The town itself is unbelievable. It's like something from Disneyland or a movie set that has been all lit up, is spotlessly clean and beautifully manicured. Snow lines the streets and landscape but all the roads and pathways are cleared to make it easy to get around.
The layout of the town is perfect. Massive free parking bays then you walk through all the cafes, bars and ski shops funnel you to the end of the street where 3 gondolas are waiting to take you up the two mountains, Whistler Mountain and Blackcomb Mountain.
The start of the gondola is only 600 meters up and they run to the top of the mountain slopes at over 2600 meters. On our way up its not hard to see why this is one of, if not the most desirable place to ski in he world.
The network of runs caters for all abilities (including mine!) and there must be more than 50 trails over both the mountains. The runs wind through the alpine trees and merge into the Olympic track that was used for the Winter Olympics back in 2010 so you can ski right on top of gold medal tracks. We had time for one afternoons skiing and got down 3 runs from the summit, each one taking about 35 minutes to complete.
We also took the oppourtunity to check out the bobsled track used for the 2010 Olympics, the track where famously the Georgian luge rider was killed when he left the track at high speed and collided with an iron girder.
There was a youth championship taking place and even though the kids were only about 10 and weighing no more than 45kg's they were flying around. If you have balls harder than steel you can be thrown down, get this. ON YOUR OWN HEAD FIRST ON A SKELETON BOARD each evening in the public session....and we though New Zealand was slack on safety...
An awesome few days up at Whistler and now we head south to crash our way though the US border and into Seattle...
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