For the fourth year in a row, Whistler has topped the
“best place to ski and stay in North America” category
in Condé Nast Traveler’s annual readers’ poll.
Photograph by: FABRICE COFFRINI, AFP/Getty Images
B.C.’s Whistler Blackcomb Mountain has earned international acclaim yet again.
For the fourth year in a row, the resort topped the “best place to ski and stay in North America” category in Condé Nast Traveler’s annual readers’ poll. It was also named the best North American resort by Freeskier and Outside magazines and garnered the top spot in National Geographic’s ski runs and lodges category.
“Whistler Blackcomb is honoured to be recognized as an industry leader once again,” said resort president Dave Brownlie in a release. “These rankings reflect the overwhelming dedication from our staff to deliver an incredible mountain resort experience to our guests. The beautiful alpine vistas, the seemingly endless terrain, and our abundant snow are all great physical assets leveraged further by our staff who help create memories for guests again and again.”
Whistler Blackcomb ranked third in the overall category for Transworld Snowboard Magazine and Ski Magazine.
The annual magazine rankings rate resorts on a variety of criteria including terrain, snow quality, lift capabilities, parks and pipes, as well as the quality of its restaurants, lodging, and amenities.
© Copyright (c) The Province

Skiers and snowboarders have been glowing with excitement since the announcement that Whistler Mountain will be opening on Friday, November 19 - six days earlier than scheduled. So far, the total cumulative snowfall is 141 cm and the snowbase is approximately 105 cm. The alpine received more than 30 cm of snow last night and the alpine forecast is predicting that another 15 cm will fall before the weekend.
Whistler Mountain will open on Friday with access from the Creekside Gondola and the Whistler Village Gondola. Skiing and snowboarding will be available from Emerald Express, Big Red Express and Franz Chair. Early season conditions apply and caution should be exercised at all times while skiing and snowboarding. Blackcomb Mountain will open November 25.

There’s one good reason the Georgia Straight has covered every spring bash since the WSSF debuted: snow culture. You either get it or you don’t. If you don’t, you’re likely dead and don’t know it. For Olympic and Paralympic resuscitation, get to Whistler, pronto. The same bonhomie that infused Vancouver streets during the two Games animates the festival. Last April, with Metric lead singer Emily Haines’s over-the-top performance framed against a diaphanous curtain through which skiers and snowboarders could be seen carving their last graceful turns of the day at the foot of Whistler Mountain, it was pure “irie time”. Breathe deeply and feel the peace that comes from being in the mountains on long, sun-drenched days.

When reached at her office, festival communications director Lisa Richardson had some words of advice for those inspired by the feats of athleticism displayed during the Olympic and Paralympic Games. “The highest form of excellence has been on display here for the past two months. People who have been watching and are inspired to join in will find some form of entry. There’s room to be completely free in how to express yourself.” Asked to define snow culture, Richardson said that the festival incubates creativity. “Snow culture is a celebration of taking away the rules, painting outside the lines. The Olympics and Paralympics define excellence. Our festival shows winter sports can be playful, too. The athletes have had their competitive season. April is a time of convergence. There’s a different energy. It’s not about pushing your career to a higher level. Instead, it’s a spring blowout where the vibe is just to throw down with your friends because we’re lucky to be doing this in the first place.”

As much as the WSSF is a celebration of snow-sliding sports, it’s equally about music and culture, whether you’re hitting a dance floor or slipping into a seat at the pro-photographer or filmmaker showdowns. Organizers have put up more than $100,000 in direct funding to athletes and artists. “As members of the community of mountain-sports lovers, we are constantly stimulated by what the artists, photographers, filmmakers, designers, and athletes are doing,” said festival director Sue Eckersley, “so we’re reciprocating by sending some serious stimulus back their way.” That translates as major coin up for grabs, including $85,000 spread among the best skiers and snowboarders. Another $40,000 goes to an array of artists, potentially including two local action-sports photographers, Jeremy Koreski and Mason Mashon, who were selected to compete in the Pro Photographer Showdown. In the spirit of the festival’s roots, several top prizes of $1,000 will be awarded by votes from spectators. Peer play rules the day, both on the slopes at the Orage Masters and the Grenade Games and in the resort’s convention centre at nightly multimedia screenings.

Over the past 15 years, the festival has grown from a celebration of technical skiing to one of the biggest winter sports events in North America. When asked to compare the WSSF to the Winter X Games, Whistler-based freestyle skier Sarah Burke told the Georgia Straight that it would be hard to replicate the X Games “in any shape or form, but the amount of stoke and energy level at the festival’s World Ski Invitational is comparable”. Certainly, support for the three-time X Games winner runs deep among festival organizers. One of the star attractions imported to showcase the half-pipe talents of Burke and her big-air-seeking friends is the newly invented Global Pipe Cutter from New Zealand, whose paddle arms reputedly better maintain the sides of seven-metre walls of snow, create fewer holes, and provide a smoother ride up the pipe. On arrival, pipe-carving maestro Steve Petrie, who built the impressive Olympic superpipe on Cypress Provincial Park’s Black Mountain, will begin shaping yet another on Blackcomb Mountain’s slopes. “Because the pipe skiers missed a chance to show their stuff at the Olympics, they’ll be going huge in the superpipe,” Richardson predicted.

