Whistler

Whistler is strung along a single mountain valley between the side-by-side Whistler and Blackcomb mountains, roughly 125 km north of Vancouver at the northern reach of the Sea-to-Sky Highway (Highway 99). The [Resort Municipality of Whistler](https://www.whistler.ca/) covers about 240 km² and is home to roughly 13,982 residents, according to the [2021 Census](https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/) — a figure that swells with the seasons as visitors and seasonal workers fill the valley. Incorporated in 1975 as a purpose-built resort municipality, Whistler is one of the few Canadian communities designed from the outset around the mountains it sits beneath. It is best known for Whistler Blackcomb, one of the largest ski resorts in North America, and for co-hosting the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, which left behind legacy venues at Creekside, in the valley, and the athletes' village now known as Cheakamus Crossing. The two mountaintops are linked by the record-setting PEAK 2 PEAK Gondola. But this is a four-season place as much as a winter one — a valley dotted with lakes such as Alta, Alpha, Nita, Green, and Lost, and threaded end to end by the paved Valley Trail that locals walk, ride, and run year-round. The neighbourhoods that follow trace that valley from south to north: Cheakamus Crossing and Function Junction at the southern end, the central mountain-base communities of Creekside and the pedestrian-only Whistler Village, and the north-valley residential pockets of Alpine Meadows and Emerald Estates reaching toward Green Lake and Pemberton. Each has its own rhythm — resort core, locals' community, original settlement, Olympic legacy — and the guides ahead introduce them one at a time.