it was a frightening experience if we were smart enough to think about it but we mostly didn’t. I can remember one day driving up and the car simply stopped moving forward. At least that’s what we thought had happened. When we got out to see what was happening the Volkswagen Beetle was just plowing up a great big snowdrift in front of it so we couldn’t go anymore.” Good in the snow, but not quite a snowplow.

The imagery of the Volkswagen Beetle was so connected to mountain towns that Whistler Mountain’s 20th Anniversary poster featured a red Volkswagen Beetle driving off into the sunset. In the iconic Whistler poster the car is covered in stickers with skis jammed into the bumper.

The iconic 20th Anniversary poster. Whistler Mountain Collection.

With many people sharing similar memories, it is no wonder the photographs of Volkswagen Beetles in the snow are popular prints at the Whistler Museum. You can see some of the Whistler Museum image collection on Smug Mug.

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Posted in From the Archives, Mountain Culture, Museum Musings, Whistler: A Town

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Highway to (Powder) Heaven

Posted on February 15, 2022 | Leave a comment

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.

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. Janet Love Morrison collection.

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 Lifts Company gave a single ski to the then-Minister of 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.

Crossing creek on the road to Alta Lake (now known as Whistler), south of Pinecrest. Before the highway, numerous creek crossings meant access via car was not possible at many times during the year. Janet Love Morrison collection.

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 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 banks to let the smaller car squeeze by. Revellers 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.”

Even the good sections of road were rough and hard on vehicles. This photo was taken prior to the highway near Pinecrest. Janet Love Morrison collection.

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 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!

Narrow road through Cheakamus Canyon. Janet Love Morrison collection.

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A Harrowing Journey to Whistler

Posted on February 1, 2022 | 1 comment

For many people, their first impression of Whistler begins with a trip up Highway 99 from Vancouver. Depending on the time of year and the weather, this can be anything from an inspiring journey with spectacular views to a frustrating slow-moving slog through traffic to a harrowing experience sharing the road with drivers unprepared for snowy conditions. For Lynn Mathew’s mother, her first impressions were closer to the last.

Lynn’s mother had already visited the west coast before her first visit to Whistler; when Lynn and David Mathews first moved out to Vancouver from Quebec in the 1960s, both her parents came out to see their new home. At the time, Lynn’s mother had never been in an airplane and didn’t particularly want to be in one, so she boarded a bus in New York and three days later Lynn’s father boarded a plane. Lynn picked up her father at the airport and then together they drove to Vancouver’s bus station to collect her mother. A year or two later, when Lynn had her first child in November 1967, her mother got on her first plane and ventured out to visit her new grandson in Whistler.

With snow on the road, Highway 99 could easily become a treacherous, one-lane route. Laforce Collection

She arrived the day after her grandson was born and, until that day, there had been no snow in the Whistler valley. David picked her up at the airport and they stopped at the Squamish hospital where Lynn and the baby were staying the night. While they were there, it began to snow in Squamish. David, who had the lift company truck, suggested that they leave before it snowed too much. When they returned to collect Lynn and the baby the next day, she got to hear about their adventures driving up to Whistler.

The highway between Squamish and Whistler today is very different from that of 1967 but, as Lynn put it, “the hill at Daisy Lake is still there.” She described this section at the time as “a very narrow hill with no shoulders, and very steep.” Though there wasn’t a large number of cars traveling up the highway, many of those that were encountered difficulties getting up that hill. By the time David and Lynn’s mother got to the hill, there were cars off the side of the road, some of them leaning towards the cliff. As they told Lynn, it was fortunate that no cars ended up in the lake.

Prior to the development of Whistler Mountain in 1965, the “roads” were in even more questionable condition. MacLaurin Collection.

David and Lynn’s mother came across a couple on their way home to Pemberton whose car was “definitely in the ditch.” Despite the fact that the bench in the lift company truck would only comfortably fit three, David and Lynn’s mother offered the couple a ride as far as Whistler, where they could arrange for friends to pick them up. The four of them squished into the truck and zigzagged up the hill between the cars stuck on the sides.

