Alpha, Nita, Alta, and Green Lakes (Whistler Valley)

It would be extremely hard to surpass the excellent visual history website created by Pepper Sunlight Productions for the Whistler Museum on the history of Rainbow Lodge and its founder, Myrtle Philip, which I highly recommend you visit by one of the links in this sentence. It is my hope that a similarly-produced site can one day be done for Lillooet and the Bridge River Country beyond the simple layout of my own, pending the cooperation of the Canadian government's Digital Collections programme and the Lillooet Historical Society and other organizations. I include the Alta Lake and Garibaldi areas in this site because they, and Squamish, were and are a part of the history of the Lillooet Country, though less understood as such nowadays when Whistler is by far the most prominent town in the region (and one of the richest in Canada). Pictures on this page are presented not in an effort to describe the early history of Rainbow Lodge and Alta Lake, which the Myrtle Philip site already does so well, but by way of having found them in searching BC Archives pictures on the PGE (BCR) and feeling that they are of interest to the history of the region.

Rainbow Lodge was only & Whistler's rise as an international ski resort out of the old skier cabins of Alta Lake, Rainbow Lodge has become the most famous and enduring story on the PGE line. The train no longer stops at Brandywine Falls for picnics and gawking, and the hand-car is no longer available for resort guests to tool up and down the valley on for entertainment, nor are there weekend dances thrown by guests from the big city, many of them entertainers and chorus workers and visiting performers and stars. Rainbow Lodge today is a rustic museum of moss-covered cabins adjacent to the railway track, which is all that's left of the old resort, but thanks to the Myrtle Philip website and the efforts of the Whistler Museum society, Myrtle Philip and her Rainbow Lodge live on. . The rest of this page below is mostly miscellaneous historic pictures from the BC Archives collection which do not appear on the Myrtle Philip site.

BC Archives # F-07504	BC Archives # F-07503 Handcar in front of Alta Lake Hotel
BC Archives # I-29046 Rainbow PGE Station, Alta Lake	These three pictures give a sample of the days spent by tourists weekending at Rainbow Lodge or one of the Alta Lake's other hostelries, including the Alta Lake Hotel visible to the upper left of the handcar depicted above (I think that building may still be there as a private residence, but I'm not sure). The handcar is no longer available as an entertainment, but hopefully Whistler will oneday have a rail system to link its scattered and traffic-clogged residential areas either for joyriding or gettingto the hill - or back from the bar without having to worry about drunk-driver roadblocks. This stretch of track is across lake from the ski hills and modern village; the watertower is long gone, no longer required as the railway's fleet of steam locomotives is long-gone.
Part of the experience of travelling the PGE, then as now, is waiting for the train; the crowd gathered at Rainbow Lodge Station on Alta Lake gives an idea both of the popularity of the run and its resorts, and of the wait for the rail service once given the name "Prince George Eventually" as a play on its corporate acronym.

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