Rethinking the Whistler Experience

From downhill laps to Indigenous storytelling, Whistler in summer asks: How do you want to experience the mountain in a season that all too often flies under the radar?

Words and photos by Hannah Truby

I can’t say that I prefer ski destinations in summer—but I can’t say I really prefer them in winter either. I love snow, and I love spending a day sliding down it, but summer is unique in that it allows a place to be experienced in more ways than one, inviting a wider range of movement across a landscape.

That was the idea behind my invitation to Whistler.

Destination Canada and Tourism Whistler brought Mountain Gazette north during what they called “a moment in the destination’s calendar that often flies under the radar.”

While millions continue to flock to the resort each winter, Whistler is putting just as much effort into convincing visitors to come back in summer. Last year, Tourism Whistler celebrated “the most successful summer season in the resort’s history,” with summer 2025 (May to October) outperforming previous years across all major visitation metrics.

The mountain has evolved into an “adventure-to-relaxation” destination, as Tourism Whistler’s Mary Zinck put it, where a downhill bike ride and a sound bath (if you're into that kind of thing) can belong to the same itinerary. Food, culture, Indigenous tourism, and wellness have become part of Whistler’s summer identity as well, with the latter especially visible this season through the Nourish Whistler Wellness Series.

Ah, wellness—the increasingly broad catchall term. It often arrives with a tired caveat: that it can mean almost anything, and therefore sometimes very little. Rather than a self-improvement checklist, Whistler’s version feels more like permission to enjoy a place fully—the opportunity to experience the mountain through all kinds of movement, fast and slow.

It would be easy to read this as Whistler simply extending its ski-town identity into summer—and that's certainly part of it. But the bigger shift is in how people move through the mountain. Winter funnels visitors toward a shared pursuit: up the lift and down the hill. Summer sends them in every direction.

My first day started in one direction: down the mountain—on a steel horse, padded from head to toe, in North America’s largest mountain bike park.

Day 1: The Descent

Come summertide, Whistler no longer belongs to skiers, but to armor-clad riders. By 9 a.m., they were already filling the village, wheeling bikes—many worth more than a used car—toward the Fitzsimmons Express, the same chairlift that ferries powder hounds in January. 

Long before Whistler embraced a four-season identity, local mountain bike pioneer Eric Wight had already begun offering guided tours through Whistler Backroads in 1982. By 1985, he was lobbying the resort to run its chairlifts in summer for mountain bikes. Four decades later, riders travel from around the world for what has become one of the sport’s defining destinations.

With more than 100 trails spread across roughly 186 miles of terrain, Whistler’s Mountain Bike Park is the largest lift-served bike park in North America–and widely considered the best in the world.  For a first-time park rider (i.e. me), the park’s reputation arrives before the first lap. Still, I was overwhelmed by the scale of it. 

My coach was Mark, a UK native who, after 13 years in Whistler and no desire to ever leave, considers himself a local. He had the patient demeanor of a good coach, especially evident when he encouraged me to try the practice loading station—and then when he politely insisted I do it several more times before joining the lift line.

I wasn’t new to mountain biking, but Whistler quickly reminded me that there is a difference between riding a trail and riding a bike park. The challenge wasn’t just staying upright, but learning to read terrain that has been engineered for momentum. 

On our breaks, Mark would point out the geometry behind the trails—the angle of a berm, the shape of a jump, the placement of each feature—all designed to keep a rider moving with gravity rather than fighting against it. Every berm, jump, and root asks a question: how much speed do you trust yourself to carry? At first, my answer was not much, and probably considerably less than Mark would have liked. Luckily for me, I had a full day to get comfortable, and by the end of it, I had learned to let the mountain do some of the work.

Knowing the Mountain

After hosing off my bike and returning to my hotel to wash off the mud that had caked most of my body, I made the five-minute trek across Fitzsimmons Creek to the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre in Whistler’s Upper Village. Inside, the beat of the drum and the powerful voice of the Cultural Ambassador carried through the gallery. The welcome song rose around a red cedar canoe, an intricately carved house post, and wool weavings hanging from the walls.

The Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre grew from a historic partnership between the L̓il̓wat7úl (Lil’wat) and Sk̲wx̲wú7mesh (Squamish) Nations, whose territories overlap in the Whistler Valley, to share their histories, art, and living cultures with the resort’s approximate 3 million annual visitors.

The centre is one expression of a broader national shift: Canada has been widely recognized as a global leader in Indigenous tourism for roughly the past decade, where community-led experiences are increasingly viewed as both cultural preservation and economic revitalization.

What makes Whistler notable is not simply that it offers Indigenous tourism, but that Indigenous presence is increasingly woven into how visitors experience and interpret the valley—from the cultural centre to the names on chairlifts and storytelling on the mountain itself.

As chairlifts are replaced and upgraded, the Nations are consulted to provide traditional names that appear alongside English ones at terminal stations. When the Fitzsimmons Express was replaced with a high-speed eight-seater, it reopened with dual names: Sḵwexwnách (Squamish for Valley Creek) and Tsíqten (Lil’wat for Fish Spear), referencing both the waterway and the practices tied to it.

