The Ski Journal - Volume 16, Issue 3
BETTER TOGETHER: The Whistler Museum Commemorates Skiers Past
Words: Steven Threndyle 2022-11-25 12:16:40
Stephanie Sloan-Murray and Mike Douglas at the Whistler Museum Speaker Series in the spring of 2022. Douglas, known as the “Godfather of Freeskiing,” dons a retro suit from the Canadian Freestyle Ski Team. Photo: Whistler Museum
Once a British Columbia schoolteacher, the late Florence Petersen understood that there weren’t many hard and fast rules to curating ski history. Part-owner of a cabin on Alta Lake near Whistler, BC, during the 1950s (purchased for $1,500 in cash), a time when Whistler was first and foremost a summer fishing destination promoted and popularized by Alex and Myrtle Philips, the owners of Rainbow Lodge, Petersen saw the rise of skiing in the region, and recognized an important hinge point in the area’s development. After the creation of Whistler Mountain ski resort in 1967, the Philips’ confided to Petersen their worries that Rainbow’s photos and stories would disappear unless some kind of preservation effort was made. When Petersen retired from teaching in 1986, she immediately formed a nonprofit society and gathered handmade wooden skis and enough of the Philips’ artifacts to start what would eventually become the Whistler Museum—a living archive of one of the most robust communities in the skiing world.
While most ski resorts and their adjacent towns recognize some value in preserving the past, it takes serious effort to procure and pay for the kind of space that will attract visitors and locals alike—to say nothing of knowing the difference between dumpster fodder and a valuable ski artifact. A great ski museum goes beyond the chronological timeline and informs, entertains and surprises.
It’s entirely fitting that the Whistler Museum is housed in two trailers that once served as construction offices during the resort’s hectic growth period throughout the ’80s and ’90s. Located in the shady Village North park named in honor of Petersen, the current museum opened its doors just in time for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. Ten years after the Olympics came to town, a permanent display from that two-week sports extravaganza greets visitors entering the exhibit space, while an entire glass case celebrates Whistler’s hippie heritage, best exemplified by the famous photo of naked male and female skiers striking stark poses in front of Toad Hall. Members of Canada’s Crazy Canucks downhill team have contributed skis and national team garb to the space and one of the silver gondolas from Whistler’s inaugural 1967 season rests inside.
“Modern skiing is splintered into too many silos,” says Mike Douglas, one of the pioneering freeskiers behind the Canadian Air Force and a local filmmaker. “The Whistler Museum is trying to bridge these worlds together so that skiing can continue to be celebrated in all its forms for decades to come.”
Last year, Douglas and Stephanie Sloan-Murray, one of Canada’s top female freestyle skiers in the ’70s, led a panel at the museum to discuss Whistler’s role in the progression of freeskiing. Sloan-Murray said the event showed her freeskiing’s place in the larger history of skiing and Douglas left feeling compelled to support the organization that is preserving his work and that of many of his heroes. In a place like Whistler, a ski locale where an international race series and world-class ski film crews, can exist next to ski music festivals and hordes of skiers seeing snow for the first time, the Whistler Museum sheds light on a distinctive ski history, reminding a diversifying ski culture what brought it all together in the first place. Petersen died in 2012, but her original passion for preservation has continued to grow, reminding Whistler that in order to evolve, it needs to know where it came from.
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