As it happened, one of the people they had picked up was from Norway, not too far from where Lynn’s mother was from. The two had a great visit as David drove them safely through the snowy conditions to Whistler. The next day, David and Lynn’s mother returned to Squamish to bring Lynn and the baby home to Whistler.

It continued to snow steadily in the area and, according to Lynn, “My mother wasn’t sure just what I had moved to.” This sentiment was echoed by David’s mother when she came out to visit from Quebec in January 1968, a visit that involved a lot of snow, a power outage, and an evacuation by snowcat to the Ski Boot Motel, but that’s a story for another day.

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Whistler’s Silver Book

Posted on November 17, 2020 | Leave a comment

When talking about the creation of the Resort Municipality of Whistler in 1975 and the early development of the Whistler Village through the 1980s, one of the documents that is often mentioned is the “Silver Book,” also known as the Community Development Study for the Whistler Mountain Area.  The Silver Book was put together in 1974 by the Planning Services Division of the Department of Municipal Affair of BC and contained a study of the current state of the area, thoughts on potential growth, and a recommended framework for creating both a short and long term community development plan.  The report was a key factor in the formation of the RMOW and was one of the first documents to recommend a single-centred Town Centre on the site of the garbage dump.

The aptly named “Silver Book”

The Silver Book also, included plans for residential development, infrastructure such as sewer and water systems, further recreational development, and transportation both to and within the area.  Reading through the report, it is clear that some of the transportation woes experienced by Whistler in the past few years are similar to those thought of back in 1974.

At the time, almost all travel between Whistler and Vancouver was done by private automobiles on the two lane highway.  According to the report, “At peak times, particularly winter Sunday evenings, traffic on the highway is almost bumper to bumper.”  The capacity of the highway in winter conditions was calculated to be about 500 vehicles per hour, but with many skiers arriving and leaving at the same time the traffic slowed to a crawl.

Snowy winter days could already lead to backed up traffic exiting the Whistler Village by 1984. Whistler Question Collection.

The idea of building a new road with a different route to Whistler was dismissed as too expensive at $80-100 million (adjusted for inflation, $400-500 million), as was a proposal to expand the existing highway significantly.  Using rail to expand transport capacity was considered, but it was concluded that the railway, designed for moving freight, “does not lend itself to the operation of high-speed passenger trains.”  A weekend ski-train was proposed but this would have removed only 600 skiers per day from the road.  Though increased bus service was expected to provide only a modest increase in capacity, it was considered the most effective solution.

Buses were also an important part of the transportation plan within the Whistler area.  The community was expected to develop in a linear fashion along the highway and be “somewhat sprawling.”  The plan for a single Town Centre meant that municipal and commercial services would require traveling outside of the different subdivisions, which, if all trips were taken in a private automobile, could lead to excessive traffic noise, air pollution, and “aesthetically inappropriate large-scale parking lots” at the Town Centre.  Instead, the recommendation was to develop an efficient public transport system within the valley.

A bus picks up skiers at the Gondola base, today known as Creekside. Whistler Question Collection, 1979.

The Silver Book outlined several ways of encouraging the use of public transport, but only one was marked “not workable” by the donor of one copy in our collections: toll gates and restricted parking.  The idea was that toll gates at the north and south ends of Whistler would encourage visitors to take a bus or train, while residents could apply for an annual windshield sticker that would allow them through.  These “stickered” vehicles would, however, not be allowed to part at the Town Centre during peak periods, thereby “forcing” residents to use buses and reducing the size of parking structure needed.

The Silver Book provides an interesting look at what the Province thought Whistler could become from the early 1970s.  Some of the plans and predictions of the report (such as the linear development) have been realised while others either have never come to fruition (toll gates) or have far exceeded these early plans.

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