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MOUNTAIN OUT OF A MOLEHILL

Have money and greed turned Whistler from a former garbage dump into a world-class resort? Not quite yet.

Text: NICK ROCKEL

1 | 2 | 3 | FEB

In a small blue room above the Whistler 7-Eleven, Janet Shimizu is putting a lot of pressure on me. Consciousness steps out for a cigarette as her strong fingers pinion my limbs and torso. First the back half of the body, then the front, from toes to crown. Getting dressed after an hour of shiatsu massage feels gauche and clumsy. It’s like I’ve just been beaten by choirs of angels. Hey, it’s Whistler. They could easily be on the payroll.

"You are good at relaxing," Shimizu says while her Australian co-worker presents the bill. Janet, everything has its price. Especially in this former backwoods garbage dump that cash built into a ski paradise for the rich. Let’s take a walk through Whistler Village and see what money can buy.

Hotel and aperitifs are a dreamy stagger across Main Street. White lights sparkle among the bare trees on this chilly late-November Saturday night. Even the freshly shovelled snow looks manicured, as if the hand of God has crumbled it into fluffy heaps at the intersections.

There’s a ton of snow for November. Just as well: It’s the unofficial start of the season at North America’s top-rated ski and snowboard resort, recently named the site of the 2010 Winter Olympics with host city Vancouver. Breathless talk of slalom and luge aside, Whistler is Canada’s most expensive municipality, a built-to-order town that barely existed 25 years ago. The likes of Julia Roberts, singer Seal and Prince Charles make the trip to party, shop and work the odds of a perfect downhill run on phat half-pipes and 200 powdery trails. That or a spill they call the yard sale, where you and your gear litter the slopes.

The Whistler Blackcomb Ski Resort is a local playground too – for those who don’t mind $70-lift tickets. Even they fondly (or bitterly) remember brown-bagging it with the family in the 1980s before the rest of the world noticed. Tonight its plush hotels, swanky condos and sprawling chalets are mostly occupied by escapees from rainy Vancouver, who risked the hair-raising 90-minute drive north along the Sea-to-Sky Highway. The Americans won’t invade until after U.S. Thanksgiving. Through June, an avalanche of Asians, Europeans and Antipodeans will likely push the skier visits to sky-high Whistler and Blackcomb mountains past two million.

Not bad for an ex-landfill.

The place is getting so big – permanent population 10,000 – that not even the residents give good directions anymore. The transient Aussies and Brits who keep the village staffed "almost instantaneously become locals," explains Steven Cannizzaro, general manager of our hotel, the Summit Lodge & Spa. The sharp-dressed New Yorker raised his kids in blustery St. John’s, so he knows from snow. The Winter Games will be business as usual, he says. Cannizzaro has another prediction: In five years, look for cycling to rival skiing here. Sounds crazy? Well, most people never saw the international ski resort coming either.

1 | 2 | 3 | FEB