The marmots named it first
The mountain was called London Mountain on early survey maps, which tells you everything about the imagination of colonial cartographers. The name that stuck came from the hoary marmots that live above the treeline and produce a piercing, high-pitched whistle that carries across the alpine bowls. You will hear them if you hike above 1,500 meters. They sound like someone trying to get your attention from very far away, and in a sense that is exactly what happened: the whistling named the mountain, and the mountain named the town.
Before any of that naming, the valley belonged to two nations. The Squamish (Sk̲wx̲wú7mesh) and the Lilʼwat have inhabited this territory for thousands of years, using it as a hunting ground, a fishing corridor, and a trade route between the coast and the interior plateau. The resort village sits on their shared traditional lands, a fact that went largely unacknowledged for most of the twentieth century. The Squamish Lilʼwat Cultural Centre, which opened in 2008, addresses this directly. The building itself is the statement: one wing shaped as a Coast Salish longhouse, the other as an Interior Salish Istken, the semi-subterranean pit house. Two architectural traditions under one roof, built by the peoples whose territory you are standing on.
A Norwegian and a gondola
Franz Wilhelmsen was a Norwegian-born Vancouver businessman who looked at London Mountain in the early 1960s and saw what a Scandinavian would see: a ski area. He co-founded the Garibaldi Lift Company in 1960 and spent five years building access. The first lifts opened for the 1965–66 season. Blackcomb Mountain opened separately in 1980 under Fortress Mountain Resorts, and for nearly two decades the two mountains operated as rivals sharing a single village — competing on vertical drop, lift speed, and terrain count with the kind of intensity that only adjacent competitors can sustain.
The rivalry ended when Intrawest merged both under one pass in 1997. Vail Resorts acquired the whole operation in 2016. But the dual-mountain geography still defines the place. You ski or ride one mountain in the morning and cross to the other after lunch, and the crossing itself — the PEAK 2 PEAK Gondola — is one of the more remarkable pieces of engineering you will encounter anywhere.
Suspended between two mountains
The PEAK 2 PEAK opened in December 2008, connecting Whistler Mountain to Blackcomb at roughly 1,427 meters of elevation. At opening it held three world records: the longest free span between ropeway towers at 3.024 kilometers, the highest point above ground at 436 meters, and the longest unsupported lift span of any kind. Each cabin carries up to 28 passengers. Two of the cabins have glass floors, so you can look straight down at the valley 436 meters below while moving at cruising speed between two peaks.
The engineering challenge was not just the span but the wind. The cable stretches across the Fitzsimmons Valley, which funnels weather between the two mountains. The system uses a tri-cable design — two track ropes and one haul rope — to maintain stability in conditions that would shut down a conventional gondola. The ride takes about eleven minutes. In winter, skiers treat it as a transit connection. In summer, with the snow gone and the valley green below, it becomes something closer to a scenic flight.
The Olympics rebuilt it
Whistler was already a major resort before Vancouver won the 2010 Winter Olympics bid. What the Games did was rebuild the infrastructure around it. The Whistler Sliding Centre went up in the Callaghan Valley for bobsled, luge, and skeleton. Whistler Olympic Park was built for cross-country skiing, biathlon, and ski jumping. The Athletes' Village was constructed and later converted to residential housing. Alpine skiing, the marquee event, ran on the existing mountains.
But the less visible changes mattered more. The Sea-to-Sky Highway — Highway 99, the only road from Vancouver — received a major improvement project between 2003 and 2009. Dangerous curves were straightened, passing lanes added, safety barriers installed along the 120-kilometer route. Driving time dropped to about 90 minutes from Vancouver. Before the upgrades, the road was notorious: beautiful and, in winter, genuinely hazardous.
The highway is now one of the better driving experiences in North America. You leave Vancouver along the shore of Howe Sound, pass the Stawamus Chief — a granite monolith that rises 700 meters from the highway — and stop at Shannon Falls, British Columbia's third-tallest waterfall at 335 meters. The road climbs through Squamish and into the Coast Mountains, and by the time you reach Whistler Village you have driven through three distinct landscapes.
The bears that stayed
Fifty to sixty black bears live in ranges that overlap the resort municipality. They eat in the same meadows that border the golf courses. They cross the Valley Trail that cyclists and joggers use. They appear in the village itself, usually in the fall when they are feeding heavily before hibernation, but occasionally in the summer when a garbage bin has been left unsecured.
Whistler became the first municipality in British Columbia to earn official Bear Smart Community status, in 2010. The program is practical rather than sentimental: bear-proof bins throughout the village, fruit-tree removal on residential properties, seasonal trail closures, and a dedicated bear-monitoring team that tracks known individuals by sight. The approach is coexistence through attractant management — you do not feed the bears, you do not leave food where they can find it, and in return the bears continue to live here as they did before the village existed.
You will likely see one. The Valley Trail between Lost Lake and Green Lake is a common crossing point. Keep your distance, make noise on blind corners, and carry bear spray if you are hiking above the village. This is not a zoo encounter. These are wild animals on their own territory who have learned to tolerate the presence of a ski resort in their backyard.
Learning to be a summer town
For its first three decades, Whistler largely shut down when the snow melted. The village emptied, the restaurants ran skeleton crews, and the mountains stood quiet. The identity was simple: this was a ski town, and summer was the off-season.
That changed with the Whistler Mountain Bike Park, which opened in 1999 as one of the first lift-accessed downhill parks in the world. The concept was straightforward — use the same chairlifts that carry skiers in winter to carry mountain bikers in summer — but the effect was transformative. The park now runs over 80 trails served by the Fitzsimmons Express and the Whistler Village Gondola. Crankworx, the premier freeride mountain biking festival, was founded here in 2004 and has since become to summer what the World Ski and Snowboard Festival is to spring.
Summer visitation has grown to roughly match winter numbers. The PEAK 2 PEAK runs for sightseeing and hiking access from late May through mid-October. Four championship golf courses operate in the valley. Alta Lake and Green Lake offer kayaking and paddleboarding. A Via Ferrata climbing route on Whistler Mountain gives you an assisted rock-climbing experience with exposure that would otherwise require technical gear and years of practice.
The reinvention worked, but it also changed what Whistler is. A town that existed for one season now runs year-round, and the culture has shifted accordingly. The seasonal workers who defined the village — ski bums who bartended in winter and disappeared in April — have been joined by a permanent population that needs housing, schools, and transit twelve months a year. The resort is still the economic engine. But the town around it has become something more complicated than a base village.
What you are arriving into
Whistler Village is a pedestrian core built in the 1980s in a vaguely alpine style that reads as neither Canadian nor European but as something invented specifically for this valley. It works better than it should. The car-free streets, the covered walkways, the restaurants and shops stacked along a creek — none of it is historic, and none of it pretends to be. It is a purpose-built resort village that happens to sit at the base of two of the most skiable mountains on the continent, in a valley inhabited by bears and marmots, on the traditional territory of two First Nations, at the end of a highway that is itself worth the trip.
The mountains are the reason you came. Everything else — the engineering, the history, the bears, the highway, the cultural centre, the summer reinvention — is what makes it a place rather than just a ski hill.