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MOUNTAIN OUT OF A MOLEHILL (p. 2 of 3)

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"Wooohoooo! Hoooohoooo! It’s Whistler! Woooooohooo!"

Ah, the jockstrap ambience of the old Whistler. This is Village Stroll on Friday night, mere icy steps from suburbanesque Main Street and its carousel of RCMP patrol cars. A toque-clad German girl is disappointed to learn she can’t smoke in any of the clubs. Downstairs at cowprint-carpeted Buffalo Bill’s, the average age is 29; the only sign of Britney butt crack is the babe on the Bacardi poster. The revellers, for the most part, are friendly.

"Does it matter?" replies Barbara (Barbra?) to the innocent question: Local or tourist? "It’s so superficial…" Clearly, mixed drinks are involved. Barbara has been out to dinner with Sean (Shawn?), an IT worker from London who lives in Munich. "The village is like Disneyland," he cannily observes.

"You wanna learn how to do Mexican dancing?" asks Joanne (Jo-Ann?), another devotee of mixed drinks. Her tall friend obliges with a full-contact two-step that brushes the go-go cage, where a couple is enacting some sort of bedroom fantasy. Two scarily young cops watch on the sidelines.

There are visitors from Munich, there are locals and then there’s Betty Jarvis. "Saskatchewan" is how the Montreal native describes her first dusty visit here with her husband – rightly convinced the skiing was better than in Europe – way back in the summer of 1972. "‘Oh, he’s really lost it,’" Jarvis recalls thinking of her husband’s suggestion that they buy some property. "Because, I mean, there was nothing there."

Well, not exactly. Whistler Mountain had already been open for six years, and developers were slowly subdividing the surrounding wilderness, a popular summer destination since the early 1900s. Whistler’s change of seasons began in 1962, when a group of forward-thinking Vancouver businessmen tried to launch a Winter Olympics bid. After that flopped, they decided to make some money, putting a Norwegian immigrant named Franz Wilhelmsen in charge of developing the ski hill.

Even so, the young couple was way ahead of the curve. They purchased their first Whistler lot for $5,500 and moved there in 1974 (population: 750) to start a family. Jarvis’ friends formed a babysitting pool so they could all ski the pristine mountains. In 1979, she got into real estate as the town centre of Canada’s first "resort municipality" sprang up on donated crown land where that dump used to be. Last year, the average lot price was $1-million; chalets sold for six times that.

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