The SAM Trailblazers series highlights the mountain resort industry innovators who have forged new ways of doing business, advancing the industry and inspiring others to follow in their footsteps.
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Peak 2 Peak at Whistler is a signature Ecosign project. What inspired it? I designed Blackcomb Mountain back in the late ‘70s, and I’d always thought about trying to connect the mountains. But we were always just thinking of going down into the valley and then going back up for the connection. That’s just not very exciting, you know? Then in 1997, I think it was, I was in Europe with Hugh Smythe, the pres- ident of Intrawest [which owned Whis- tler Blackcomb at the time]. We were in Zermatt, where they hired a helicopter to show us around. We were headed toward the Matterhorn, and we could see a sil- ver line going up to the smaller, hiking Matterhorn. [The Klein, i.e. Little, Mat- terhorn is a popular starting point for hiking tours.] Smythe said, “What is that?” and I said, “That’s an aerial tramway going up to the small Matterhorn.” He said, “Well, how long is it?” I told him, “It’s about 2.6 kilometers,” which is about the same dis- tance from Blackcomb to Whistler, and he went, “Oh my god, are you kidding? Do you think we could do something like that?” I said, “I’d love to.” But at that time, we were looking at [a two-cabin system]. That meant maybe 1,000 customers per hour. It just wasn’t
1. Paul Mathews and friends summer skiing on Black Tusk Glacier, near Whistler Blackcomb, British Columbia, circa 1974.
When Whistler first opened [the municipality was incorporated in 1975], I think 90 to 95 percent of people arriv- ing by plane rented a car and drove up. Now, [45 percent of destination visitors] come by bus. We actually have too much parking underground, because people aren’t using it anymore. How receptive have developers been to your vision of dense planning? Real estate at mountain resorts has his- torically been—and in the United States still is—just horrible. They just want to sell the dirt and get rid of it. We have been very hard pressed to push public beds (i.e., hotels and such type lodging). When you just have the single-family cabin that is used 28 days a year, there’s just no business out of that for the opera- tor because you have two peak days a week over a four-month season, so you have 40 days of business. But you need 150. [With group lodging], they get break- fast, lunch, and dinner revenue. They get revenue from lift tickets, the ski school, all of it. So, every hot bed kicks out, oh, I don’t know, $150 to $200 a day per pil- low. It’s good business to have warm beds near the lift. And as I said before, then you don’t need the bus systems, the park- ing lots, and all that kind of stuff.
2. Paul at the Ecosign office drafting table, 1985.
3. Paul in Zermatt at Lake Stillisee, summer of 1998, framed by the Matterhorn.
4. Groundbreaking for the Delta Sun Peaks Resort (now the Sun Peaks Grand Hotel and Confer- ence Centre) in summer 1998. Left to right: Masayoshi Ohkubo, then-owner of Sun Peaks; John Johnston, president of Delta Hotels; Darcy Alexander, CEO, Sun Peaks; and Paul.
5. Ecosign staff at Sun Peaks, March 2019.
feasible. We’d have huge lines and a lot of unhappy people. We were doing 20,000 visitors a day at that time. Then in 2005, I was in Austria, and I saw this three-rope system, which had a cabin leaving every 28 seconds. With that, we found out we could go from the Roundhouse on Whistler to the Rendez- vous Restaurant on Blackcomb in just about 11 minutes at about 2,800 people per hour. That was quite reasonable. That meant with 20,000 customers a day, we could take half of them, easily.
How has it aged? The impact has been tremendous. I think
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