Not every way of moving through a mountain is measured in speed or distance. After a day spent zipping down it, the cultural centre offered another pace—a reminder that landscapes are not only places to explore, but places with histories, relationships, and stories. Even for this adrenaline junkette, it was the kind of pause I always hope to find when traveling.

Day 2: From Summit to Sound Bath

My second day took me to where Whistler has always excelled: the alpine.

I joined a guided hike with Mountain Skills Academy & Adventures, climbing toward Whistler Peak. Lichen-tinselled trees gave way to low-growing shrubs, where lingering snowfields and blooming arctic lupine revealed the alpine’s brief transition between seasons. We followed Pika’s Traverse before linking into the well-known High Note Trail, which wrapped around the backside of the mountain. Fleeting breaks in the clouds revealed panoramic views of the valley below, Cheakamus Lake, Black Tusk, and the surrounding Garibaldi Provincial Park (though I went back for seconds the next day for more sunshine and better views).

We finished, of course, with a lap on the Cloudraker Skybridge.

A few hours later, I found myself lying on a yoga mat inside a pop-up cargo box perched on Blackcomb Mountain called The Lookout—one of the many venues for Whistler’s Nourish Wellness Series. The vibrations of crystal bowls filled the room as I lay among a handful of strangers who had, like me, willingly climbed into a repurposed shipping container to do absolutely nothing.

If hiking and mountain biking represented Whistler’s long-established summer identity, the sound bath felt like something newer.

Now in its fourth year, the month-long series brings more than 100 experiences to unique pop-up locations across the resort, ranging from mindfulness sessions and outdoor movement classes to culinary experiences and creative workshops. 

The appeal here is less about choosing between adventure and relaxation than combining them. A day can mean blasting down trails on a mountain bike, earning your dinner and drinks on an alpine hike, and ending the evening soaking, stargazing, sound bathing, or doing absolutely nothing—which, occasionally, is the point.

There was plenty to do, but no pressure to do any of it. I could join a “Paint My View” class, finally try forest bathing, or sign up for a “Rooftop Beekeeping Experience.” Instead, I asked Tourism Whistler to choose for me—which is how I ended up in a randomly placed cargo box on the side of a mountain, listening to crystal bowls ring through the air.

And while some may laugh at the “wellness industry,” Whistler’s approach reflects a larger shift in how people travel. Visitors are no longer just looking for a checklist of things to do; they’re seeking ways to better understand and experience the places they visit. In that sense, wellness is not a departure from adventure, but another way of moving through the mountain.

Day 3: The Slow Ride

Whistler is one of the most photographed mountain towns on Earth, which makes its quieter neighbor just up the road easy to overlook.

North of the resort–about 20 miles along a winding stretch of Highway 99—the road spills into Pemberton, a broad agricultural valley framed by some of British Columbia’s most dramatic peaks—and a place where horses are as much a part of the landscape as the mountains themselves.

At a dirt pullout just outside Pemberton, I met Dudley Kennett and Don Coggins, their two cattle dogs circling a trailer loaded with horses. The pair own Copper Cayuse Outfitters (CCO), a horseback outfitter with access to more than 4,000 hectares of British Columbia backcountry. What began as a retirement project in the mid-2000s has grown into something much larger. Today, their herd numbers more than 40 horses.

The arrival of the railway and, eventually, roads (not paved until the 1960s) changed how people moved through the valley, and the need for working horses faded. But the connection endured. Pemberton’s cowboy culture remained, and today horseback riding is less a relic of the past than another way of knowing this landscape.

Most of CCO’s horses come from the Mount Currie area, home to the Lil’wat Nation. (“We call them our Mount Currie boys.”) They spend their early years roaming freely before being gentled at the ranch. Kennett and Coggins prefer them because they already know the country. Bears, cougars, river crossings, and rugged terrain are familiar; people are not. When the riding season ends each fall, many return to the landscape, spending the winter in a semi-wild state before the next season begins.

Our full-day ride followed a 15-mile ascent into the subalpine wilderness above Birkenhead Lake, moving past Fowl River Falls and toward Sun God Mountain. Most of the route was steep alpine singletrack—river crossings, winding forest trails, and rocky climbs that shifted constantly with elevation–and demanded my attention just as much as the horse’s beneath me.

“A horse can tell within ten seconds whether someone is a rider or not,” as a reminder from Coggins before we set out for the trail. “Keep ‘em in check, otherwise they’ll be ridin' you.”

A good amount of years had lapsed since I’d last been on a horse, and settling into the rhythm took some time. I found myself wondering if some older instinct might kick in—some trace of the 6,000-year relationship between humans and horses still living somewhere in the body. Enough, at least, to convince the horse beneath me that I belonged there. Maybe it was that. Maybe it was just three hours of practice keeping Pan on the trail and away from every edible leaf within reach. Either way, by the end of the day, I think I did.