Is it true that skiing leads to harder crimes, like snowboarding? Sarah Burke remembered when “new school” skiers weren’t allowed in the half-pipe. “We’d wait until dark for a run and risk losing our passes.” She took part in her first pipe contest at the WSSF a decade ago. “I couldn’t handle one of the old eight-foot pipes today. You have to know how to ride transitions. A half-pipe run is all about linking five to seven hits, building speed as you go. You can measure a good half-pipe by someone who drops in at the top with no speed and finishes their run with a rush.”

A day spent in the spring sunshine puts paid to any notion that the problem with winter sports is that they take place in winter. Most ski resorts across North America called it quits once the Easter Bunny left town. Head for Whistler, where he will be hopping in his ski boots to the unbelievably talented kids in Vancouver’s We Are the City. No one but no one wants this party to end.

ACCESS: A complete schedule of events and performers is posted at www.wssf.com.

With the 2010 Olympics at Vancouver and Whistler’s doorstep, one local real estate insider has crunched a decade’s-worth of Whistler sales results to make the case that the 2010 Olympics have given the resort’s real estate a boost.

“I still think there will be a good, positive side to the Whistler story,” Rudy Nielsen, president of research firm Landcor Data Corp., said in an interview.

Nielsen chronicles a doubling of Whistler’s property values and widening sphere of international buyers there over the last decade to support his case.

“I think people will realize that this is a world-class place to be, and not only Whistler but Vancouver and British Columbia,” he said.

Landcor, in a report released this week, has compiled a list of trends from examining the resort community’s sales as recorded by the B.C. Land Titles office. Between 2000 and 2010, with the 2008 financial crisis that dented markets everywhere notwithstanding, Whistler saw 8,990 property sales among the 13,134 residential properties within the resort.

And the Landcor data records dramatic price increases over the decade, with a lot of the gains coming in the first half of the decade. The average price for a condominium rose 101 per cent over the decade to $380,000 by 2010. Town house average values increased 104 per cent to $677,000 and

detached homes saw the biggest gain rising 141 per cent to hit an average of almost $1.4 million in 2010.

In Whistler right now, Lisa Bjornson, general manager of the Whistler Real Estate Co., said it is difficult to tell if the Olympics are having an effect on the market, but there is an assumption they will.

Bjornson said the community’s real estate counterparts in Park City, Utah, host of alpine events for the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics, told them sales would dry up in the three months leading up to and three months following the Games, but agents have been making sales.

“We just don’t know who, if anybody, is buying after the Games as a result of the exposure yet,” Bjornson said. “We just know that a lot of people are going to be here.”

However, University of B.C. real estate expert Tsur Somerville expects that the gains Whistler is seeing come more from the improved Sea to Sky Highway and not the additional exposure.

“I’m not saying it’s zero,” Somerville said in an interview, but he is skeptical that the Games will give Whistler better exposure to the market of buyers likely to buy ski-resort property than it has already had.

Somerville, director of the centre for urban economics and real estate at the Sauder School of Business at UBC, released a report, co-authored with Jake Wetzel, on the effects that staging Olympics have had on property prices host cities. They found that being an Olympic host city did not bump property prices up any more than surrounding, non-host locations.

Any gains, Somerville said, were more attributable to general economic conditions that were shared by non-host regions, or as a result of infrastructure improvements independent of the Games.

depenner@vancouversun.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Whistler – The Blackcomb Mountain fire is now 100 per cent contained, officials announced late Sunday (Aug. 2).

In a statement issued Sunday at 9:49 p.m., the B.C. Ministry of Forests and Whistler Fire Rescue Service (WFRS) jointly announced that the fire — which burned something like 30 hectares on the east side of Crystal Ridge, just inside the ski-area boundary — fully contained. Blackcomb Mountain is now safe for WB to resume full operations, officials said.

“The Ministry’s initial attack was highly effective and we would like to thank them, along with Whistler Blackcomb staff, for their quick response in containing what could have been a very dangerous fire situation,” WFRS Chief Rob Whitton said in the statement.

The B.C. Real Estate Association says it just might be, pointing to a large drop in carrying costs for an investment property today compared to a year ago.

“It doesn’t matter what the market is doing, I don’t say whether or not it’s a good time to buy,” association chief economist Cameron Muir said in an interview Monday. “That being said, I would suspect investors are actively looking in the marketplace for bargains. If you compare today vs. a year ago, investing in real estate is more attractive than it was then.”

Muir made the comment after the release of an association housing survey Monday that concluded the residential sales dollar volume on B.C.’s Multiple Listing Service declined 61 per cent to $873 million in January, compared to the same month in 2008 when sales totalled $2.25 billion. In the Metro Vancouver region, the sales volume was down 62 per cent over the same period, to $413 million from $1.09 billion in January 2008.

Muir — who said he also believes sales activity in the province will pick up in the spring because of improving affordability resulting from lower mortgage rates and home prices — cited a typical mortgage payment for a property in January 2009 compared to January 2008.

