Whistler

The Canadian Resort town of Whistler is situated within the southern Pacific Ranges of the Coast Mountains within the province of British Columbia. The town is situated roughly 125 kilometres north of Vancouver. The area has been incorporated into the Resort Municipality of Whistler, housing nearly 10,000 regular residents with an additional rotating "transient" population of workers. These workers are normally from beyond BC, notably from Europe and Australia.

Over two million individuals go to the town of Whistler yearly, mainly for alpine snowboarding and skiing and, during the summer months, mountain biking at Whistler-Blackcomb. Its pedestrian village has won many design awards and Whistler has been voted amongst the top destinations in North America by major ski magazines since the mid-1990s. In the 2010 Winter Olympics, Whistler hosted nearly all of the alpine, Nordic, skeleton, luge, as well as bobsled events, although all snowboarding and freestyle skiing events were hosted at Cypress Mountain near Vancouver.

Whistler Blackcomb is a major ski resort located 125 km north of Vancouver, in British Columbia, Canada. By many measures it is the biggest ski resort within North America; it is 50% larger than its nearest competitor when it comes to size, has the greatest uphill lift capacity, and until 2009, had the highest vertical skiable distance by a wide margin. Whistler Blackcomb likewise features the Peak 2 Peak Gondola for moving between Whistler and Blackcomb mountains at the top; Peak 2 Peak holds records for the longest and highest unsupported cable car span within the globe. With all of this capacity, Whistler Blackcomb is likewise often the most-visited ski resort, normally besting 2 million tourists each year.

The Whistler Valley is formed by the pass between the upper-middle reaches of the Cheakamus and the headwaters of the Green River. It is flanked on both sides by glaciated mountains; the Garibaldi Ranges on the side which contains the ski mountains, and a group of ranges with no collective name but that are part of the bigger Pacific Ranges and are essentially fore-ranges of the Pemberton Icefield. Although there are several other routes through the maze of mountains between the basin of the Lillooet River just east, the Cheakamus-Green divide is the most direct and lowest and naturally was the main trading route of the Lil'wat First Nations and Squamish long before the European people arrived. One Lil'wat legend of the Great Flood says that before the deluge, the people lived at Green Lake.