Ger’s Excellent Adventures

Wow, what a year… I have been meaning to write something here for a while but whenever I try to think what to write I’m at a loss for words. Whistler is awesome. I might be stuck here for a while.

Whistler is just a big playground for adults. The whole town is geared towards helping people play on the mountains, and doing it bigger and better than anywhere else. It has by far the most ski terrain in North America, the biggest and most progressive lift-serviced downhill mountain bike park, fantastic cross-country bike trails (of which I have ridden maybe 10%), tons of great paddling and climbing nearby…

In the winter, tourists arrive by the thousands and work any jobs they can get their hands on for minimum wage and a lift pass. They sleep in bunkbeds in cramped rooms with other travellers, get maybe two or three days off per week to enjoy the mountain, and after returning home flat broke will look back on it as the time of their lives.

Compared to most people I have met here, I am extremely lucky in that I have a stable job that lets me set my own schedule and play outside when weather and conditions are at their best. I never have to miss a powder day because I have to work, and when it rains for a week I’m happy to stay inside and get lots of stuff done.

Powder days are pure nirvana. On powder days, all over the mountain you hear people hooting and hollering for joy. How many other activities do you know where people surrounded by total strangers just spontaneously shout for joy, because they just can’t help themselves? Powder days are so fun that many local businesses have a rule that if it snows more than a certain amount (20cm?), you don’t have to show up for work until 11:00 or something.

And then there’s summer, and mountain biking.

You know when you’re a kid, and all you want to do is ride your bike? Then one day someone finds a piece of wood, and you make a little jump, then you make it a bit bigger and dare your friends to go off it, and you start doing stupid things like trying to see how many of your friends you can jump over without landing on one of them, and you keep pushing each other and jumping until someone gets injured or you get called in for dinner. Life doesn’t get any better than that.

Until you’re an adult, and you’re covered in body armor, and you’re on a $5000 bike with 8″ hydraulic shocks and big disc brakes and you spend all day hucking it off machine-groomed dirt jumps — hundreds of them, scattered all over the side of a mountain, and you’re surrounded by trees and wildflowers and some of the most beautiful mountain ranges you have ever seen. And you push yourself and your friends to go bigger and bigger, and you ride all day until you get injured, or you break your bike, or the park closes. It’s awesome.

When you’re not jumping, you’re either cruising down sweet flowy singletrack, or testing your focus and coordination on rocky and rooty technical trails, or daring yourself to ride down rock faces that are longer and steeper than you ever thought possible.

This is the expression I had on my face for much of the summer. I can’t wait until the bike park opens again.

I have been trying to figure out if it will be possible for me to create a normal life for myself here, or if this will just end up being a fun diversion for a year or two.

I think I could really come to enjoy living in a small town. The locals really look after each other; once you know a few people here and there you don’t have to pay cover charges any more, and food and entertainment are often free or close to it. It’s almost as if the locals get subsidized by all the tourist money floating around.

My first six months here may have been exceptionally good because of the house I found when I arrived — I had an amazing room in a great house stocked with every possible convenience and a rotating set of fun and friendly roommates. I arrived with my backpack, snowboard and couple other things and never missed any of the other junk I had in storage because the house already had everything else. Things I never had to worry about include: signing a lease, paying bills of any kind, house keys (the door was always open); everything was taken care of, from wireless internet and long distance phone to laundry detergent and toilet paper. I wonder if I’ll ever be that carefree again.

Despite all this fun, I feel that I have never been more productive at work. I worked more hours this year than last, and they were quality hours because I always wanted to finish whatever I was working on so I could go play outside. And I can’t count how many times I solved a problem in my head during the peaceful ride up a chairlift.

I am about to take off on an extended trip around Southeast Asia and New Zealand, then I plan to head back to Whistler for another fantastic summer and hopefully my first full winter there. If my next year there is anything like my first, I may never leave.

Possible deal-breakers about making Whistler my permanent home:

• too many dudes. I have heard that the male/female ratio is anywhere from 60/40 to 7-to-1 or 9-to-1 (the cited ratio probably depends how long the guy you’re talking to has been single.) I don’t know what the real ratio is but it’s definitely skewed.
• much of the population is transient; even aside from the seasonal tourists, many of the “locals” have only been there a few years, and many seem to move on after a while. So it may be hard to make lasting friendships. I’m optimistic that there must be a core group of quality locals, and it’s just a matter of finding them. I have already met a few.
• no Vietnamese food anywhere in town! Come on! I have been so spoiled by the quality and variety of Vietnamese restaurants in Ottawa (going at least once and sometimes two or three times a week), that going without has been quite a shock.

We’ll see…

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 4th, 2006 at 12:37 am UTC and is filed under Whistler. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.