He said the benchmark price for a two-bedroom condo in Metro Vancouver was $334,602 in January, 11.5 per cent less than the $378,336 the same condo would have sold for 12 months earlier. A typical posted five-year fixed-term mortgage stood at 5.79 per cent in January, much lower than a similar mortgage rate of 7.39 per cent the previous January.

Therefore, he said, a condo with a 10-per-cent down payment (on a 25-year amortization) would have resulted in a monthly mortgage payment of $1,890 this January, nearly $600 less than the January 2008 mortgage payment of $2,468 (property taxes, maintenance fees and mortgage insurance fees not included).

On top of that, he said, there’s upward pressure on rents with the same two-bedroom condo renting in October 2008 for about $1,507 a month — a five-per-cent increase from October 2007.

“For both investors and home buyers, your mortgage payment would be several hundred dollars less than a year ago,” said Muir, who noted that investors have so far not been very active since the economic downturn started last year. “As an investor, the cash flow from the rent will more closely match your mortgage payment on the property.”

The BCREA survey also showed that residential unit sales fell 57 per cent to 2,115 units during the same period.

The average price on the MLS in B.C. was $412,934 in January, down nine per cent from the same month last year, the survey noted.

Muir said that home sales were sluggish in January, reflecting an overall malaise in consumer confidence and a weaker provincial economy.

Muir said that first-time buyers are especially affected by the economic news and are holding back because of a lack of confidence. “Demand from first-time buyers has been off significantly. First-time home buyers tend to be younger and not have years of experience in their occupations. Therefore, they have more concerns around job security. They’re more vulnerable to layoffs.”

Despite that, he said, the BCREA expects sales to rise this spring because of greater affordability and lower interest rates.

Muir noted that realtors are reporting increased activity from buyers over the past three weeks, but that it hasn’t yet materialized in sales statistics. “By all accounts, there’s increased interest. There’s more showings and more buyers kicking tires.”

Meanwhile, an Ipsos Reid poll released last week showed that a growing number of British Columbians think this is a good time to buy a home, though most say it isn’t a good time to sell.

The poll found that some 71 per cent of respondents said it is a somewhat good or very good time to buy real estate. In November, only 60 per cent of respondents told Ipsos Reid it was a good time to buy.

In the latest poll, though, 82 per cent said this is not a good time to sell a home.

The poll also found that British Columbians’ expectations for falling prices are changing, with just 42 per cent of respondents saying they expected prices to be lower 12 months from now compared to 57 per cent in November.

The association represents 12 member real estate boards and about 18,000 realtors.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

…If there’s a silver lining to the cloud, it’s that for those with money in their pockets, now is the perfect time to score a deal on a vacation. And if you have lots of money, that deal could be a new condo.

“If you’re a buyer, I can’t think of a better time,” said Pat Kelly, president of Whistler Real Estate and an almost 30-year resident of the area. “There may be some people who are more interested in looking at an offer than they were a year ago. If you’re patient and you have cash, you are in a very strong position. It might be the best buying opportunity prior to the Olympics.”

Right about now the resort could use a perfect storm - one that combines just-right temperatures with snowfall to cover bare rocks and trees in the upper reaches of the alpine. The past week has seen a dramatic improvement in the snow cover. After snow bypassed the resort during the holidays, a whopping 87 centimetres has dropped on it in recent days.

Even so, Brownlie says the unstable snow pack still has to be dealt with through extensive avalanche control that is now going on at the resort to prevent layers of snow from breaking free.

There have been bright spots, such as the opening of the $50-million-plus Peak 2 Peak gondola connecting Whistler and Blackcomb Mountains. It has garnered attention and enthusiasm both on and off the mountain. A BASE jump video has drawn almost 30,000 viewers on YouTube, and the first week of operations alone saw an aerial wedding conducted on the gondola as it hovered over the mountain. Several couples took the heady step of getting engaged on the Peak 2 Peak.

Jeff Hunter and his girlfriend Amy Galiszuski travelled to Whistler all the way from Philadelphia for the grand opening of the lift, and Hunter marked the occasion by asking Galuszuski if she would marry him.

“I got the guys (running the lift) to block off the doors so there was just the two of us in one gondola,” he said. “I waited until we were in the middle. I told her how much I cared about her and I popped the question. She said yes,” he said of his proposal, made 436 metres over Fitzsimmons Creek.

Hunter isn’t worried by the stories about the Excalibur Gondola or the avalanches. The B.C.-raised skier tells all his friends to go to Whistler, which is heading into the final-year countdown to the 2010 Olympics with a lineup of World Cup competitions scheduled this winter as a prelude to the big event.

“I’ve emailed everyone I know who skis, and I’ve told them they’ve got to go and ride the Peak 2 Peak,” he said. “I’m telling them Whistler is a great place to ski.”

Brownlie also remains relentlessly upbeat, pointing to the top ratings the resort consistently gets from ski magazines, and a reputation that draws outdoors enthusiats from around the world.

“There is lots of new snow in the forecast,” he said. “Every year there is something different, and certainly this is no exception.