Out early again, leaving the room at 7.45 to meet our tour group, a day trip to Squamish and Whistler booked with a few stops along the way. Another beautiful morning, and we walk downtown along Howe Street to Canada Place, where we join 20 other passengers boarding a white coach with Bernie at the wheel. He introduces himself, warns us it’ll be an 11 hour day, back in Vancouver around 7.30pm, and we buckle up and settle in.
Bernie is good company, running commentary the whole way north, disused mines, waterfalls, the history of the towns we pass through. The Sea-to-Sky Highway earns its name honestly, the road hugging the cliffs above Howe Sound the entire drive, water on one side, granite rearing straight up on the other, forest clinging to slopes too steep to explain. It’s the kind of drive where you stop looking at your phone. Bernie also entertains us with dad jokes of the lowest order, what kind of music do orcs like, orchestral, delivered with the confidence of a man who knows exactly how bad it is and doesn’t care. Limited applause, universal appreciation.
First stop is Shannon Falls, a five minute walk up a gentle incline from the car park, the sound of falling water finding you through the trees before the waterfall itself does, then the whole cascade opening up down the mountainside. Mardi’s sent me a video on some iPhone camera tricks for moving water, and I give a couple a go. None of them work, so none of them make the gallery below.
A quick comfort stop follows at what used to be Britannia Mine, once the largest copper mine in the British Commonwealth, running from 1904 until it finally closed in 1974 after seventy years, more than 60,000 people from over fifty countries having lived and worked there at one time or another. At its peak in the late 1920s it was producing 17 percent of the world’s copper. Now it’s a museum, the old concentrator building still standing against the mountainside like something out of an industrial cathedral.
Squamish itself is really the Sea to Sky Gondola, Bernie pulling the bus in beside the station and sorting tickets while we wait. An hour at the top once we’re up, but first the ride itself, 15 minutes, about 700 metres of climb, or 2,100 feet as Bernie insists on putting it, thoroughly Canadian yet stubbornly analogue. What strikes me most is the quiet, six of us in the cabin, nobody talking, just gliding over the treetops with the fjord opening up behind us and the mountain rising ahead. Gondola cabins like this run on a continuous steel cable, and the low, rhythmic clunk you feel through the floor every so often is the cabin’s grip passing over a support tower, a stanchion, where wheels guide the cable through rather than the cabin itself touching anything. It’s the only sound in an otherwise silent ride.
The top is five or six degrees warmer than the ground, full sun up here while the valley floor sits in the mountain’s own shadow, which nobody expected. We wander, cross the suspension bridge at a leisurely pace while others shuffle nervously or stride straight through, and take the forest track back to the gondola platform, the air clean enough to taste. A sit in the sun, a cookie, some water, and the trip back down is as quiet as the way up, the fjord ahead of us this time instead of behind.
Ninety minutes on to Whistler, Bernie still going with the jokes. We’re given three hours to ourselves once we arrive, and the town takes some working out, a confusing tangle of winding, circular paths lined with restaurants, retail, and every kind of adventure and bike shop imaginable, built for the mountain bikers who fill the place in summer and the skiers who’ll fill it in winter. We’re squarely in the shoulder season and the bike crowd has it. We eye the gondola and the peak to peak walk, only to find the peak to peak is closed and the gondola alone is 95 dollars a head, so we give it a miss in favour of lunch.
Bernie had recommended Earls on the way in, and it’s every bit as busy as expected, a 10 to 15 minute wait we spend at the bar. I order a lemon lime and bitters, which our server, a Melburnian, is the only person in the building who’d know what that is. We chat for a while about her move to Whistler before our table’s ready, a choice between full sun or dappled shade, and we take the shade. Mardi has a cob salad, I order a fried chicken burger that arrives roughly 15 to 20 centimetres tall, so I dismantle it and eat the chicken and salad, leaving the bun behind. An hour there, a cocktail, and a crow working the patio with a chip in its beak, not eating it, just flying laps showing it off to the gulls.
After lunch, ice cream, tipped off by a staff member back at the gondola, and Mardi finds it after a bit of searching, a shop wall to wall with chocolate and sweets besides. Mine is a chocolate, peanut butter, and cashew combination drenched in dark chocolate sauce, and we pick up fudge to take with us. Then the hunt for the Olympic rings, a Whistler landmark since the 2010 Winter Games, when the town hosted the alpine, Nordic, luge, skeleton, and bobsleigh events, the rings themselves sitting in Whistler Olympic Plaza alongside the original Olympic cauldron and a memorial to Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili. We find them eventually, after a few wrong turns through a town that seems built to confuse, dodging cyclists who ignore every sign asking them to walk their bikes through the village. Mardi picks up an iced coffee, and we sit in the sun until the group reassembles for the 2.5 hour drive home.
On the way we stop for fellow passengers chasing a filming location from the Netflix series Virgin River, then again at Porteau Cove, a disused ferry pier on the Sea-to-Sky Highway. The name comes from the French porte d’eau, water’s gate, dating to 1908 when a gravel mining operation set up here, its own small community served by ferries running between Vancouver and Squamish until the railway made them unnecessary. The dock still stands today, kept as an emergency crossing point should the highway ever be blocked by a slide, otherwise left open for exactly the kind of idle sightseeing stop we’re making of it.
Back in Vancouver a little after 7, Mardi wants Sephora, which sits on our walk home along Howe Street, and dinner is fairly ordinary Mexican from the food court nearby before we head back to pack for tomorrow. Four days in Vancouver, done. The big adventure starts now, a trans-Pacific crossing on the Celebrity Edge.
