Hitting the High Note

The High Note Trail is an intermediate loop of Whistler Mountain. The trail map says to give yourself 4 hours to complete it, but with detours and lookouts (and the odd wrong turn) Terra and I stretched it into a full day hike. The route begins at the Top of the World Summit (2,182 m) where the Peak Express chair lift drops you off. On the advice of a good samaritan at ground level, we took the lifts up Backcomb Mountain and the Peak 2 Peak gondola across the void between mountains to the base of the Peak Express on Whistler Mountain. This saved us from spending an hour in line with all the tourists waiting to go straight up the Whistler Gondola. The Peak 2 Peak gondola is the longest, highest unsupported cable car in the world, and the only view better than the one out its windows was the view of it in miniature once we hiked above it.

The contrast between the glacial turquoise waters of Cheakamus Lake, the vivd violet fields of alpine flowers, and the eerie cliff faces stripped bare by rock slides gave us the impression that we had traversed whole planets in a day, rather than kilometres. Neither of us had any desire to come down from the clouds, but finally we wound our way to the end of the trail and the gondola down to Whistler Village. The sun was just beginning to set, and against a backdrop of pink and golden clouds we were treated to the sight of a family of marmots dozing in the curves of a giant set of Olympic rings remaining from the 2010 games.

Why was a crowd of tourists not photographing this? It slowly dawned on us that the terrace was strangely empty, and the gondola (our ride home) was not moving. Before the gravity of the situation could really hit us, though, a pickup truck pulled up and the driver, Michael, told us in a justifiably exasperated tone that we had missed the last lifts down by over an hour. He gave us a ride down the switchback road and we took in the sights of what would have been our very long walk home. Michael’s silence told us exactly what he thinks of girls from Ontario who don’t read the gondola hours, but we were on too much of a hiking high to be bothered. We joined in the silence, staring out our windows and imagining the next day’s route.