Murder in Whistler

Friday was a provincial wide specialist professional development day, and I had decided to go to the CUEBC conference in Surrey.

We had asked friends to join us on a weekend that we had booked at Sundance Lodge in Whistler. Patty and Olivia came up from Washington, and picked up Paula, Bridget and Daniel, and went up to Whistler in the late afternoon. The conference I was at was close to the border in Surrey, so I went down to Burlington, picked them up, and headed back over the border to North Van, picked up my gear, and then on to Whistler. We got up to the lodge at about 10:30. We had booked two apartments which were on the same floor, but with a few rooms in-between.

We were staying at Whistler Creekside and woke up to beautiful views down the valley and over the lakes. It was in between the mountain biking season and the ski season, so the town was a bit quiet. We all went in to town for a walk around the village. After we had walked from one end of the village to the other, Roger, Olivia and I decided that we would go for a walk up the mountains, while the others decided they would head back to the lodge.

We crossed the creek and began to head up Blackcomb Mountain. The walking was easy on grassy hills which would be the ski runs during the ski season. The slopes got a bit steeper at times and we stopped regularly to take in the views, as well as to catch our breath. The views were spectacular. All the colours of fall spread out like a carpet in the valley below. We were looking across the valley at the snow capped peak of the nearby mountains and wondering how much further we would have to go to reach the snowline. We had decided that we had better turn around by about 3 pm, so that we would be able to get back down the mountain before it started to get dark. As it neared 3 pm we also began to see snow on the sides of the road. We continued a bit further and decided that we had reached the snow line, so we stopped for a bit, took in the view, and headed back down the mountain. On the way back we stopped at a rocky outcrop that was strewn with rocks and Roger and Olivia decided to build an Inukshuk to join the other Inuksuit that others had built.

When we got down to the village we decided to call in to the Whistler Brewrey and have a snack and a drink. We ordered some chicken wings and a taster tray of the beers. There were seven beers on the wooden tasting tray that arrived. We tasted them all before deciding which we preferred, and ordered a pint each.

Paula had picked up an unopened "Murder" game that was set in a ski resort, so we ha decided that we would play that on Saturday night. We had all been given information about the characters we were playing, and had brought up gear appropriate for the scene. We moved furniture from one unit to the other so that we had enough for all of us to have dinner and play the game. It was fun with Roger dressed up as a Texan with a broken leg, using a mop as a crutch, while he sipped his Havana Club rum and Havana cigar.

We woke the next day to find that it had snowed up on the mountain, and that if we had done the walk up the mountain today instead of yesterday that we would only have had to walk half the distance to the snowline. We had another walk around the village before heading back down the Sea to Sky Highway, stopping at Brandywine Falls and back along the edge of Howe Sound to Vancouver.