Moose Tour part 3 – Whistler
Day 15: Whistler to Vancouver
There was an enormous
thunderstorm overnight. It was so cool!
Three of us were picked up by Dustin at 8:20am for our off-peak-time
zip-lining session. I've been on the little ones there are in children's
playgrounds, but nothing like this, not proper adventurous zip-lining. I've
never been scared of heights but I was a bit surprised that I wasn't even
slightly nervous about taking a step into thin air.
It was fantastic! Ever so much fun. The session lasted two and a half
hours and we went on five lines of varying height, length and steepness. There
are ten lines in the whole course, zigzagging back and forth across the valley,
and now and then we heard whoops of delight from some person in another group
echoing around. The two guides were knowledgeable and told us a lot about the
course, the company, the area, its environment and history, and there were
information boards around the course too. I liked that the company makes a
point to be as eco-friendly as possible: solar power, sustainably-sourced wood
with natural properties that mean they don’t need to use chemicals to clean it,
and other stuff I can't remember. The branches of the trees surrounding us were
covered in hanging lichens, which only grow at about one millimetre per year
and are very sensitive, so are a good indicator that the air is very clean.
After the zip-lining I went on the chair lift system. I refuse to call
it a gondola. "Gondola lift" is the technical term, to distinguish it from the
Venetian boat, but nobody says the "lift" part. So I'll be pernickety and call
it a cable car. Anyway, Whistler Village is located in the valley between two
mountains: Whistler and Blackcomb. There are chair lift systems on both, and the
2.76-mile-long Peak-2-Peak Gondola traverses the valley between the two peaks –
making the longest continuous lift system in the world.
The first chair lift on Whistler Mountain had been hit by lightning and
was out of order so I made the short walk to the other side of the village to
the base of Blackcomb. It took two lifts and about half an hour to get up to
the Peak2Peak terminal. Literally surrounded by cloud for pretty much the whole
time, it was extremely quiet, drizzly and cold, and I couldn't see any of the
scenery. There are hiking trails on both mountains and I did a fairly short and
easy one around a rocky alpine landscape before getting gladly on the Peak2Peak.
There are twenty-eight cabins, two of which are partially glass-floored. I was
able to ride in one of these but most of what was visible underneath was cloud,
or trees swathed in cloud. About midway between the peaks, though, the cabin
did leave the cloud for a minute and Fitzsimmons Creek, four hundred and
thirty-six metres below, was visible, which was cool.
I didn't know if the chair lift on Whistler Mountain was open yet so I
stayed in the cabin and returned to base via Blackcomb Mountain, arriving in
the still-cloudy but brighter and warmer Whistler Village about 2:30pm. There's
a little bakery-cafe hidden at the back of a bookshop, so I went for lunch
there. They'd sold out of beef stew, but I was just as contented to have hot,
chunky vegetable soup with a thick slice of multigrain bread. Hmm :)
The group reassembled on the steps outside the aforementioned bookshop,
by the taxi loop, to be picked up by Dustin at 4pm to return to Vancouver. The
only stop we made was at Tantalus Lookout to see the view, which was quite
impressive: we could even see Shannon Falls far in the distance. The clouds had cleared by the time we reached the coast so we could see
a lot more than we had the day before, and we arrived back to a very warm and
sunny Vancouver.
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