Photo Courtesy Whistler Museum and Archives
The Alta Lake Schoolhouse
Local birthplace of Whistler’s Olympic Dreams
By Jane Carrico
Apart from the rustic train station just down the hill, in the fall of 1960 the schoolhouse was the only public building in Alta Lake. Only four years old at the time, the one-classroom school was bright and well-appointed with an entrance hall and a covered play area. Once the most popular resort west of the Rockies, Alta Lake had fallen out of favour and with only a tiny year-round population of railway workers, fishing resort owners and loggers to draw from, it was a struggle to find enough children to keep the school open from year to year. When my father, Mel Carrico, answered an ad in a Vancouver newspaper, the fact that he had three school-age children, myself included, figured prominently in his landing the job as its teacher.
The teacher played a role that extended far beyond the classroom and my father hosted town meetings, film nights and even provided spontaneous emergency services on the night the abandoned old mansion on the other side of the lake burned down. That arson fire signaled the end of the old Alta Lake; change was in the wind. Not long afterwards, a helicopter landed in the clearing across the tracks from the school and a new chapter began.
Among the men on board the chopper were Canadian Olympic Committee member Sydney Dawes and Vancouver businessman Dave Matthews and both men were very excited. The group, who named themselves GODA or Garibaldi Olympic Development Association, had been scouting locations for a potential ski resort within driving distance of Vancouver that could one day host the winter Olympics. Originally, they’d been interested in Black Tusk but it was socked in with clouds so they’d flown north until they saw Whistler Mountain resplendently coated in the season’s first snows and bathed in brilliant sunshine.
Then and there, her destiny was sealed – Alta Lake would become a ski resort and would one day host the winter Olympic Games.
Confident that Whistler was the mountain of their dreams, the GODA scouts left the chopper behind and caught the train back to Vancouver. They returned the next weekend with CBC weatherman Bob Fortune and department store owner Chunky Woodward and all flew back to the top of the mountain to get some turns and further investigate its potential.
Skating on Alta Lake. Photo Courtesy Carico Family
Despite the world-class skiing up top, it was early winter and raining heavily at lakeside. All the summer resorts had closed for the season and when they returned to the lakeside my father decided these important visitors couldn’t be left cold, hungry and exhausted at the train station so he fired up the schoolhouse furnace, plugged in the coffee percolator and strung a clothesline up for their wet ski gear while my mother raided the family freezer and prepared a much appreciated baked ham dinner with an Alta Lake huckleberry pie for dessert.
GODA quickly enlisted us to monitor the weather conditions for them as a school project and the following year, they launched a bid for the 1968 Olympics. Given the lack of infrastructure to support it, the Canadian Olympic Association turned that bid down in favour of Banff’s. Undaunted, and with a gondola now running up their mountain, GODA bid for the 1972 winter games but once again lost to Banff who in turn lost to Sapporo, Japan. Finally, in 1968, Whistler won the Canadian nomination for the 1976 Winter Olympics but Canada lost to Colorado who then lost the games when a local referendum turned them down and the Games went to Austria instead. Canada would not host the Winter Olympics until 1988 in Calgary. Now with the 2010 Games upon us, Whistler’s Olympic destiny is finally fulfilled.
Mel Carrico’s one-room schoolhouse still stands on the west side of Alta Lake where it has been in use for some time as a carpenter’s shop. It is a rough and tumbledown affair, long since bypassed by the glamour of modern Whistler. Million dollar homes have replaced the original surrounding cabins. Looking at what is left of the old schoolhouse today it’s hard to believe that fifty years ago, Whistler started here.
enjoying the peace and quiet. Photo Courtesy Carico Family.
